Sell People What They Want and Need

Damien has posted quite a nice rant about how people should and shouldn’t pitch to him.

While he might have been writing from his perspective as blogger, he raises a number of points that extend well beyond blogs and are more about sales in general.

I don’t like cold calls. Some people probably enjoy them, but I can’t think of anyone offhand. When you first start a business you feel almost honoured that someone is trying to pitch their goods to you, but over time that (quickly) wears off. You soon realise that your time is better spent looking after your own business and if the product or service is as cool and useful as the salesperson is making out you’ll probably come across it anyway. (That argument is a bit flawed, but please don’t interrupt!)

The problem with some people is that they have blind faith in their own products. Now don’t confuse “blind faith” with “confidence” or “pride”.
I’m proud of our business, but I also know that what we sell is not suitable for everyone.

I wouldn’t try to sell my mother a dedicated server, but I know she needs and uses her email. How it works isn’t her problem – though her tendency to seek technical support via my mobile number when I’m in the wrong timezone can be a challenge at times! (Admittedly she hasn’t resorted to that since I got my first server)

About a year ago (possibly longer?) we were contacted by someone who was selling a software product.
I can’t remember the product name, but I know it was some kind of CMS solution.
And it wasn’t cheap. They asked us if we would be interested in selling it to our clients. We weren’t for a number of reasons.

End of story? You’d have thought so.
But no.
They then rang again demanding to speak to someone “further up” because the person they’d dealt with obviously “didn’t have any vision”.

Of course they’d been dealing with me, so they never got that sale.

Whether I have vision or not is irrelevant.

If you’re trying to sell anyone anything you can’t expect to make a sale with that kind of attitude.

If you love your product, that’s great.

But you’ve got to realise that:

• nobody else is going to share that much passion
• forcing people to get passionate about it isn’t a good tactic. You might be able to win people over, but forcing them to do anything isn’t a good idea
• telling a sales prospect that they lack vision is tantamount to suicide
• if someone isn’t interested insulting them or simply pushing them won’t make that sale. It might make you an enemy instead

You’ve got to have perspective!