Connect with the Right People and you will Dramatically Increase your Sales

It is a well-known fact that people buy from people they know, like and trust. So if you have a desire to increase your sales, then you need to stop sitting with your feet braced firmly against the table, with a desperate look on your face trying to sell your products or services. Instead you need to invest effort into fostering mutually beneficial relationships with business partners. Your objective, when developing these relationships, must be to about solving challenges for your new partners, or rather providing them with solutions, which meet or exceed their expectations. This can only be achieved if you are supplying products or services; you completely believe in and trust yourself.

Learn the art of listening twice as much as you speak and ensure that you completely understand the needs of your partners. If any partnership is going to work, you must be certain that your product or service can completely satisfy the needs of your new partner. When you listen and completely understand their needs, you believe in your product or service and trust that it is exactly what they need. You have the ingredients you need to begin creating that mutually beneficial relationship, which will ensure that any relationship will be sustainable.

Your main objective when you work with any client has got to be one of building mutually beneficial relationships and creating partnerships, which will be of value to both parties. To become successful and to move “YOUR BUSINESS” to the next level, you must change your mind-set around the relationship you need to foster with your clients or partners. When I refer to “YOUR BUSINESS”, I do not care whether you own the business or you are an employee at a business owned by someone else. Unless you look on the portion of the business, where you are selling products or services as your own, you will struggle to get your mind-set right, where you are able to build the mutually beneficial relationships, you need with your clients and prospects.

You must believe 100 % in what you are selling and see your products as solutions to partner challenges. If you look on your products or services as a commodity, it will be impossible to convince anyone you are committed to build a mutually beneficial relationship and that your product or service is a solution to any need they may have. As long as you allow the relationship to remain one where, you are the sales person and they are the buyer of your product or service. They hold all the power and you are a subservient junior partner in the relationship. The person, who holds the purse strings, is in charge. You become merely an order taker, who merely writes down the instructions of someone, who needs the commodity you have to sell.
When you believe in the value proposition of your product or service and you always have your clients’ or rather your new partners, needs as the prime objective. Your partners will very quickly see your pure intentions and will eagerly partner with you and your product and service. The will start to buy from someone they know, like and trust and someone they believe will add real value to their business. You can awaken your own sales giant today, if you are willing to make the crucial shift away from trying to sell a product or service, which you view as a commodity. Toward seeing your products or services as a real value proposition, which when integrated into your partners business, will solve their challenges and meet their needs.

As you build mutually beneficial sales relationships with your new partners, there is an immediate shift in power. You are no longer viewed as a junior partner and provider of a commodity, but an important cog in the wheel of your new partners business. As you shift away from the old school hard selling tactics and begin to use new age mutually beneficial relationship building and sales influence as a selling strategy, you will unlock your hidden sales super and you will become unstoppable.

Action Idea: Take a close look at your current sales strategies and answer these questions:

• Do you believe in the product or service you are selling? Would you want to buy what you have to sell?
• Do you really believe your product or service is a good value proposition for any client?
• Do you believe that your product or service is value for money?
• Are you just an employee, trying to get through the day, or are you involved in building your own business?
• Do you have the intimate knowledge of your market and partners business, necessary to become a partner and challenge solver in their business?
• Would you like and trust you, if you were the client?

Invest sufficient time to answer the questions above and after conducting an honest audit of your current selling strategy. Begin the process of improving all the areas in your business, which may be below par, so that you can make the shift you need. Where you move away from selling, towards building partnerships with people who know, like and trust you and who see your product or service as a great value proposition.
As you develop a real belief in what you have to sell, you completely understand your market and individual partners needs within that market, you will no longer just be selling products or services. You will be forming mutually beneficial relationships with partners and solving any problems they may have. As you continue to grow into this new modality, you are no longer selling; you are building connection and fostering relationships with people, your products or services, help and support.
As long as you really know your markets and individual partner’s needs within those markets, you always have their best interests at heart and you believe 100 % in what you have to sell, you will succeed in growing your sales beyond even your wildest dreams.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za