Have you considered your investment in Sales?

This is a post about a conversation I had about how your investment in sales is investing in the people you are trying to help.

Hey everyone, I was busy editing some videos and creating new content to share with you and I was reminded about a conversation I had with some dear friends who also run a small business and we’ve been in operation for more or less the same period of time.

So just some context, I started the emagination about 15 years ago. That was a consulting company that I, that I’ve run for many years now. So in this conversation with these friends of mine, I’m just sort of going through their journey, something came up and I was talking about this new avenue that I’m journeying through, which is RichardTalks, which is these kinds of things. Talking specifically about sales.

Now I’ve had some success with my sales and built up what is probably not a unique selling system. I’ve been through training myself, learning different methods that other people using, take what I like and exclude what I don’t like. I’ve listened to various podcasts about sales, about customer relationships and I take out what I like and leave out what I don’t, and I’ve also had lots and lots of sales conversations with customers trying to sell them my product.

Listening to the feedback and saying, oh, this is, you know, is valid feedback and some of these things are not, but all of it has allowed me to create what I think is a good sales system for small businesses and medium businesses when you are selling your product service or cause.

Now, I’ve dealt primarily with large businesses. That is my consulting customer base. But the interesting thing, the interesting thing about this particular conversation that I had was that. I hear the same kind of resistance that I’ve heard for a long time, which is “that won’t work for us“.

Now, this is a strange concept to me and I’ve heard this in my sales conversations with potential clients is like, “oh, that’s great but our business is different, Richard, that just won’t work for us”. Then they go ahead and explain to me why it won’t work. Sometimes, sometimes it’s valid, but most of the time it’s not.

So there are two sides to this. Obviously, I need to learn about some value proposition that I’m not sharing with that potential customer or that there’s something that they’re saying that I’m not listening to. And if you have any experience in sales, you know that when you hear these kinds of things, it sounds like objections.

The Second is that there’s generally some other meaning behind what that person is actually telling you, but because I knew these friends of mine, these business owners, I knew them very well, and I was genuinely trying to speak to them about why they should invest more time in the sales system.

A key question that I asked was, “so over the years like tell me how much you invested in sales”.

The answer was, unsurprisingly, ZERO.

Now, a lot of you think that you might have invested in sales, but if you break it down and you go cool, what kind of business did you get in through some sort of referral, most likely where somebody else says, “Oh yes, this thing there’s that thing or I bought these earrings here. You should definitely talk to this person about it”, or go by the earnings and generally it is through Some sort of referral network that you’ve built up a client base and then hopefully you get some repeat business out of that.

But most of the time, when I speak to people, they have very, very little consistent investment in sales.

I do ask other questions like if you think that advertising is noisy and rude and all these funny words that people use when you talk about advertising, why does a brand like Coca-Cola, known throughout the world, still advertise? Why does a brand like BMW still invest in advertisement? Why does a brand like Nike Invest in advertising through various channels?

Through branding, making sure that you, are in the positioning of what you feel when you hear the word Nike, or the positioning of how you feel when you hear the word Adidas or how you feel when you hear Coca-Cola. Those are all the branding exercises. Why are these mega worldwide companies still investing in those things, when you feel they are not important?

So when you’re thinking about your business and when you look back about the kind of investments that you’ve made in sales over the last five years over the last year, if that number is close to zero, then maybe it is time for you to consider investing in a sales system, or at least some sort of training for sales.

It doesn’t have to be with me. I am not saying that I have the best sales system. I feel that I can help people. I genuinely feel I can help people get started with putting together a sales system so you can get an understanding of who your customer is and learn to prospect.

Doing outbound call calling, then creating an inbound strategy with an e-mail sequencing all of those things. Those are all things that you do need if you believe in your product and you believe that it’s going to make a difference. You do, but getting started. Is the hardest.

I want to encourage you to take that first step and write down the number that you’ve invested in your business in yourself and the people that you are trying to help write down that number, and if that number is close to 0, then I want to help you.

OK. I hope that this creates some inspiration for your Sunday, Saturday, Friday, Monday evening, whenever you are watching this and I hope that it will inspire you to think about making a change. 

If you haven’t downloaded my Sales System then get it below or if you want to know what it is then check out this post with video.

The Difference Between Sales And An Offer

Simply put, Sales Sales is how you show up to sell your product or services to your customers, be that online or in person, and an offer is how that product is presented to the customer when you are trying to sell it.