Nathaniel Fried
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. – Peter Drucker Nothing summarizes the objective of marketing as well as this Peter Drucker quote.
Marketers are influencers, sellers, and persuaders and the customers are at the center of it all. I love Daniel Pink’s book for the story form he uses to put the customer at the center of it all. Daniel starts the book by saying we are all in sales and sales is the profession that continues to move the economy forward.
1) Without sales, everything stops. Gone are the days of sales practices explained around a slimy car salesman. Customers are researching and buying products and services with information on hand like never before. So there is a rise of the invisible sales men in us, the guy who created the Amazon iPhone page, for example, is a good visualization of this evolution. She is selling to us with new information, images, videos, text and what not!
2) Lawyers, Doctors, Consultants are all selling all the time without having the sales title to their name. Daniel quotes a commissioned study that the average worker is spending 40% of their time selling something.
3) So how does one influence and sell in this new world of information – first show and sell, Daniel illustrates the story of how Otis, demonstrated the safety of his elevator by putting himself on the line and disengaging the top shaft and how the safety mechanism kicks in. This wowed the crowd that gathered and set the way for his ascent. Second, improvise all the time, agree with the buyer, say yes and. Third, have a service mindset, best sellers today care about the customer and want to improve their life by helping them and not aggressively pushing them.
Selling, I’ve grown to understand, is more urgent, more important, and, in its own sweet way, more beautiful than we realize, Pink says towards the end, and calling sales as a human nature is more apt today then ever before!
Contributor: Karthik Sathuragiri (President, Datatracks) | LinkedIn | Twitter
Company: datatracksglobal.com
