As we head into a holiday weekend here in the U.S. I want to share a few things for you to think over.  Unless you don’t read a newspaper, listen to the radio, or watch the news you already we are losing jobs at a rate of about 600,000 jobs a month.  The White House is forecasting an unemployment rate exceeding 10%.

If you took that information at face value alone things could look pretty grim.  Plus many of you are lamenting about companies closing.  Everyone is tightening their purse strings.  Does this mean you won’t be selling much of anything to anyone anytime soon?

Take a Closer Look

Well, I want you to take a closer look.  I only heard this mentioned briefly.  It doesn’t seem to be a big news interest story for the media just yet.  However, the number of new businesses is growing at about the same pace each month as the number of jobs lost.

WHAT THE HECK!!!  Yes, it seems that more and more people are fed up with someone else controlling their destiny.  They can’t depend on the security they once enjoyed from their employment, there are hundreds of applicants for every job, so people are electing to take matters into their own hands.

What Does this Mean for YOU?

It means you’ve never had a better opportunity to actually sell something.  Each month there’s a whole new group of new businesses who need your stuff.  600,000 new businesses each month!  Just think how many of those new businesses and business owners are in an industry you can help.

There’s no reason you can’t be the person who gets their business.  All you need to do is answer 5 questions for these new potential buyers better than the competition.  Here are the 5 questions you must answer:

1. Why are you contacting me?
2. Why should I pay attention to you?
3. Why is this the right thing for me?
4. Why does it cost this much?
5. Why should I act now?

When you can do a good job of answering those 5 questions you won’t have any problem attracting and attaining new buyers.

You & Your Potential Buyers have a Common Challenge

Oddly enough you probably share a common challenge with your buyers.  Those new business owners are starry eyed and enthusiastic about their exciting new future.  They have a good idea or a skill they intend to build a business around.

At first they don’t know what they don’t know.  It’s once you start implementing those ideas and run into road blocks and obstacles that you begin to appreciate it isn’t as easy as you once thought.  The common challenge you share is effectively communicating:

• What whatever you’re selling actually does for the person buying
• The critical reasons why
• Best options

Most new business owners don’t have a clue how to effectively communicate these three critical pieces of information.  You simply have to communicate these critical pieces of information effectively to succeed.  Even though you would think it would be easy to communicate what your offer does it isn’t because most people try to tell you what their offer does in terms of themselves rather than in terms of what the buyer is looking for.

Reasons Why

Without a solid reason why for the potential buyer everything you put out there gets a, “So what?” response.  Each potential buyer must understand:

• The reason why they should pay attention to you
• The reason why what you say is true
• The reason why they should act now

When potential buyers can link what you’re communicating to their reason’s why they act.  The next challenge is closing the business.  While most people think the key to selling is a sales pitch that’s exactly what turns red hot buyers into stone cold suspects.  Pitches, slick sales lines, and sales gimmicks turn buyers off.  A “salesy” approach works against you.

The good news is, like those new business owners, you don’t need to take a “salesy” approach. All you
photo credit: Tony Crescibene

need to do is help your potential buyers choose the best option for them.  Bottom line the future for sales is as hot as the fireworks this 4th of July.

Need a little help getting ready to increase your sales with all these new buyers?  Discover an easy way to increase sales.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under sales coaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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