No Sell Selling

To anybody involved in selling the fact that people buy for their own reasons ought to be the most obvious fact in the world. It isn’t.

As I have said this subject is massive, some of the following paragraphs have been taken from “The New Conceptual Selling” Robert B Miller and Stephen E Heiman with Tad Tuleja price £19.99 from Amazon. I highly recommend this book to you because you will see your customers in a completely different light once you have read it.

This book looks in detail at the driving force behind every sale, ie the individual customer’s decision making process. The New Conceptual Selling is a road map to that process, the main principle being:

Buying is a special case of decision making.

Every time one of your customers makes a buying decision, they do so in a series of predictable and logical steps.

The steps of the person’s decision-making process take place in an equally predictable and logical sequence that can be identified and tracked by the seller.

By systematically following this sequence and helping your customers to follow it, you discover one of two things. Either (a) there is a solid fit between his needs and the solution you can offer, which can lead to a quality sale; or (b) there is no fit, and you shouldn’t be doing business together in this particular situation.

By ignoring or working against the customer’s decision-making process, you ensure confusion, resentment, and - sooner or later – lost sales.

Conceptual Selling is a “customer-driven”, not “seller-driven”, system.

You may think that by allowing the customer decision-making process to direct the course of the sale will take things out of your hands – will cause you to lose control. Exactly the opposite happens. When you start to work with your customers – when you act as a facilitator of the decision process – you always end up with more control, both in individual sales call and in terms of future business, than you had when you relied on trial-and-error techniques.

There’s a good reason for this. When you help someone to do what they already wanted to do – make a wise buying decision – they know they have actively brought in to your solution and not been passively sold it by force-feeding or manipulation. Someone who knows that is buying much more than your product or service; they are buying into a partnership with you that is the linchpin of predictable, long term sales success.

This is the paragraph which sums it all up perfectly, this is your goal. You are going to be a relationship builder with customers for life. Any other way is nuts.

What we have to do now is the tactical planning, to manage each one of your sales calls so that your customers know that doing business with you is a partnering experience. That is consciously thinking through in advance, and writing down as part of a sales Call Plan how you are going to handle the three key phases of the sales call:

Phase One - Getting Information

Phase Two - Giving Information

Phase Three - Getting Commitment.

There is no set order to these three phases; we number them merely to make the distinction between them clear. Every sales call is a dynamic interaction between buyer and seller, and that means you must be able to move freely from one phase to another at any time, not in response to some hypothetical, ideal sequence but in response to what’s actually happening in the sales call.

Tactical planning enables you to do that. When you use this three-phase framework, you always know three things with precision. At any given moment in the call, you understand exactly where you are, exactly where your customer is, and exactly what still needs to be done to move the sale towards a Win – Win conclusion.

The Win – Win conclusion

The Win – Win conclusion is where both the buyer and seller come out of the sale understanding that their respective best interests have been served – in other words, that they’ve both won. Sellers who can count on remaining successful are the ones who are committed to this Win – Win philosophy.

The reason isn’t just philosophical. In this era of intense competition and sophisticated customers, the successful sales professional cannot rely, “on taking the order and running like hell”, (not that you would guys, because we do not do that). Today, in our very competitive world to ensure that your success will last from customer to customer and from sales call to sales call, getting the individual order is never enough. You also need:

Satisfied customers
Long-term business relationships
Solid, repeat business with your “regular” customers
Enthusiastic referrals to new prospects.

If you don’t consistently and predictability get these four things out of your sales calls, sooner or later you will be eroding customers. If you do then you will have customers for life.

Marketing and Sales are a massive subject and what I need to do is to cut my bit down so that I can get on with what I am currently doing to recruit customers and then leave you to read further into the subject from authors who are far better than me in explaining the concepts and best practices.

Marketing budget

At this point two things are important. Firstly, to achieve the future you are looking to aspire to, (have you done your goals yet), you will have to invest in it, simple. No marketing, no future. Secondly you do not have to do them all at once, one at a time in a planned way, some of the marketing will not cost much at all.

In Summary

So what are we endeavouring to achieve:


To market you, your personality your unique selling point, why you are outstanding, what sets you apart from the competition. By doing this you are informing your local area of who you are and what you do.

By marketing your products and services and thereby giving information to prospective customers (and distributors) you will pre-sell.

People will then come to you because you have a solution to a problem they have, whether it is poor service, poor products, poor company. Because you have the solution. People will contact you.

Your goal with your customers is to gain their respect, (relationship building), listen to them, work with them to achieve the Win – Win we have spoken about.

Following up, your customer is a customer for life, to be nurtured. Never loose contact with your customers.

The above five steps logically follow each other, you are building an empire, a customer base, a team, a future, call it what you like, but in my opinion this is exciting stuff, if you do this then you will have a job for life.

Who out there wants to deal with a real person, a person who is not going to rip them off who will help and care for them? This is what you are striving to achieve.

These five stages are not complicated, they are a logical process for you to undertake. It focuses on where you need to be and if you are not achieving the results then you need to go back to the previous stage to establish whether you need to spend some more time and money on building up that part of your strategy. It will take time to build create your footprint. By doing the above you are underpinning your future.

There is also one massive benefit that we haven’t even discussed yet and that is once you have an established data base of customers and they trust you, (because they will, because you are good), You will be able to sell them other products and services over time.

I have only outlined (because it is a massive subject) where I believe you need to be and what you need to do to be successful in this business. I am still doing it, I am making mistakes, I am learning from them, I am letting you know what I think.

I am continually looking for new ideas, you may have one, let me know, share our experiences.