Harry Bullis, former chair of the board of General Mills, used to give his salespeople this advice:”Forget about the sales you hope to make and concentrate on the service you want to render.”
The moment people’s attention is centered on service to others, they become more dynamic, more forceful, and harder to resist. That is why you need to stop selling, start helping.
“I tell our salespeople,” said Bullis, “that if they would start out each morning with the thought, ‘I want to help as many people as possible today,’ instead of ‘I want to make as many sales as possible today,’ they would find a more easy and open approach to their buyers and they would make more sales.”
“The person who goes out to help people to a happier and easier way of life is exercising the highest type of salesmanship.”
Sell something and you make a customer today. Help someone and you create a customer for life. The difference between helping and selling is just 2 letters. Here are three vital steps to stop selling and start helping:
Discover peoples’ needs.
Traditional marketing tactics involve telling people why your company is great. With content marketing, you show them. But content marketing isn’t about your company; it’s about your customers. You can discover your customers’ needs in a number of ways, one of which includes discovering what your current or potential customers may be searching for online. Use a keyword search tool, such as Google Keyword Tool, and uncover terms or words that people most commonly search for that are related to your business. This will help you determine what people need, what challenges they may be facing, or what they’re looking for specifically.
Also, observe conversations happening on social media, like Twitter, Facebook, and Quora. Follow hashtags related to your business or industry on Twitter and see what sort of questions people are asking. What kind of content gets shared, commented on and retweeted? Quora is also super useful in that it’s a question-and-answer social media site/community, entirely made up of questions people have on a variety of topics. Search and follow topics that relate to your business, and discover what people are asking.
Map needs to programs.
Based on the discoveries you make in Step 1, create content or “programs” that map back to peoples’ questions and needs. For example, say you discover people have questions about how to choose the best Email Service Provider (we may have researched this once or twice). Create a variety of content that answers those questions. Write a series of blog posts, create a video on YouTube, make an infographic, produce a podcast, conduct a webinar and/or TweetChat about it. By creating a variety of content, you’re being useful, but also giving readers various ways to interact with and consume content. All of this content should also be optimized for our search engine friends.
Make Helping a process, not a project.
Like the old saying, “it’s the journey, not the destination”. It isn’t something you can put on your to-do list, and check off permanently. Why? Because our customers’ needs change, technology changes and of course, trends are always changing.
But to be truly successful, you have to remove yourself from the equation and think more about your audience than yourself. From establishing a relationship to holding a meeting to following up after the fact, HELPING your audience is more important (and more effective) than SELLING to them.
To your success,
