I’m sure you’re no different: you hate to sell. Perhaps you’re in the minority and love it, but I am yet to meet a business owner who told me that they love sales. However it’s necessary. It is the only source of funds. Nothing happens unless you sell something. Yet sales and marketing never get the focus deserved. Bigger, brighter, more seductive fires flare up daily and distract us from what’s important. Dozens of small business owners have told me that they know things need to change — but they can’t describe what should change. What they often want, but may not say directly is this: a quick-fix prescriptive solution for a poorly defined problem.

Everything being taught about selling rubs most of us the wrong way. Even the words are a turnoff. You have to prospect, generate leads, close deals. UGH! The customer is described as a target, a market, or a persona. There is nothing real or relatable here but we persist, perhaps because it has always been done this way and there are many who have achieved success using these techniques. “Sales is a numbers game” we’re told and while I’ve never seen it described this way, I think we see sales as really cornering a customer and brow beating them into saying yes. What fun!

What’s missing?

Well for starters – the view of the customer as a human being with a genuine need or a problem to be solved. Selling a service is never going to be a two step process: advertise and then they buy.

Customers are travelling along a journey of getting to know you, deciding if they could like and trust you, getting an opportunity to interact with you to see if they could in fact work with you, providing you can tell them clearly, what you do and how you do it and why this is important to their situation. And so finally they can make an informed decision to buy from you but this is not the time to drop the ball. When a customer finally buys, it’s an opportunity for you to reinforce why they made a good choice and deliver in all the ways you said you would when they started paying attention to you in the first place. This is where you lay the foundation for a solid relationship, one where they may be inclined to tell others about you and buy again.

As a service provider you will need to provide information to support potential customers on their journey to buyer status. This is the give. But this giving must be unencumbered. It is not a give to get immediately. It is a give to serve – to show, to demonstrate what you do, on a regular basis, until eventually a customer, based on the information you have provided over time, decides to step forward and express an interest in working with you.

Think about how fruitful your chases have been to GET customers. Think about how often you fret because the customer doesn’t see your value and doesn’t understand why you are charging so much. Think about how you despise having to be told what to do by a customer who knows less about what is required, but has power over you because you NEED this project.

The difference between the two approaches lies in one word: POSITIONING.

The way I am suggesting generates a level of respect, so that your guidance, counsel and recommendations are received in a way that provides maximum impact.

The other way, is when the client gets to call the shots, removes your power and usually would blame you for the way things turned out, or for the results they didn’t get, primarily because they didn’t respect you enough to listen to you, and continued to do things their way.

I worked with Jason Leister to develop a media platform, which really is a fancy name for a newsletter, a podcast, a blog, a video series or some other publication you put out into the world on a consistent basis that demonstrates the value you offer to the world.

The operative word there is consistent, which would vary based on you, the time you have available, and the medium you feel comfortable with. You can produce daily, once a week, twice a week, bi-weekly, every month – the choice is yours.

This is also not a fast process but I would like you to think about how the other ways are working out for you. Sure you might be busy busy and exhausted at the end of the day but basically you are burning yourself out, pursuing sexy tactics with little to show for it.

This approach is strategic because you get to have a conversation on a consistent basis focusing on you, your methods, the trials and tribulations, case studies, what’s working in your industry, what’s not, new approaches, what’s trending, what books you might recommend, share articles you found useful…you get the picture.

Slow and steady is the name of this game, but it really works over time and because the majority will find that it’s TOO MUCH WORK, you will most likely have very little true competition.