Is your salesmen just as important as your product?
In sales you learn pretty fast that a customer or client is essentially buying into YOU, the sales man or women when they make a purchase. I overhear comments being made regularly that if you hold a high quality product it is unimportant whether or not you're marketing to the correct audience, providing competitive prices or anything else for that matter.
This is simply untrue! Marketing, sales, or whether or not people know about your business is one thing, but this is in the same category as the "buy and sell" line that I hear so often..."all you gotta do it buy and sell to make money"...Right! but it's the process of accomplishing this, that is the difficult part. Yes in a nutshell buying and selling, or inventing and selling, or offering a service and selling would be a pretty great plan to start with.
Something else that matters tremendously though, that may or may not seem to be obvious, Is that when it comes to selling, business, blogging or social media, a customer or client is essentially buying into YOU! sometimes to the equivalent or more so than they are the product.
Which may seem absolutely crazy to some of you who believe that nothing else should be of concern other than the product.
Yes the product is like content, and no one is going to visit a blog everyday without great content, but if you do not respect the writer because for example they treated you like junk once at a bloggers convention. You are not visiting their blog with or without great content!
Obviously yes when it comes to digital or with anything for that matter, content is king! and i will be the first to vouch for that as a marketer. In sales though, I have sold things that the client or customer had very little interest in to start, they could have purchased a dress from any other boutique but they were buying into me.They trusted my expertise. They were unfamiliar with the store, so naturally they want to purchase from a more trusted or known merchant that they know of like a brand with status like Chanel, but I made them feel secure in their purchase.
If they were unfamiliar with the boutique and if the saleswomen was nowhere to be found or gave an attitude or ignored the client. They would have walked out and never returned, and that would be that! Instead they purchased, returned and spread our name to family and friends.
Lets use an even more obvious example. That was obvious!
"Well of course you are not going to buy if the salesmen was rude".
Lets say you want to buy a car. You want a black car with a back seat, that is easy on gas and for under $15,000. Well Honda, Toyota and Ford probably all have a car like this.
Lets say they visit Ford, They ask the salesmen if it is all-wheel drive..The salesmen is unable to provide a valid response, He starts chatting with his girlfriend and now leaves the buyers unattended to head off to Toyota...
This is the same for blogging or any other content creation or Digital selling.
The other day I visited a women's blog who made a comment saying something like "someone with no experience in Social Media but experienced in something else totally unrelated can charge more for services than a college grad should" WHAT!! So you are saying that someone with no expertise can charge more than someone who has thoroughly studied the specific topic just because of the date on their birth certificate. ..This is such an unwise way of thinking..
Anyways, from there i couldn't stand her blog and will not return. It is not just about the product. You need great AMAZING people selling and representing your brand. Whether it be, your store's sales person, or your social media account manager or blogger. You need people who are relatable and an absolute expert in the topic. You need blog writers, social media people and sellers that you, yourself would buy into because at the end of the day a client or customer is buying just as much into your salesmen as they are your product!
