Wednesday, January 9, 2008, 6:37am
Sell the Concept, Then Yourself
As I’m sitting here trying to decide exactly when I’ll pull the trigger over at MacHeist, I’m reflecting on a conversation I had last night with a local business owner. Now I have very little experience in direct (face-to-face) sales, and the purpose of this meeting was to bring his restaurant’s website over to Snowdrop. While I felt I had a strong sales pitch and a nice angle, I quickly realized selling Snowdrop wasn’t going to be the difficult part. In fact, the owner liked the idea of Snowdrop being a small startup in the area.
The difficulty, it would turn out, was convincing him that a website in itself would help his business.
So I Changed My Plan
Within five minutes, I completely switched my game plan to one more focused on technology and the benefits of the Internet. For example, I found out that many of his customers come from out of town, and he’s been wondering why he doesn’t get many locals.
Luckily for me, I had prepared a document that outlined his current position within Google Local and regular search results. Basically his business was only listed in directories - both web and print - and these were focused on other towns. Since his restaurant is fairly new, I imagine many people from other towns find his restaurant more easily than those in town. Enter Snowdrop.
What’s the point?
One of the lessons I took from last night is that for a business (or individual) to be successful doing what they love, they need to work at selling others on their passion before they can sell them on their product. In other words, if you blog about boating because you love the feeling you get when you’re on a lake or in the ocean, describe that feeling in detail to your readers. Make them feel as happy and great as you do - or make them curious about how great something can feel - and they will come back to your blog.
Certainly the same idea can be applied to selling a product or service. In my case, I had to sell this business owner on the fact that a website will make people excited about trying his restaurant.
Picture by flattop341.
