Whom Do You Want to Sell?

So much time has been invested by sales gurus in writing articles about how to sell to people who don’t want to be sold to. (For that matter, they don’t want to buy, either.) We talk and talk and talk about asking questions, discovering needs, and persuasively presenting solutions to these people. But they would rather sit there, occupying a slot on a company org chart, pushing paperwork around.

But my question is this: who do you really want to spend your selling time with? Those people? Or people who are anxiously engaged in improving themselves and their companies?

Sure it’s a challenge to change someone’s thinking. To reverse their present course. To cause someone to believe what you’re telling them. But your initial prospecting efforts should be geared towards, what I call, “screening.” Others may call it “sorting.” It’s the same thing. It’s not selling or communicating or persuading or pitching or anything like that.

It’s finding out, quickly, who recognizes they need to make things better because they’re broken, or make things better because they can. And spending time only with those prospects. It’s telling them in brief, easy-to-understand, engaging language what you do, why you do it, how it could help them, and finding out if they get it.

If they don’t, then move on.