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Can be a Salesperson
C.J. Hayden, MCC

I am not a sales and marketing guru. I’ve written two books
on marketing and taught thousands of people how to sell
themselves, but really, I don’t know more about sales and
marketing than most of you.

What I know how to do is talk to people, all kinds of people
– restaurant owners and waiters, CEO’s and receptionists,
entrepreneurs and kindergarten teachers. I don’t try to sell
these people anything; we just have a conversation. But
sales happen as a result.

In my book “Get Clients Now!” I define marketing as telling
people what you do over and over. That’s part of the secret
right there. I’ve seen too many business owners fail because
they simply don’t speak up about their business. Or else
they tell someone once what they do for a living, and then
think they never need to mention it again.

But there’s another piece of the sales and marketing puzzle
that often gets left out. When you talk to someone about
your business, you need to be direct, authentic, and
unattached to the outcome.

Clients and students often ask me questions like, “What do I
say when I call Mr. Big to find out if he’s ready to buy?”
They’re shocked when they hear my answer: “Hello, Mr. Big,
have you decided to purchase our product?”

Or maybe the question is how to follow up with someone you
met at last night’s event who expressed some interest in
your service. My suggestion is to say: “When we spoke last
night, you seemed interested in my services, and I’d like to
continue our conversation.”

What do you do when you fear that the client doubts your
qualifications? How about: “You seem a bit unsure of my
qualifications to do the job, and I’d like to address that.
What are your concerns?”

These are all conversations. You ask a question; they
answer. They ask a question; you answer. It’s like a
friendly tennis match — all you have to do is keep the ball
in the air, and nothing is at stake.

But that’s the catch, isn’t it? You think there’s a lot at
stake. What if you don’t get the contract, the client, the
money? So you make the conversation overly significant, put
on your marketing face and your selling voice, speak someone
else’s words… and the result is anything but direct and
authentic.

What impact does this have on the person you’re speaking
with? The opposite of a direct approach is an indirect one:
devious, underhanded, sneaky (check your thesaurus). The
opposite of authentic is inauthentic: phony, fraudulent,
insincere. Isn’t this exactly what you have always been
afraid of — sounding like a used car salesman or
telemarketer reading a script?

Scripts are for rehearsals. In a meeting or on the phone,
keep some talking points in front of you, but don’t read.
Every word should be one you would use in normal
conversation — use instead of utilize; fix instead of
rectify; help instead of facilitate. Get to the point
quickly, and tell the truth about it. “I’m just calling to
introduce myself,” is not only an ineffective pproach, it’s
a lie.

Show a sincere interest in people by asking questions about
their goals and problems. When you see a place where your
business can help, don’t hesitate to say so. Be respectful
of people’s time and really listen to what they say. Respond
to what you heard instead of continuing to the next item on
your agenda. Don’t be afraid to toot your own horn while
staying true to who you are.

But these are just tips for changing your behavior. The real
key is in your attitude. If you can recognize that being
indirect, inauthentic, or attached to the outcome is causing
you to lose sales instead of make them, you’ll have a
powerful incentive to do things differently.

C.J. Hayden is the author of Get Clients NOW! Thousands of
business owners and salespeople have used her simple sales
and marketing system to double or triple their income. Get a
free copy of “Five Secrets to Finding All the Clients You’ll
Ever Need” at http://www.getclientsnow.com

Fail Forward Successfully
Copyright © 2005 Debbie Allen, All Rights Reserved
Confessions of Shameless Self Promoters
http://www.ConfessionsofShameless.com

Can Mistakes Be Good For Your Business?

Hopefully you make a mistake now and again, because failure can
actually be good for you and your business. If you haven’t made
any mistakes for a while, you may be playing it too close to your
comfort zone and not stretching yourself far or fast enough to
achieve high level goals. To aim high, you must accept some of
the risks that go along with learning something new.

Risks come with the acceptance that you will make some mistakes
along your journey, but you will want to avoid making costly
mistakes or making the same mistake over and over again. Use
good common business sense. Every business and every career has
its share of challenges. You will constantly be tested in
business as new challenges arise or as your business grows and
expands.

You will always be challenged with new areas of your business
that stretch you past your current abilities and expertise. It
may be a big sale, the start of a new business, a new opportunity
or an extremely difficult challenge. Yet all failures will help
you learn more about your business and help you build your
self-esteem at the same time.

Learn from your mistakes and move On. (Actually I don’t even like
the word mistake; I believe that mistakes are simply challenges
in disguise.) Realistically most of us don’t get it right the
first time around.

Successful People:

* Make mistakes all the time, but the only difference is that
most of the failures go unnoticed because they don’t give up.
They keep on going.

* Make it look easy. Although it’s easy looking in from the
outside, many don’t often notice or acknowledge their
failures.

* Evaluate their failures, come up with new solutions to the
challenge and try again – this time more educated than the
first.

* Don’t allow the fear of failure to stop them from achieving
their goals.

A study of the failure and challenges of business shows the
ultimate success secrets of any enterprise. These are the key
lessons an organization learns as they grow, expand and compete
in a changing marketplace.

If you want to create shamelessly fabulous success, study all the
failures. Most highly successful people were not successful from
the beginning, they had to struggle a little or a lot to reach
their peak potential. Walt Disney was actually fired from his
first job because he was told that he was not creative enough.
Not creative enough? Luckily, he didn’t listen to his clueless
boss and trusted his own innovative ideas.

We all have a tendency to focus on success and fear failure when
things don’t go as planned. So don’t be too hard on yourself if
you feel that you are making too many mistakes to make it to the
top. Hang in there and be patient. Once you overcome the
challenge, you won’t have to do it again and you will be failing
forward faster.

Success takes time just as it takes time for you to adjust and
learn new skills. But, be aware that mistakes will continue to
happen even after you have reached a high level of success. You
will always need to be learning something new in business to stay
innovative and on top of your game.

When you think you have it all figured out and have made all the
mistakes you need to make to learn, something will challenge you
again and test your confidence. (I’ve been an entrepreneur all
of my adult life and I’m still making mistakes, and plan to keep
making them. Once I have it all figured out I get bored.) Making
mistakes, turning them into challenges and then overcoming those
obstacles in business is extremely rewarding. There is nothing
that can challenge, motivate and build your confidence faster.

Mistakes and challenges are going to occur anyway, so the sooner
you learn from them, the sooner you will become more successful
in whatever you do. Most people tend to reach conclusions about
success, but until success is compared with failures – people
don’t truly understand the whole story of how business works.

Why Don’t They Teach Failure In School?

Failures tend to disappear from business education curriculum?
Information about business failures is often scarce or ignored
completely, yet it is inevitable. On the other hand, information
on successful companies and their success strategies is in
generous supply.

Companies that pursue unsuccessful strategies either change their
business strategies or they go out of business. A successful
company is described as having used visionary management and
innovative marketing strategies while a failing business is
accused of poor business management and overall bad business
skills. So why don’t we teach future entrepreneurs more about
failure? Wouldn’t that save us a ton of money from mistakes that
could have been avoided in the first place?

Can you imagine telling your banker to add an additional $20,000
for the mistakes that you plan to make in your new business
venture? They would think you were crazy. Yet that is exactly
what is going to happen while you develop the business. You
simply must make mistakes to see what works and does not work to
attract new customers. It is necessary to make mistakes as any
business grows. The reason why franchises have a larger success
rate than independent company start-ups is because they have
already made many of the mistakes and systemized the business
around avoiding them in the future. For the most part, franchises
come with proven success systems that were created out of
learning from past mistakes. So mistakes can indeed be good for
business.

———————————————————————
Debbie Allen is an international professional speaker who
has presented in nine countries. She is a well-known self
promotional marketing expert and author of four books. Her
expertise has been featured in Entrepreneur, Selling Power and
dozens of other national and international publications. Her
award winning book, Confessions of Shameless Self Promoters has
been published in four countries. Download a free chapter of
this insightful book, sign up for your free online marketing
newsletter, and listen and/or view Debbie’s dynamic presentations
at http://www.ConfessionsofShameless.com