What I learned from personal endeavour about selling is this: "People are not able to sell because they sell!"
Sounds odd, but keeping this in mind makes "selling" easy. I learnt this accidently. I personally don't have any sales background. Few years ago I volunteered for one of my employer's internal volunteering project. The sales team of the company use to conduct every year a volunteering program one month before Christmas to boost company sales. They use to take non-sales people from the company and give them opportunity to sell directly to customers in brick-and-mortar stores. As I had no sales background, I decided to volunteer to understand what sales is really about. We were not given any training and asked to talk to the store manager(s) what they expect from the volunteer. Nothing special was expected. The only brief received was that sell computers and accessories. So I started on the shop floor trying to sell the goods. At the end of the volunteering period I received an award from my employer for selling most computers that year by a volunteer!
So how did I do it? Well, because I did not have sales background, I did the only thing I was good at: inform, educate, guide, redirect and if still interested sell(this was not required on my part because by this time the customer was already willing to pay)! I did not try to sell anything to anyone. I just honestly informed them about the products, educated them about various parts in the product, guided them to different product(s) or to help them with decision making by asking them questions about what they really wanted, even informing them if something was not suitable for them, and if there was no product I could offer, I would redirect them to other stores. This built the credibility and people use to directly walk to me bypassing the regular staff at the stores. I was able to "sell" without any "selling efforts". I just offered them "help" rather than a "product". I couldn't believe myself that I was able to sell 24 computers(few very expensive computers) in just 2 weekends at three different stores in the city!
Sounds odd, but keeping this in mind makes "selling" easy. I learnt this accidently. I personally don't have any sales background. Few years ago I volunteered for one of my employer's internal volunteering project. The sales team of the company use to conduct every year a volunteering program one month before Christmas to boost company sales. They use to take non-sales people from the company and give them opportunity to sell directly to customers in brick-and-mortar stores. As I had no sales background, I decided to volunteer to understand what sales is really about. We were not given any training and asked to talk to the store manager(s) what they expect from the volunteer. Nothing special was expected. The only brief received was that sell computers and accessories. So I started on the shop floor trying to sell the goods. At the end of the volunteering period I received an award from my employer for selling most computers that year by a volunteer!
So how did I do it? Well, because I did not have sales background, I did the only thing I was good at: inform, educate, guide, redirect and if still interested sell(this was not required on my part because by this time the customer was already willing to pay)! I did not try to sell anything to anyone. I just honestly informed them about the products, educated them about various parts in the product, guided them to different product(s) or to help them with decision making by asking them questions about what they really wanted, even informing them if something was not suitable for them, and if there was no product I could offer, I would redirect them to other stores. This built the credibility and people use to directly walk to me bypassing the regular staff at the stores. I was able to "sell" without any "selling efforts". I just offered them "help" rather than a "product". I couldn't believe myself that I was able to sell 24 computers(few very expensive computers) in just 2 weekends at three different stores in the city!
It was a revelation to me!