The secret to making more sales
I started working as an agent in an Independent agency about 9 years after working for a big corporate company. This agency was a mom and pop shop and was so much different than the structured corporate world I was used to, in fact some of the things just drove me crazy. Things like getting face time with my boss was hard because he wore so many hats and was pulled in many different directions. The agency hired out a well know insurance consultant to come in and work with them to help the agency grow and work on operational efficiency. This consultant spent a week interviewing every employee and observing the agency operation, and on the last day prepared a presentation of the way forward. This was great because he laid out what exactly the agency needed to do to change their operations and increase sales and operational efficiencies.
Don’t you wish that a book of all the answers would just drop out of the sky, so that you can open it up and just prosper and do everything right? So what happened after the consultant left? Well, the agency changed their ways for a little while, but eventually settled back into the same agency that they had been for many years, the owners were spread too thin to be able to take advantage of putting some of the practices in force that the consultant had wanted the agency to do.
A few years later, I started my own business from scratch and it was during that time that I learned how over-committed small business owners can be and about how small business owners wear so many different hats. Some days I had to go help manufacture our product, some days I pulled the orders and packaged them up, some days I had to clean the restrooms or the kitchen. This experience really opened my eyes and made me appreciate the job of a small business owner. This was probably the one thing in my professional career that shaped me the most, and I can attribute most of my future success to this experience.
As a sales rep or a salesperson selling your own wares, one of the most important things that you can do to be successful is to become “indispensable” or find the one thing that you do that brings value that cannot be easily replaced. For me as a sales rep, it meant realizing that as a rep, in order to get these agency owners to take on a project – it would be better if I actually helped them execute. I could tell an agency owner what they needed to do in order to increase business, but if I didn’t help them execute, as soon as I left the office, the agency owner would just put my suggestions on the to do list and that’s where they would be. That is what small business owners do.
As a salesperson selling your products, think about the one thing that provides value or helps you become “indispensable” to your customer. Take a product out there like Apple. Once you realize the convenience that Apple brings to it is hard to find a replacement product. That indispensability is what you need to almost create a dependency on your product. Your goal is to find that one thing that will create this with your clients. When you discover what that is and can provide that to your customers, they will be your customers, making it harder for them to replace your product or service.
In summary – the goal is be “indispensable” and bring the value that makes it hard to replace.
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