All Posts by John Aberle

Time Enough But No More — If

By John Aberle | Prospecting , soft sell marketing , soft sell sales

No matter how noble your efforts and how much you want to help people, each of us only has 24 hours in a day. For most business purposes, the time to work with prospects and customers tends to be significantly less. After too many hours, I lose enthusiasm and energy so eight to ten hours is my practical limit normally. I find too that as much as I love my work, I need downtime to refresh and recharge. Still there is time enough but no more, if I manage my time well, to reach the prospects and customers I need to.

The point here is that none of us has an unlimited supply of time. If we’re sales managers, we can multiply it by hiring more people but then we usually get limited by money — or the time needed to help them and to manage them. So how do we grow our businesses then?

We do it by identifying our Ideal Customer Profile, determining which of their problems or desires we can help with, and understanding what they really want or feel they need to do about their situation.

That’s the first step: narrow down the suspects, which includes everyone in the world or in your community, to only those who are likely to benefit from your products and services. You’ll not only save time by being focused on the people or accounts that make for the most productive use of your time, you’ll find that you don’t need hard sell techniques of pressure, control, and manipulation. This approach is ideal for soft sell sales and soft sell marketing.

Just as understanding your customer is key to building a relationship of trust, it is essential for soft sell salespeople who want to find sales fulfilling, fun, and mutually rewarding. There is time enough, but no more — if you learn who your best prospects are and focus on them and if you show you care because you understand their situation enough to ask the right questions, and then you listen fully before you try to help the customer buy.

What’s in It for Me?

By John Aberle | soft sell marketing , soft sell sales

Two weekends ago I was fascinated when I was visiting my son to see how he disciplined his daughter. I grew up in a home where my father used the belt to discipline and punish so it was interesting to see Ian get Cai Anne’s attention without yelling or spanking. She’d started to demand what she wanted. He calmly asked her, “What do people get who misbehave?” The second time he asked, she said, “Nothing.” And with that she changed her behavior.

What an incredible demonstration of the power of WIIFM. It really doesn’t matter whether you’re in sales & marketing or management or just trying to convince your child to change her behavior, the key question is “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM)

So when you want people to seriously consider what you are proposing to them, speak to them in terms of their interests and concerns. Continue reading

The World Is Not Your Oyster When It Comes to Sales

By John Aberle | Prospecting , soft sell marketing , soft sell sales

Stop wasting your time, effort, and money trying to sell to the whole world. It takes discipline to train yourself to narrow your efforts to your best effect. I too have to discipline myself: soft sell sales and soft sell marketing appeal mostly to small business owners and people who care about developing long term relationships. Yet we find it tempting to be available to anyone and everyone who might want to buy our products. We don’t want to miss out on any sale. The whole world is our oyster. Not so.

The people who thrive are those who identify their niche and tightly focus on what they do that appeals to that specific group. Last year I read a great example of this by Wayne M. Thomas in his book, The Sales Manager’s Success Manual. He described a plastic surgeon in Southern California who invested heavily in a state-of-the-art laser system capable of removing wrinkles and blemishes.

When he initially identified his potential patient base, he included everyone over 40 in Southern California. His advertising produced disappointing results. Continue reading

A Great Looking Website Only Gives You an Office on the Internet — Now You Need to Attract Traffic

By John Aberle | Internet Marketing , soft sell marketing , soft sell sales

I’ve had numerous clients who wonder why their websites fail to produce sales. The answer is simply the lack of marketing. Traffic doesn’t just happen because you have a URL or website address and a presence on the Internet any more than it does if you have an office in an office building or an industrial park. Having had a small business in a commercial park, I can assure you, we did not have walk-in traffic. The Internet with millions of websites is worse than any neighborhood in the world for trying to be seen just by having a “presence” on the web.

For instance, in October 2008, Netcraft reported 182,226,259 sites from their web server survey. That number has surged to 235,890,526 sites in their May 2009 survey. Given that volume of competition for attention, I would say that the odds of being “found” by chance are slim to none. You need to actively market your business like you would any “brick and mortar” business, i.e. a company with a physical storefront or office space.

Avoid panicking at these numbers. Only a fraction of that number provides competition to you. Instead use this information to motivate yourself to actively market your business.Continue reading

How to Help Customers Trust You

By John Aberle | Sales and Marketing , soft sell marketing , soft sell sales

Recently, while I was making tunafish salad, I had an experience that reminded me why prospects distrust sales and marketing statements. I decided to mix and match types of tuna from Bumblebee. I grabbed a Chunk Light Tuna and a Solid Tuna. What I got was flakes of tuna and chunks of tuna respectively, but no “solid” tuna. It wasn’t what I expected by the labels. Although the “solid” was at least packed tightly and had to be broken up, the “chunks” were tiny pieces more like a thick soup than chunks.

It’s no wonder that most Americans don’t trust marketers. Label something properly and customers buy because no matter how often we’ve been lied to, we want to trust the words. We’ve been taught that words have certain meanings so the product marketing people can generate sales by picking the right product names, even when the labels are misleading. This hard sell approach of “Get-the-sale-however-you-can” works until the words have been abused and misused so long that they lose their power.

As soft sell marketers and soft sell salespeople, we have our work cut out for us. We have to win our customers’ trust. Yet we are up against Continue reading

How to Overcome the Fear of Making Sales Calls

By John Aberle | Sales and Marketing , Sales Calls , soft sell sales

You’d think as an experienced soft sell salesperson and consultant, that I now longer have to deal with the fear of calling on someone. But then, I’ve read even highly successful public speakers still get jittery nerves or apprehension before giving a talk. In my case, I was going on a consulting call yesterday with a client in Glendale, California.

I was going in feeling somewhat cocky because I had done my homework. When I’d reviewed their website, I made notes about what would improve it as part of the suggestions I would give to take their marketing efforts up a notch or two.

Imagine my shock when my clients showed me the screen of the new website. Continue reading

All’s Fair in Love and War, Not – to a Soft Sell Marketer

By John Aberle | Sales and Marketing , soft sell marketing , soft sell sales

This concept crystallizes for me the hard sell position when taken to an extreme. Do what it takes to get the sale because “All’s fair in love and war”; and sales, to the hard sell marketer, is war. There are winners and losers. The good ones make sure they are the winners most of the time. On the other end of the spectrum, soft sell salespeople and soft sell marketers work to achieve a win-win.

Mind you, there are degrees between hard sell and soft sell sales and marketing. Rarely do you find people anchored at the poles. Usually salespeople are moving in one direction or the other, being mostly hard or mostly soft sell. Nevertheless, the “All’s fair” mentality causes a tremendous amount of heart break in this world.

While many men probably would not describe a failed business trust or failed business relationship as causing a broken heart, Continue reading

Defining How to Sell with Heart and Integrity

By John Aberle | Sales and Marketing , soft sell marketing , soft sell sales

Congratulations, Judith & Jim, on an incredibly successful email campaign to get The Heart of Marketing: Love Your Customers and They Will Love You Back (Morgan James Publishing) to hit #59 on Amazon overall (which means that only 58 books sold better than it). You truly demonstrated the impact a well orchestrated campaign can have if you have the involvement of lots of friends and people who care about your work — and if you give those supporters the tools and the reminders to make it easy to share news.

But all of the good marketing efforts will fall flat if they are wasted on people who have no interest in what you are offering. The fact that The Heart of Marketing soared to the top in so many categories is reassuring because I long believed the way to sell and market was the soft sell approach. Still for years I felt insecure about my decision. Continue reading

How to Sound Like a Soft Sell Marketer Instead of a Spammer

By John Aberle | email marketing , soft sell marketing , soft sell sales

On Wednesday, while I was doing research for a report that included a section on autoresponders and email “blasts,” I checked out MailChimp. My friend DeBorah Beatty, Solopreneur Logistics Specialist, praises them highly for being an excellent service and offering the best value. I really liked their site. More importantly for this post, I liked the point Ben brought up on his MailChimp Blog in the article, Rant: How To Sound Like A Spammer.

Ben’s point was that he’s had spammers ask about how they can do blasts on MailChimp. They’ve turned a lot of potential customers away for using that term because it shows they don’t understand permission based marketing. I left a comment asking what term he uses then for legitimate mailings of email newsletters and for mailings about events to everyone on your list at once. Ben’s reply was “@John – I’d call it an ‘event invitation’ or ‘weekly email newsletter.’”

He got me thinking about the term “blast” from a different angle than spammers. Continue reading

How Soft Sell Sales Can Give You Your Self Respect Back

By John Aberle | Sales and Marketing , soft sell marketing , soft sell sales

Have you ever made a sale you didn’t feel good about where you got your sale just because you could, not because your customer would get the help they needed? I remember one employer in particular where that was true. I didn’t last long there – despite being on the fast track for rewards and promotion. I didn’t feel right about selling their product when I stopped believing it delivered what we claimed it did. Today I met a client who once quit sales for the same type of reason.

Ralph (not his real name) and I started out by going over some of the questions I sent him about his sales and marketing activity. I learned that Ralph had prior sales experience selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. He excelled at it for awhile. He was aggressive, and he was good at it but found he hated himself for what he was doing. He had one of those moments many in hard sell sales have. It was an experience where he knew he could get the sale, but his prospect had no need for the product. In danger of losing his self respect, he quit sales.

Interestingly, he’s a small manufacturer now and the only one in his company at the moment who is doing sales. But today, he sells in an entirely different way. Continue reading