Why There Will Always Be High Paying Sales Jobs

With the dot.com revolution crushing once solid business models on an almost daily basis, the question surely crosses one’s mind “am I next?”.

Selling is one of the oldest professions on the planet. We get paid to have fun doing what others find difficult, confusing, or just plain hard. Everyday someone’s life is being made easier by new a technological innovation. And everyday another company figures out how to sell its product directly to its customer’s through a web browser. It’s tempting for our minds to see this pace of innovation, and wonder if professional salespeople will be innovated out of their jobs. I assert that the answer to this lies within each individual salesperson. Because the answer to this question is both a challenging Yes and secure No.

The challenge is and has always come from new innovations. You will be challenged by more, new, and greater innovations coming at you and your customers everyday, every hour, and every minute. What was good enough to get you where you are today, is no longer enough to keep you there. There are things that you can be very secure in knowing. One thing is that everything is changing. Master that, and you have secured the future.

A salesperson serves two masters - the customer and the producer. Once we accept that things will always be changing as a constant in our lives, it is easy to see the constant need for professional salespeople. Our role in serving our dual masters is simple - create more value for them than can be provided through a web browser. And we will rightly get paid handsomely when we add significant value.

A salesperson has always played two primary roles that add tremendous value. One is convenience. Convenience for the customer is helping the customer get her exact needs met when she wants them. Taking all of the potential ways, ideas, options, components, products, services, or properties that could meet her needs, and showing her which ones will now. Convenience for the company is getting the 8, 27, or 335 customers that she needs that year to grow the business and make a profit for the owners and shareholders. If the owners were to wait for the phone to ring without a salesperson, the company would be out of business in a flash.

The other role that the professional salesperson has always played is that of an advisor, or a broker of expertise. Helping a customer to understand complex applications of new products, new technology, new business service models, cannot be easily communicated through text, pictures, audio, or video. It is rightly a relationship grounded in face-to-face human dialogue and interaction. It is a give and take of the needs and desires of the customer and the capabilities and products of the producer.

What we do then is provide value to our customers and producers by providing convenience and expertise. As long as there are complex products being dreamed up by bright-minded innovators, and human beings with needs whom make purchasing decisions, there will be professional salespeople.

So who’s most at risk? Industries for which the information about a product is relatively known and stable have progressively seen the need for the professional salesperson disappear. Today you go buy your groceries at a large supermarket, or maybe you have them delivered by WebVan. Years ago you would have gone to a market or bazaar in the center of town and haggled over the price of a few eggs or chickens with owner selling them. Now many producers of products and services with a stable knowledge components are going delivering that knowledge directly to the buyer, and bypassing the salesperson. Car buying is a prime example. People have despised the process of buying cars for years. The whole caricature the car salesman in our society has created a burdensome image that the professional salesperson has had to bear in all his social dealings with others. The major car companies are already planning on new business models where you shop for your car on the web, pick colors, features, and negotiate a price and financing. The dealership of the tomorrow is simply a place for taking a test drive and later picking up the completed custom built vehicle. If your business has a stable knowledge component, it will go directly to the customer. The only question is, how soon?

Constant change is a major source of security for us then. If we master change, we are in a position to offer tremendous value to people. There will always be new ideas, new products, and new services. When ideas, products, and services are new, they are often raw or seemingly complex by their very nature. In this environment the professional salesperson can be a real hero.

What about face-to-face sales calls? Will broadband Internet capabilities eliminate the need to visit our customers or for our customers to visit us in person? Have you noticed that a dog knows when you are scared of him? If you act scared, a barking dog will become more aggressive towards you. If you act unfazed and unafraid of that barking dog he will most often try to intimidate you from a safe distance. 55% of all communication comes through in our physiology. How we breathe, gesture, sit, stand, move, twitch, and blink all serves to communicate to another person, or even an animal. 37% of our communication is in the tonality of our voice. How fast or slow you speak, the pitch of your voice, the volume….. You may notice that you can read this sentence aloud as a statement or as a question, can’t you. And the tonality is different in either case, imparting a very understandable meaning to whom you are speaking with. The words that we choose to communicate with, represent only 7% of all communication. Only 7%. This is why many people have a difficult time with the traditional classroom based teaching style of the American school system. With 93% of human communication coming through nonverbal forms, can broadband eliminate the need for in-person meetings? (look at all of the dot.com entrepreneurs congregating along US 101 in Silicon Valley)

When we succeed in recreating the fine sensory awareness of human sight, hearing, feeling, smell, and taste, then we will no longer need to go anywhere to meet anyone. We will be able to stay plugged into in our little pods, providing resources for the machines to feed off of, like Keanu Reeves in the Matrix. Until that day humans have a high need to use their full sensory awareness, receiving and communicating 90%+ of their thoughts and emotions through nonverbal means.

We still have sales calls to make, and we still have customers who want us to make them. Just as the telephone made the job of selling easier, so will the Internet for those who learn how master it, and not let it master them.

Shamus Brown is a Professional Sales Coach and former high-tech sales pro who began his career selling for IBM. Shamus has written more than 50 articles on selling and is the creator of the popular Persuasive Selling Skills CD Audio Program. You can read more of Shamus Brown’s sales tips at http://Sales-Tips.industrialEGO.com/ and you can learn more about his persuasive sales skills training at http://www.Persuasive-Sales-Skills.com/

Tips to Generate Endless Referrals

The last couple of years have been a challenge for salespeople in many regions. If this is true for you and/or your company, the time has again arrived in the business cycle for professional salespeople to place more emphasis on sales techniques that take business away from the competition.

Getting referrals is one such sales skill. I have never met a highly competitive and aggressive salesperson that believed that he or she ever has enough referrals — the lifeblood of new business.

Like any sales tool, getting referrals is almost a science. It’s hard work and must be pursued continuously. Here are eight tips for generating referrals:

1. Be generous with personal and professional favors. In the sales profession, “what goes around, comes around.” Zig Zigler puts it this way in his lectures on selling, “To get everything in life that you want, all you have to do, is help enough other people get what they want.”

Don’t do favors for others strictly to induce them to do something nice for you; you’ll be forever disappointed as you sit around waiting. But give for the sake of giving and you’ll eventually receive a lot more in return than you gave in the first place.

2. Stay close to sales “influencers.” Sales influencers are not necessarily decision-makers, but they have a lot of influence on those who do have the authority to make buying decisions. It may be a sub contractor who influences where the general contractor buys materials, or an architect, or designer.

Or it could be a shop foreman who influences the brand name or specifications for a new piece of manufacturing equipment.

Keep these kinds of influencers on your mailing list. Keep them informed. Look for ways to help the influencers solve their business problems.

3. Show an active interest in the interests of others. Arm yourself with an arsenal of questions that show that you have more than a casual interest in what is important to those in your network. Questions like:

• How did you happen to go into business for yourself?

• Who has had the most positive influence on your business philosophy?

• What are the primary business challenges you’re facing this year?

• What are the biggest mistakes you have made since you went into business?

The people we find most interesting are the people who seem most interested in us.

4. Ask others for other people’s business card. There’s nothing wrong with handing out business cards, but you’re more in charge of your destiny when you ask for someone else’s business card. As a highly motivated salesperson, you’ll hold onto their business card. Don’t run the risk that your business card will be thrown away at the first opportunity.

5. Don’t take referrals for granted. Like most business owners, I enjoy sending business in the direction of salespeople who look like they could use a break. But also like most referral-givers, I appreciate being appreciated. Always send a thank-you note each time you receive a referral even if it didn’t immediately lead to an order.

6. Stay prominent in the minds of your referrals. I encourage salespeople to send copies of magazine articles, inexpensive, but informative paperback books, magazine subscriptions, picture postcards, etc., to the people who are in a position to send business their way. If someone you know is mentioned (favorably) in a newspaper or magazine article, be especially diligent to clip it out and drop it in the mail with a short note of congratulations.

Remember that out of sight is out of mind, even though there are lot more ways these days to remain in a prospect’s “sight” without necessarily being in his presence.

7. Send business leads to those who send you business. Nothing is more impressive than to receive a business lead, or better yet, an order, without having to work for it. These blue birds are worth their weight in gold with respect to marketing yourself.

8. Communicate with postcards imprinted with your name, phone number, and photograph. If you select the 5″ x 3″ size, it will fit nicely into a No. 10 business-size envelope.

Top earning salespeople spend almost as much time networking as they spend selling.

Bill Lee is author of 30 Ways Managers Shoot Themselves in the Foot. http://www.BillLeeOnLine.com

If You Respect Them, They Will Buy — Closing the Sale

We’ve all had the unfortunate experience of being convinced by a pushy salesperson to buy something we weren’t sure we wanted. You may have really wanted the product, but after being pushed into buying it, you don’t want it anymore. You either return it or you never patronize the store again.

Since you resent the experience, don’t recreate it for others when you are trying to sell. If you didn’t appreciate being pressured and disrespected, no one else will either. When trying to close a sale, you must always respect the opinions and thoughts of the buyer. If all you care about is your payoff, then you will drive customers away. They will be afraid to buy from you, thinking that you will always try and convince them to buy things they don’t want.

Here are some helpful tips to help you close a sale with class:

1. Be kind and considerate: Don’t try to fool the customer. You will get a lot further if you’re really trying to help them, instead of just helping yourself.

2. Give them a direct request: You can let them know what you want them to do. Don’t be afraid to ask for the order or sale. The customer will know you are being honest if you tell them what you really want them to do.

3. Give them two choices: Explain that, on the one hand, if they buy the product, they will be receiving these benefits. Then explain that if they don’t buy, they will be losing out in certain ways. People like to have the pros and cons laid out for them. It helps them make a decision the smart way.

4. Give them plenty of room to think: Don’t pressure them. As I mentioned above, people resent purchases they were pressured into. Real persuasion doesn’t involve pushiness. The choice belongs to your customers, so let them make it.

We learn at a very early age how to persuade people to do what we want them to. Some of us learn it better than others, but EVERYONE can LEARN to use simple persuasion techniques to make their life better. Often, earning more, finding the perfect mate, being pushed around less, and being happier in life don’t have anything to do with you as a person. It has more to do with knowing a few simple rules of persuasion.

About The Author

Author Jian Wang is a master in the art of persuasion. His ebook, “Hypnotic Persuasion: How to Get Anything You Want,” is a truly inspirational read, filled with the wisdom to help you gain control of your own mind and convince others without resistance. These techniques can be used to improve business, sales, relationships, and your overall well-being.

For more information, visit http://www.mrchange.com Reach Jian at calljian@163.net.

Why Use Lead Management Software?

Having a popular website, or popular company of any type, is entirely dependant on sales. Effective sales at that. Maintaining a healthy profit is key to the long-term survival of your web site or business and this means knowing the difference between your effective sales leads and your ineffective sales leads.

Small Business Owner

Lead management software is perfect for the small business owner or webmaster of a website. You may have numerous different affiliate links and many different salespeople. Sometimes it can be very difficult to manage your prospective clients. By using lead management software you can keep track of your sales force or each of your affiliates.

Salesperson

Perhaps you are a salesperson or sales executive responsible for selling goods or products for one or many companies. Lead management software can provide a similar service for you too. By essentially managing the tracking of your sales, lead management software will free up much more of your time providing you with the opportunity to do what you do best. Sell.

Lead management software is useful for absolutely anyone who needs to track, manage and maintain his or her sales leads. Internet marketers will find lead management software particularly useful. Often we find ourselves spending more time working out the efficiency of each avenue of sales than we do actually advertising and selling. Lead management software will give you all the statistics you could need.

What’s It For?

You will be able to track how much you are paying for your advertisements and how much return they give for your investment. That way you can remove or improve the campaigns that don’t give a decent return. Using good lead management software, you can know which of your campaigns are worth investing more money into or which campaigns you should be repeating, and which you should be dumping.

With lead management software you can keep, manage and update all of your vital contacts’ information in one place. You can keep track of whom you’ve assigned each of your sales leads to, you can also record where that sales lead came from and how you got it.

The Bottom Line

Organizing your leads and all the information surrounding them will not only lead to a more effective sales campaign it will also increase the time you have creating leads and selling to your new prospective clients. If you sell a useful product, whether it be consumable or not, one of the greatest ways of making money or winning contracts is through follow up business. If you own a website, this usually involves sending an email to a previous customer. Lead management software can effectively manage this process for you, sending emails at predetermined times, managing responses and updating all the required details.

Halstatt Pires is with the Internet marketing firm - www.marketingtitan.com - a San Diego Internet marketing and advertising company offering automated web site systems through www.businesscreatorpro.com.

Handling Rejection: The Key to Success!

Among the many business people- especially salespeople, I’ve helped as a psychologist over the years, handling rejection by customers is often a major problem. Typically, they tell me how the “motivational” books and tapes they’ve tried don’t seem to work. As one man said recently, “They always exhort you to be positive and don’t take things personally. It only makes me feel dumb when I do get upset about a lost sale.”

What really helps us to handle rejection is to recognize that there is a part of our minds which ALWAYS takes disappointment seriously. This part connects us to childhood emotional feelings of insecurity- something we all have experienced. Any disappointment, frustration, and loss will make us feel anxious and small, what I call a “child state.”

The key to handling rejection is to have COMPASSION for such young feelings. All too often, people(especially men) are self critical when they feel vulnerable-e.g. “Why am I making such a big deal of losing that sale?” This only shames us and makes us feel bad.

What REALLY works is when we can say, “Look, this WAS a disappointment and it hooked child feelings in me. OK, so how can I best take care of myself to get back on the horse and get going again.” Such self compassion and active coping with rejection gets us back in an “adult state”. This difference between adult and child states is important to understand both in our professional AND personal lives.

When dating, for instance, it is important to remember that child state feelings are evoked when someone says no to our request for a date. The key, once again, is awareness and compassion for such feelings. Doing so can have amazingly positive effects on enhancing future success!

Norm Ephraim,Ed.D. is a psychologist in Boston, Mass. He is the author of MOOD SHIFTING: UNDERSTANDING AND TRANSFORMING YOUR NEGATIVE MOODS This 3 step program helps you transform negative and pessimistic moods into more positive and productive ones. His web site is http://www.mood-shifting.com.