Posted on: 03 December, 2001
Author: Wild Bill Montgomery
From the time I was old enough to grasp the concept ofsales I knew I wanted to be ... My dad was insales, I wanted to be in sales. At the tender age of17, I was still under the false ... From the time I was old enough to grasp the concept ofsales I knew I wanted to be involved. My dad was insales, I wanted to be in sales. At the tender age of17, I was still under the false impression that salesand marketing were the same thing. Eventually I went toschool for a specialized degree in business/marketing,while working part-time selling home fire safetysystems and found out a very distressing fact. I'm nota salesman. I enjoyed observing them in action but whenit came right down to it, I found the act repulsive andstill do today. I gave up on my dream of being anotherJ. Paul Getty and discovered an even bigger love;"Computers". Big Mainframes, Cobol, Pascal, they weremy true desire now. I was still fascinated by Sales andMarketing, but believed it was only a pipe dream,because I just didn't have what it takes to be asalesman. You see, even with a formal education, in theback of my mind I still believed sales and marketingwere one and the same thing.Eventually, I started doing programming on the side,but still had an extreme phobia about sales and sellingpeople on my services. Then in 1991 I picked up a bookon vacation called "Marketing Your Services". Irediscovered the fact that marketing and sales are notthe same and I don't need to be a high-pressuresalesman to market my talents. I found something called"relationship sales". Sales is sales, right? You haveto convince the customer to buy what you have to sale.Wrong!You know the high-pressure sale is hard on everyoneinvolved. The "burnout" statistics are so high thatonly 5% of high-pressure sales people stay with it forlife. But it's not only hard on the salesperson, it'shard on the customer too. Have you ever sat through ahome vacuum cleaner demonstration? Most of these peopleare hardcore pros. They have to be to last even a year.I know, my father was one for most of my childhood, andhe was good, I'll give him that. But, eventually evenhe burned out, and went into construction.For the potential victim, and I say that with allsincerity, it's just like being lined up for the firingsquad. You know it's coming and feel completelyhelpless to stop it. This is how I pictured marketinguntil I read the book. It's not like I didn't study thedifference in school. I can't remember whether I justdidn't believe it or I just didn't get it. No matter,it was what it was and I wanted no part of it anymore.In 1997, I discovered the Internet. Some small part ofme was still crying out for the dream. The "J. PaulGetty" dream. I saw an opportunity and I wanted to getin on it. With time constraints, two jobs and a familywho demands my attention, I very slowly got into HTML,Perl and eventually Flash and SQL. But what good is itgoing to do me. I already had a great job that Iwouldn't leave for another. So I decided I would set upa website and sell what I have learned. So I wroteattention getting headlines and hard selling copy. Ifigured Internet sales was a lot easier, because therewas no face-to-face pressure. I could sell my serviceson my web page. Too bad it's not that easy. People areinquisitive, curious and skeptical. I found myselfgetting emails about this and that, getting telephonecalls asking me why they should pick me. The problemwas I couldn't back up my hardcore sales pitch in amore personal manner. I just couldn't figure it out,even with reading all about it. How can this behappening again? What is the answer? I went back andread that book that I had read years before, just onemore time to refresh my memory. It clicked,"Relationship Sales".Relationship Sales is actually a lot like "PersonalBranding". But it gave me a new outlook on sales.Selling, in it's most basic sense is the one-on-oneprocess of building a relationship between seller andprospect. The "good" sale comes after both partiesinvolved discover that a relationship has been built. Ifigured it out. Selling and marketing are not one andthe same, however they are a part of each other,meaning one cannot prosper without the other. They'requite synergistic you know, empowering each other toreach their final goal: The Sale.I hope you can join me next week for Part II: BuildingA Relationship With Your ProspectIt's been a pleasure. Be sure and stop by or and visit or feel free towrite me and let meknow what you "Honestly" think about sales, marketingand of course my article!Would You Like To Discover More About The Advantages OfRelationship Marketing and Personal Branding? Check outRick Beneteau's NEW Book "Branding You and Breaking theBank".This Powerful new book puts YOU on the fast track tobecoming an Internet Celebrity. Not only does Rickteach you step-by-step how he did it; he also askedmany of the top Internet personalities to share theirsuccess secrets with you. If you're at all seriousabout achieving success on the Internet, you need tostart Branding YOU and Breaking the Bank!Do yourself a favor. Check It Out!I'll be e-Seeing you Soon Article Tags: Part I: Sales, Revolting Part I:, Part I:, I: Sales, Revolting Part Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com ABOUT THE AUTHOR Wild Bill MontgomeryHome of the "InfoZone" Business andMarketing Article Archives! Article Tags: Part I: Sales, Revolting Part I:, Part I:, I: Sales, Revolting Part Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com