How to Sell Like Crazy Even If You’re Only a So-So Salesperson
As the owner of a start-up or small business, you’re going to have to do some selling. But what if you’re not strong in that department? Is it hopeless?
The More Powerful Sales Factor
Selling is a fact of life for any business, including yours. You’ve got to attract customers, engage them, close them, and collect their money.
It’s likely that, in the pursuit of customers (or more customers,) you’ve learned about aspects of salesmanship—things like marketing, copywriting, and closing techniques.
Salesmanship is as much an art and a skill as engineering or stage acting, with its own special technologies. Though some natural talent or extroversion might make sales easier for some, anyone can learn salesmanship and can hone their ability to a more-or-less professional level.
But learning to be a super-salesman is not a guarantee that you will have super sales statistics. There is an even more powerful factor that accounts for crazy-level sales.
Remember the Edsel
The most skilled salesman in the world and the biggest marketing and advertising expenditures can’t sell something to people who don’t want it.
Take the Edsel. Several theories have been suggested for the colossal failure of this car. Back in 1957, Ford Motors ran a long and expensive campaign of hype and mystery for the Edsel, promising it to be the car of the future: “There’s never been a car like Edsel,” the ads teased. But none of the ads—or even the front-page story that Newsweek did on the “secret” car—showed a picture of it.
When people were finally allowed to view the Edsel—literally from behind a curtain at their local Ford dealer—they were overwhelmingly underwhelmed. Rather than being a remarkable new car, as the ads promised, the Edsel was, as Motor Trend magazine editor-in-chief Angus MacKenzie observed, “just another chrome-laden land yacht of the era.”
They sold dismally, despite tens of millions spent on advertising and marketing—to say nothing of research and development and manufacturing—a loss of more than $250 million (more than $2 billion, adjusted to today’s values.) Ford pulled the plug on Edsel two short years later.
In the final analysis, Ford might have had a winner if their car had actually been unlike anything the public had ever seen (in a good way,) but it was no better or different than other cars in the Ford line.
Edsel did not fill a need or fulfill a desire; it did not solve a problem for the public.
The Hungry Crowd
I have used the example of the hungry crowd to illustrate the one factor that would allow an average salesman to outsell an expert salesman.
Let’s say the expert salesman is selling the finest gourmet food. He can really sell it, too—gets people to reach for their wallets almost involuntarily. Put him in front of a crowd of wealthy people who’ve already had dinner. They aren’t thinking about food. Sure, he’ll probably get some sales anyway.
Now, take the average salesperson, selling some cold, stale McDonald’s burgers and fries. But the crowd in front of him is starving. Maybe they’ve been locked away without food for a week. They will pay his asking price and that average salesman will outsell the hot-shot salesman.
It’s a pretty extreme example for sure. Regardless, when it comes to outrageous sales, a hungry audience is far more important than your level of sales skill.
Success: Identify the Right Market
Many companies and entrepreneurs start out with what they think is a “hit” idea. (Or, in the case of Ford, they assure you they’re going to deliver something remarkable.) But it doesn’t matter what they think; it only matters what their intended audience thinks. It’s only a hit if the market is hungry for it. It may take research to confirm that.
Look at some of the biggest product niches today: weight loss, anti-aging, and making money. Products in those niches answer the continuous human desires for beauty, youth, and wealth. That’s why there are so many weight loss, anti-aging, and “get-rich-quick” products and marketers out there. Those are big markets. And for the people who sell such products, those are the right markets.
So, you don’t need to invest hours or years to become an ace copywriter or a pro-level salesperson. You can have average salesmanship skills and still do very well … if you concentrate on identifying the right market—that hungry crowd we talked about.
Focus your efforts on identifying the right market, then make sure that market really wants your product, and you will find it very hard to fail.
Ed note:
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