Success without selling... Make referring simple...
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| Are you too honest to be a salesperson? |
There will be a few who say they do, but I believe they just like exuberantly extolling the virtues of some product or service with high levels of enthusiasm. This is often confused as enjoyment of selling!
I've heard people often say in the past... I don't think I could ever be a good sales person I think I am basically too honest! ... that always makes me smile.
The single largest mistake people make right now with marketing (selling) is that in our excitement to get sales we post endlessly on our low cost sales platform... Social Media. There are a number of things that are wrong with most people's approach here...
- Confusing Social Media predominantly as an advertising platform
- Thinking that if you don't get a response you need to do more of it
- That most people are already bored with your endless posts and have 'turned you off' by either blocking seeing your posts or switching off notifications.
What this all boils down to is being very busy, but getting almost no traction or response from your activity. i.e. you are probably wasting your time and energy.
So what could you do differently?
The mechanics of building success in the 21st century are actually quite simple. The hardest part of the work is actually defining in detail what you want to be doing. So success without selling can be broken down into 4 main elements.
- Define what it is you love doing. Picture (write it down) the exact profile / description / type of person and their situation of the people who are your target clients or who you want to work with
- Identify how you intend to use social media (and which platforms) to support what you are trying to achieve in (1)
- Make sure that your website, social media profiles and collateral are consistent with what you want to be doing and who your product / services are for (1)
- Go make friends
Let's look at point 4 above in more detail
The first 3 items above are pretty mechanical. Once you have worked out what you really want to be doing with your time and the kind of people you want to be doing it with, undertaken a few bite size training courses (Link4Skills.com) to plug your skills gaps... you will be pretty much good to go, with a bit of practice and intent...
If you keep plugging your own stuff people get bored with it pretty quickly. Think about how you react if all you see from someone is them punting their product(s), their workshops, their courses, their events... after a while you switch off... sometimes block... sometimes even unfriend (especially on Twitter and FB).
So how do you avoid this? The biggest challenge we have is reaching those people that need what we have.. fit the profile of who we want to work with, and either really like us as a person or are given our details by someone who thinks would benefit from what we do.
When people blitz social media what they inadvertently do is annoy 97% of people who are completely uninterested in what they have... to perhaps discover the 3% who might be... but because there is so much noise, even the 3% are unaware, they are simply either disengaged already or they just miss it as it passes by in the timeline with all the other irrelevant posts.
That's where making friends comes in. People will only buy from (OR RECOMMEND) people they like. So rather than sell anything we just go and mix with people... get to know them... make friends, and see what happens. Guess what... once you start having conversations the magic happens...
- As you begin to know people you start to want to help them and of course they want to help you too. You will find youself becoming interested in what they do, they in turn will become interested in what you do. What skills you have and how you have helped others. That's why your website and social media profiles need to confirm what you love doing and are passionate about
- By having total clarity about what you do (confirmed online) you make it easy for others to identify the right kind of people that you want to work with when they are talking to others. You will be mentioned in conversations when you are not there
- You've not only made it really easy for people to find you... but you've also made it dead easy for others to share what you do, and refer you onto others... If you make it easy for people they will refer you rather than others where it is just hard work.
The really interesting one in the list above is No. 3. If you have 20 good well connected close contacts that like you... and they know people who you have helped... you have potentially 20 people telling others about what you do... you share it once with close contacts who WANT TO KNOW what you are doing... and then those people will pass the message on to their contacts.
Conclusion time
What if it took 12 months to build an extremely close network of 20 people who really understood what you did? Who understood the type of people you help and where to send them to find your information?
Can you see how quickly this could grow all through engaging with people and being crystal clear about what you want to do... if you have 3 flavours of what you do... then have three different sets of social media profiles... keep things simple and clean.
Building connections online makes things happen even faster... so get good at it! if you build connections with people on Twitter, facebook, linkedIn, Google and Instagram things can be shared, linked, liked, tagged much more easily by others... once you meet someone offline get connected with them electronically straight away... please don't say "I don't do technology" ... learn how!! and do it Now! ... not just PC, Laptop, AppleMac but on your Android / iOS smart phone too...
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