Sales Skills – A Skill Worth Improving

I am a bit of a collector and I also can’t pass on a great deal, so when Whole Foods Market offered their very best bar soaps I rearranged my schedule to get there early. I ended up with twenty-two bars in my cart, carefully selected and wrapped in the special brown bags placed next to the bin near the front of the store. I also learned something about sales skills from a different perspective.

Now this wasn’t just any soap, this was Allafia full size bars of triple milled shea butter from the wooded savanna of West and Central Africa. I don’t understand exactly what triple milled refers to and I could not locate the wooded savanna on a map if my life depended on it, but I was sold just by reading the blurb in my email the day before. I even added it to my calendar so I wouldn’t miss out on the sale.

So I carefully chose twenty-two bars of assorted shapes, sizes, and scents and proceeded to the checkout to buy them for one dollar each by scanning my Amazon Prime app at the register. My reason for buying twenty-two bars was to have two for myself and twenty to give away. I’m generous in this way.

But probably the primary reason I moved forward with this in such a focused and determined way was to make sure to deconstruct and study the sales process and to then apply and modify what I learned to my own products, courses, and services I offer for sale in my business.

There are so many lessons here that will help you and I to become better at sales skills and marketing for our own businesses. I want you to become an observer of how you and others make a decision to buy or not buy something, whether it’s digital or physical and regardless of the price.

Using the soap as an example, I was intrigued at the information Whole Foods included within their email message. They painted a vivid picture for me, using broad strokes to describe what the soap was made of and where it was sourced from. At some point during the first three minutes I no longer cared that it was on sale at a deeply discounted price. I simply wanted to feel the soap on my skin and to share it with people I care about. That’s the power of storytelling when making a sales pitch.

Sales skills are a craft. And selling is a learnable skill. You learn it on the job with every conversation and interaction you have with your prospects. It is measurable. This means that something must be purchased in order for the sale to be consummated.

People purchase based on emotional responses rather than from logical decisions. Find out what they want and why they are seeking you or your product as a solution to their problem. Ask the deep questions to learn as much as you can about what they hope to gain. Improve your sales skills and see how this impacts your bottom line, now and forever.

I’m author, publisher, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and would love to connect with you. If you are new to the world of online entrepreneurship please check out my comprehensive training on how to set up Funnels That Click and learn how to gain an unfair advantage when it comes to building a lucrative online business.