Who Else Wants to Increase Sales - without Being a Sales Person?
By: Cheryl A. Clausen

Does it make you shudder to think of yourself as a salesperson? Do you think of sales people as pushy, manipulative, and brash? Upon hearing the word do you immediately picture a used car salesperson wearing a plaid jacket and a phony smile? What if you could find a way to sell your services without being a “salesperson”? What if you could get all the sales you want without ever selling anyone anything? Sound impossible? Well, it’s not and you can.

As a professional in a service industry you never want to position yourself as a sales person. On an emotional gut level you understand why. You know you feel queasy inside just thinking about acting like a sales person. You’d feel embarrassed behaving the way you perceive sales people to behave saying the things you remember sales people saying to you. Your gut reactions are both right and wrong.

You absolutely never want to act like the sales person you’re envisioning because doing so places you in an adversarial position with your prospect from the onset. However, those behaviors you’re associating with sales people aren’t the behaviors or words a true sales professional would ever demonstrate or say.

The funny thing is you don’t think of true sales professionals as sales people. You think of them as trusted advisers. You want to position yourself as a trusted adviser never a sales person. The difference is tremendous. A trusted adviser never sells you anything instead they help you to buy what you need to meet your desired outcomes. They work with you as an assistant buyer. You trust them respect them like them and value their knowledge and expertise.

How do you position yourself as the trusted adviser? It begins by doing your homework. Ok after you finish moaning, realize that you’re going to really like this homework because it’s going to get you almost immediate financial rewards. Do you know why most inventors never make any money from their inventions? Because they don’t do their homework in the form of market research, and that’s the same reason many service businesses struggle to survive.

Having a service and trying to find someone to sell it to is like trying to find a needle in a haystack that may not even have a needle in it. What you want to do is find an unmet or unfulfilled need in a specific market, and then determine how you can position what you do to fulfill that need.

All the people who have that want/need will want to know how to fulfill it, even though they have no interest in your service when you talk about it in terms of the service. Do you see the subtle yet dramatic difference?

Make this unmet or under-served need your niche, what you do. To position yourself as the trusted adviser you’ll need to convince yourself that you are one. That means you must be convinced:

*You are or can be an expert helping specific people obtain a specific solution

*You have specialized knowledge that makes you valuable to a specific group of people

*The way you deliver your solution better fulfills their needs than competing options

*You can help your best prospects discover their highly motivating reason for acting and acting now

*You’re cheating your prospects when you don’t help them make the best buying decision

Then package you and your solution. Focus on presenting yourself and your solution in terms of what your prospects want to get. Recognize no one cares about you or what you do until/unless it specifically pertains to what they want to get.

Position and package yourself to make powerful first connections. From that point forward your prospect should have no question that you are the trusted adviser. Each subsequent connection should build on and strengthen the previous connections.

The best way to ensure this happens the first time and every time is to have systems. Systems ensure consistency and prevent start stop roller coaster cash flow struggles. You need systems for: consistently, predictably, and profitably filling your marketing funnel; smoothly transitioning prospects through your sales funnel as new clients, and obtaining repeat business and referrals from existing clients. Put this all together and you increase cash flow by helping people buy.