All Posts by John Aberle

The Seductive Voice of Soft HARD Sell

By John Aberle | Sales and Marketing , Soft Sell

I listened to an exceptionally fine preview call this week. It was so good that at first I did not realize it was the seductive voice of a soft HARD sell. The man and the woman used all the right terms about their mission being to help you with your mission and about doing this for you and for your customer. It was very convincing how for a mere $5,000 they would teach me about how to close more sales as well as how to close them at a higher ticket value.

Still, something bothered me about the presentation. At first I assumed it was just that I was uncomfortable with putting people on the spot about committing to their own business growth or choosing to miss out, or maybe it was that we can increase our prices thousands of dollars by not focusing on the value of our material but on the cost of not buying, such as on all the money you’ll leave on the table for passing on the chance to learn what we can teach you. Why did that bother me? Isn’t closing the whole purpose of sales?Continue reading

Don't Let Your Passion Blind You to What Your Customer Wants

By John Aberle | Sales and Marketing , Soft Sell

I’m a big believer in walking the talk. Yesterday, however, I asked my client how I did. What he told me was eye opening, and my ego would have preferred to not have gotten the answer. Despite the soft sell sales training I do in which I stress using questions to understand before selling, I almost allowed my passion blind me to what my client wanted.

Actually, we’d had a great session. We were talking about soft sell sales and marketing activities he can take to grow their business in these tough times in one of the hardest hit industries in America: apparel. I was teaching him about the soft sell sales approach to selling: get to know the customer’s concerns and interests, her issues.

We did some brainstorming that he, his wife/partner, and I all enjoyed. We discussed identifying the real benefits. We talked about the challenges their retailers are facing and how difficult it is to get to the buyers these days.

That’s when my own passion overrode my listening skills. Continue reading

In Soft Sell Sales, Questions Are to Understand

By John Aberle | Prospecting , Sales and Marketing , Soft Sell

About twenty years ago, I attended a sales training class that has ever since stood out as the classic example of hard sell. This former vacuum cleaner salesman taught us how he sold 90% of the homes in this small town in Nevada or Arizona. He told us to just develop a series of questions that everybody would answer yes to. Each yes was like a degree on a thermometer. Eventually you had so many yeses that the temperature reached a point where — that’s right — where they couldn’t say no. Degree by degree he built his closing momentum.

I left that training really disappointed that I’d wasted my money. Talk about manipulation. Long before I heard Judith & Jim talk about soft sell marketing and their Soft Sell Marketers Association, I was a soft sell salesperson and soft sell marketer. My spiritual convictions are such that I’m responsible for my actions. If I control people subconsciously so as to take away their freedom to choose, I will eventually find my actions come back on me.

The irony is that when you use the soft sell approach and ask questions to better understand your prospects’ situation, Continue reading

The Hidden Lie about Seven Impressions in Advertising

By John Aberle | advertising , Internet Marketing , Sales and Marketing , Soft Sell

For some 30 years of my career in sales and marketing, we’ve used a rule of thumb that it takes seven impressions for the average person to buy — assuming he or she actually has a need for what you are selling. And as rules of thumb go, it’s a good one — if you understand what it means. Otherwise, it’s a lie to the extent that it can be very misleading. It’s a lie of omission.

When running ads, in magazines and newspapers, you would normally expect to run for seven days or seven monthly issues and get seven impressions. Wrong. Perhaps because my first sales job when I left the Air Force was in radio advertising, I immediately got a different slant on the seven impressions. Someone has to hear your spot or see — and actually notice — your ad for it to count as an impression. So immediately one has a challenge getting seven impressions.

How many people do you know who actually read every article and every ad in every issue for seven issues. That means that they might notice your ad every third or fourth one.

The other issue is that it needs to be frequent enough that the last impression hasn’t faded from memory. This is why in Internet marketing, Continue reading

Insight that Increases Your Marketing Effectiveness

By John Aberle | Sales and Marketing , Soft Sell

I love it when someone can help me appreciate my profession in a new way. The fascinating part of it is that after over 30 years in sales and marketing, it took a couple psychologists to give me a major insight into how to make my marketing activities more effective. I found their tweak to the definition of marketing in The Heart of Marketing by Judith Sherven & Jim Sniechowski, known as Judith & Jim.

This significant change is so subtle yet simple. I was always taught that marketing is about making yourself known in the marketplace. To quote them, “The essence of selling is converting your prospective customer into an actual customer. And the essence of marketing is — preparing your prospective customer to buy.” (p. 25)

While things like sale flyers and discount coupons obviously have that goal in mind from the beginning, many of our marketing activities lack that clear intention. A common example is blogging. Continue reading

Choose More Powerfully Attractive Words

By John Aberle | soft sell marketing , soft sell sales

There’s a fine line that soft sell salespeople and soft sell marketers tread with words. At least 25 years ago, I read a book by one of the leading sales trainers in America. He was a hard sell sales professional with manipulative closing techniques. Despite my feeling really icky about such manipulation, he had a chapter that I liked about choosing more powerfully attractive words.

 In every culture, certain words have connotations the dictionary definition doesn’t cover. In America, there are many terms that have implied sexual meanings. Soft sell sales and marketing people will avoid using them as they undermine your efforts to develop trust. The chapter I enjoyed in this hard sell sales trainer’s book talked about words that have baggage attached to them. Continue reading

The Passionate Road to a Sales Career that Is Fun, Fulfilling, and Mutually Rewarding

By John Aberle | sales career , soft sell sales

When I’m consulting with clients on soft sell sales and marketing, I come alive. I absolutely love training people on how to improve their sales and marketing effectiveness. I really think that a career in sales is fun, fulfilling, and mutually rewarding when you help customers buy.

At the same time, it is work, lots of work. Nor is it a get-rich-quick scheme. A career in soft sell sales offers a lifestyle of hard work rewarding success with much more than money.

Identifying your ideal customer profile takes digging into your records and analyzing them. Developing the understanding of your customers so that you can relate to prospects’ concerns honestly takes research, thinking, and listening. A life worth living in sales takes time and effort, study and practice. It’s my passion that makes it enjoyable.

I really agree with Randy Pausch Continue reading

It's Not about Controlling with Questions

By John Aberle | Prospecting , Sales and Marketing , Soft Sell

When I first experienced sales training, the trainers sometimes gave me the feeling that questions were a form of cattle prod designed to guide prospects down the chute to the slaughter house. For any soft sell salesperson, that is an unacceptable approach.

In soft sell sales and marketing, the role is that of a trusted advisor or consultant. We use questions to understand, not to control. One of my clients, Scott, shared with me yesterday his excitement about how well open-ended questions worked for him last week. (Note: Open-ended questions ask who, what, when, where, why, how — they invite the other person to talk more and explain her meaning.)

Looking back, Scott realized Continue reading

The Ideal Sales Option for Small Businesses, Especially Small Manufacturers

By John Aberle | affiliate marketing , Internet Marketing

Here’s a number to make any small manufacturer or small business take note: Clickbank has paid affiliates over $1,294,388,522 in the company’s ten years in business. I captured this figure Friday, June 26, 2009, 11:08 PM PDT. Marketing Sherpa reported in their Affiliate Summit 2006 Wrap-Up Report that commissions would reach $6.5 billion in 2006. Those figures demonstrate the huge impact this form of Internet marketing has.

This is a way to add a sales organization of commission-only salespeople! Affiliate marketing offers a solution that small manufacturers are looking for. How do you get sales help when your average sale is so small that you can’t attract an independent rep, and you’re too small to afford a sales team of your own? Turn to Internet marketing and specifically to affiliate marketing.

Initially, I thought of affiliate marketing was only for digital products. After all, Clickbank specializes in digital product sales. Also, the first money I earned on the Internet came as a result of promoting First Step Internet Marketing to my friends and business associates. However, as I thought about it, I saw that the system to do affiliate marketing applies wonderfully to any manufacturer and to any small business.

As I looked deeper, I found Continue reading

The Park Is Open Until 8 PM

By John Aberle | soft sell marketing , soft sell sales

While I was reading Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture that my son and his family gave me for my birthday, I came to the 12th chapter, “The Park Is Open Until 8 p.m.” I didn’t pay close attention to the title until I got into the chapter where Randy said (on p. 62), “Ask Disney World workers: ‘What time does the park close?’ They’re supposed to answer: ‘ The park is open until 8 p.m.”

Wow! Such a little change yet it has such a different feeling. The emphasis is on the positive viewpoint, “open.” This immediately reminded me of a Soft Sell Marketers Association weekly training I listened to recently in which Judith & Jim talked about guarantees.

As they said, many guarantees on the Internet say something to the effect of “If you’re unhappy with …, I’ll give you your money back.” The problem with that wording is Continue reading