How To Sell Anything To Anybody

If you want to be so good at sales that you could sell ice to the Eskimos, the first thing you must recognize is that your needs matter much more than your customer's.

Abandon any thought of "serving the customer" or "satisfying the customer's needs."

Focus on how much money you will make, and how wonderful it will feel to be the Top Sales Professional Ever.

To close more sales than anyone else, you will need to stretch the truth, manipulate your customers, and make promises your company almost certainly can't honor.

As soon as you finalize a sale; move on. Don't waste time taking care of your new customer. Instead, pass the customer to a junior staff member or - even better - someone in another department.

If you sense an opportunity to upsell the customer, swoop in armed with a special offer or especially persuasive pitch.

Sweet talk your client and "confess" you regret there haven't been more opportunities to get together.

Then (you guessed it) close the sale and move on.

I hope this sounds ridiculous...

I just described how many companies operate. In fact, when they decide to "get aggressive," many hire a sales leader who adopts precisely the tactics I just described.

Even worse, many times the CEO pushes such a strategy.

Of course, your CEO may not use the same words I did. But s/he will pay people to sell, not to serve.

Sales professionals will be measured based on how many calls they make, meetings they schedule and transactions they close.

Taking care of existing customers? That's relegated to customer service.

Selling, selling, selling may work in the short run, but it almost never works in the long run.

Customers start to churn (i.e run away in record numbers) and revenues actually decline.

Yes, the "new aggressive sales strategy" actually causes sales to go down, not up.

About that headline...

You can't sell anything to anybody, and sleep well at night.

What you can do, however, is to sell people the things they actually need, the products and services that will bring them closer to their most important goals.

Serve, serve, serve is a more profitable strategy than sell, sell, sell.

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