Tom’s Marketing Tip for Today
Remove SELLING from your vocabulary.
But keep SALES.
You don’t need to convince, persuade, manipulate or arm-twist anyone to buy your stuff – you just need to FIND the people who are already willing and able to buy. And there are more of them than you can possibly handle! Find them, and SALES will happen.
Marketing is the process of making SELLING unnecessary.
This is a guest post by Tom Harris, Your Marketing Coach. Tom helps entrepreneurs and small businesses develop and execute marketing plans. He specializes in website usability and effectiveness.
Ok, but I ask you, Mr. Harris: what about competition? Nowadays, products are almost all the same, and the difference among the product you sell and your competitor’s, in the point of view of our clients, is just the way you approach them. The answer to that, I think, is the way you attend to them. And this attendance have direct relation to the act of persuade, convince, manipulate etc. (sorry for eventual failures in my English)
Why would put words like convince & pursuade nex to “manipulate”. The first two imply that you are leading people along a process willingly. Manipulate implies unwillingness yet need to go along with due to coercion or control over.
Marcus, I think that if you market your product properly, you won’t have to “persuade, convince, manipulate, etc.” Customers who come to you because of your expertise and reputation are much more likely to purchase from you and be happy with their decision. Also, consultative sales, or helping a customer choose what’s right for them, is much more productive than selling them something that’s not (or persuading them that it is). I believe this was the point that Tom was trying to make.
[...] reading a comment on Tom’s recent post, I thought I’d talk a bit about why consultative selling is important for long term business [...]
Drucker said. “The purpose of marketing is to make selling superflous” .
You can go ahead and eliminate the word selling , but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.