A Fresh Perspective On Modern Sales To Grow Your Business
A lot of modern businesses fail to embrace the new way of selling. Personally, I call it relationship building which really isn’t a new definition of sales anyway. Your business is suffering because you’re still selling like it’s 1995.
We are in the new world and many companies are still utilizing outdated techniques to attract new customers.
What I’m about to share with you are things I’ve personally experienced and succeeded with from a sales standpoint. Especially over the last several years when modern sales really took a significant turn.
1. Permission to sell.
You have to gain the permission of prospective customers. This is probably one of the golden rules that many companies fail to understand.
What I mean by permission? Exactly just that. You have to gain the permission of a prospect before you can pitch them anything.
- They don’t want to hear about your product.
- They don’t care about your service.
- They don’t give two shits about whatever value you preach.
…unless you first get permission from them.
One of the best ways to gain permission from prospective customers is by getting to know them.
2. Build relationships.
Truth be told, sales has always been about relationship building. As in, getting to know the people you will eventually end up calling clients.
Think of relationships in a way that you’d establish a connection with a friend or maybe even a close one. Some of the best clients I’ve ever had were or are some of my closest acquaintances.
- Learn about their likes.
- What are their specific interests?
- What are their dislikes?
- How do they prefer to communicate?
- What are their goals?
If I had to prioritize all the different ways to generate sales in this modern digital world, building relationships would probably be at the very top.
What you know matters but who you know is even more important.
3. Storytelling using video.
Video has become perhaps the top medium for cultivating an audience. It’s no secret and some some of the insane statistics around video prove that it’s a necessity for modern sales.
Over 85% of U.S. internet audience consumes video.
YouTube has over 1 billion users which accounts for about a 1/3 of all internet users.
Video generates about 157% increase in organic traffic within SERPs.
I will tell you this much. Some of the biggest relationships/clients were generated as a result of a LinkedIn video, YouTube video, Facebook Live, Facebook/Instagram story, or even a Twitter video. Let that sink in for a minute.
The reason why video works so well for generating new relationships and sales opportunities is because it’s the most engaging medium.
As they say, “an image is worth a 1,000 words but a video is worth a million”.
4. Forget selling!
The problem with most companies these days is that all they think about is SALES, SALES, SALES. That’s all they care about for their bottom line.
The more you think about selling in itself, the lesser your chances are of actually creating new business opportunities. It’s actually a matter of mindset and the way you channel your focus.
Here’s a breakdown of what I mean.
If you spend every single day just thinking about SELLING, SELLING, SELLING, you’ll actually be deviating your attention from the approach you need to take in order to create more opportunities.
- Think of ways that you can help your prospective clients.
- Establish new relationships where there are opportunities to solve problems.
- Always look for ways to expand your network rather than to just SELL, SELL, SELL.
I used to just worry about creating more sales. This was in my earlier years of doing marketing and being the real world. Literally, just sales, sales, sales.
Then I realized that I was going about it all wrong. The three things I mentioned above have significantly helped me alter my sales approach by forgetting about selling.
5. Provide value that solves unique problems.
Aside from relationship building, one of the other ways to create more sales for your business is to provide value that solves unique problems.
Every company has their own unique set of problems they’re striving to resolve. The type of value you’re sharing has to be in alignment with their needs.
One of the biggest problems on the internet today is that many people are sharing value that solves common or broad issues. This is where you really need to focus on diversifying your content in order to increase your chances of solving unique problems.