Get Comfortable with the Notion that You Need to Sell in order to Grow Your Business
This is a guest post by Don Connelly, originally published at the FA Magazine website.
Advisors approach me about coaching. Rarely are the requests about improving their selling skills. Being better organized, being more efficient and going to the next level are popular goals. But I cannot recall one instance where an Advisor said to me, “I want to be better at selling.”
I don’t think that the reason for not asking me is that every Advisor thinks he or she is a great salesperson. Rather, I think that ‘salesperson’ is an image to be avoided at all costs. To many Advisors, selling is a dirty word.
Rest assured selling is not a dirty word.
The image of a salesperson has changed and the driver of the change has been the Internet. It used to be that the seller had all the information and could pull a fast one. Buyers were very aware that they could be ripped off and they often didn’t trust salespeople as a result.
As Daniel Pink points out in his book To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, fifteen years ago the guy selling the Chevy knew more about the Chevy than the guy buying the Chevy. We lived in a world of information asymmetry. Not anymore.
Now, if the salesman lies, the buyer knows it immediately.
Thanks to the availability of information, salespeople can no longer be duplicitous. They must be capable. It is no longer Buyer Beware. It is now Seller Beware. The image of a sales person has changed and for the better. With that change, sales has become a huge industry.
Read the Full Post on FA Magazine Website
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