The Problem With “Selling”
Patrick Widen 
Jan 23, 2009 in Marketing
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There’s something very wrong in the world of sales. Profits and products have taken the place of an asset that’s far more important to your company than anything else - people.
Today’s business climate places far too much emphasis on “selling” things to consumers, on influencing and convincing and suggesting their purchasing behavior to skew it in favor of a brand or product - and that’s the problem. You’re not selling products. You’re buying people.
As strange as it seems, that’s precisely what any successful business is trying to do. There’s a market out there for just about anything: blankets with arm holes, chicken-flavored candy, and who knows what else. If you make it, someone out there will probably buy it. But, the question isn’t whether or not you can get them to buy it but rather if you can get them to buy it again.
Of course, some of this depends on the product. After all, there can’t be too many lost souls out there clamoring for a candy bar that tastes like chicken. But, if there are, you can bet that you’ll be a lot more successful if you can find a way to keep them buying your poultry-flavored treats.
Most companies make this challenge harder than it needs to be. Sure, it isn’t easy, but it isn’t rocket science either. If you think about any successful relationship that you’ve had in your life, what were the things that made it successful?
One interaction surely wasn’t responsible for the success of the whole relationship, although just one bad interaction could swiftly have ruined it. What makes a relationship successful is trust, openness, and excitement. If you’re company can find a way to do all of those things, you’ve just won over your customers for life (that is, until you stop doing one of those three things and create a bad interaction).
If you want to buy people, you need to decide the price that you’re willing to pay for them. It doesn’t have to involve actually paying them to buy things from you (you’re still in it for some profit after all), but it does require a little bit of effort on your part. You have to give them something that makes them feel special and coddled, something that makes them feel lucky to be your customers.
There’s no limit to what this payment could be but, without it, it’s a lot harder to realize your full potential - both in life and in business.
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Marketing
On Feb 10, 2009, Dom Moreci said:
This is really a great post. Simple and to the point. But more than that, it’s very timely - especially for me. As selling applies to the design industry, I have always maintained that its not the creative part thats the money-maker. Good creative is (or should be) cost-of-entry. At the end of the day, this like most others, is a service industry. And the full of themselves “designers” need to work that thought into the mix. That killer idea is only as good as your ability to sell it of course. But the trick is to get them to buy the idea and then he-hire you. No one wants to work with a egocentric blow-hard again. No matter how stellar the logo was.