A recession is possibly the best time to launch a new business or to sell more in an existing one. It’s also a great time to get ahead in your career as a sales person. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, so let me x’splain.
As we all know………first, the media goes nuts during a recession. They turn a little bit of negativity into a mountain of pessimism. This makes a lot of companies and people financially paranoid. Both companies and individual people become socially conditioned to expect the worst.
If you buy into this social hysteria, you become a victim too………..you might really get stuck (please read some of these articles to get out of that: http://personaldevelopmentforum.blogspot.com/)
But if you tune out such negative traps (not watching TV helps a lot) and maintain a grip on rational and emotional thought, you’ll see some amazing sales opportunities popping up everywhere you look.
How……..well, during such times people get scared and start cutting back on expenses. They cut some of the fluff from their lives. They stop buying so much stuff they want, but don’t need. So what really happens is that they go away from “want” based buying to only “need” based buying).
This causes some sales people and businesses to do poorly, especially salespeople that don’t provide stuff we really need or are not able to package it in a way that you think you need it. We have all acted in this way…………. as we all can live without new credit cards, shoes, cloths and gas-guzzling SUVs for a while. Those non-essentials can be put off for some time.
We also become more sensitive to receiving genuine value. When we spend money, we want to make sure we’re getting a fair deal in buying what we believe we need (even if we don’t need it).
Consequently, a sales person that provides genuine value in his sales process can actually do better during a recession. More people will flock to those sales people in tough times, while the fluff sales person and businesses will become more and more paranoid.
Instead of focusing on trying to make more money, put your time and energy into CREATING and DELIVERING real value to your customer (the sales process). Find a way to give people what they want (which in these times is what they believe is there need).
Take note that the keywords here are CREATE and DELIVER VALUE.
Creating value means expressing your unique talents and skills in a way that can potentially benefit others.
Delivering value means ensuring that your customers are actually receiving and benefiting from the value you’ve sold (so don’t oversell).
If you don’t do both in some fashion, then it’s going to be hard for you to generate sustainable sales income, especially during a recession. I’ll explain why.
If you oversell and thereby have only create value but don’t deliver it, then your value isn’t being received by anyone – at least that is what the customer feels. What is money? Money is simply a medium for exchanging value. Money is what you receive in exchange for the value you create and deliver. If you can increase your outflow of value creation and delivery, you can increase your inflow of money received.
If, however, you try to increase the inflow of money without increasing the outflow of value, you’re trying to get something for nothing and that strategy does not work, especially in these recession times . This approach is untenable and will ultimately collapse – as we see in so many companies.
It doesn’t matter what happens to the economy — if you keep selling value, you’ll do just fine.
I just thought that I wanted to share this, especially since we are in troubling times. Times where you need to do more in your sells process
Regards
Mark von Rosing
