101 Best Sales and Marketing Ideas
IDEA 97:
DEFINE YOUR JOB
Different sales jobs are, well, different. For instance, one may involve much cold calling, another none. One may involve short one-off meetings, while others may necessitate a long chain of events all of which must be got right. Simply to say that job is “to sell” is not a useful guide to making it successful.
Idea
From American business guru Mark McCormack …
For selling to be done well, anyone doing it must be clear what “doing selling” means. The first step she is to produce a clear definition of your own sales job. This needs to be entirely job and organization-specific, but general overviews can be helpful here too. For instance the following comes from McCormack on selling, a book by Mark McCormack, the American sports marketing consultant and commentator:
The qualities that I believe make a good salesman:
- believe in your product
- believe in yourself
- see a lot of people
- pay attention to timing
- listen to the customer –but realize that what the customer wants is not necessarily what he or she is telling you
- develop a sense of humour
- knock on old doors
- ask everyone to buy
- follow up after the sales with same aggressiveness you demonstrated before the sale
- use common sense
I have no illusions that I’m breaking new ground with this list. These are essential, self-evident, universal qualities that all sales people know in their heads – if not in their hearts.
Well said.
In practice
- Whatever your job entails and however many different aspects of it there may be, you need to be clear about it all.
- Furthermore you need to be about how different tasks fit together, to know what you have to do to be sure of doing a good job. If half your job is cold canvassing, make sure that you spend 50 percent of your time talking to new prospects, and so on, as your job dictates.
- It is surprising how often sales people take all this as read. They know the job they must do, but if a lack of analysis means that they fail to give a correct emphasis to any specific part of the job, then they may be in trouble. Good definition underpins good practice.