Timothy Crawford | The Marketing Mash Up

The good old sales days. They weren’t so good were they? Remember the old sales styles?

Remember this guy?

Salesman had a reputation for being pushy, aggressive, annoying, scheming, slimy, snaky and all in all a big bag full of scum balls who’d push their mothers down a flight of stairs if she was blocking them from chasing down a customer.

Car salesman were seen so negatively that if we were having a Yo Mama round, and I said “Yo’ mama’s a crack head” you could respond, “So what, Yo’ mama’s a car salesman!” And you’d win!

Car salesmanship has changed. Not necessarily because dealers wanted to, but because it made good business sense. Dealers finally realized the crappy buying experience was deterring people from buying more cars, more often. It took a while. A long while. But they changed and when they changed a strange thing happened: People brought more cars.

The death of the hard selling is everywhere now. Look at social media; social websites are the epitome of the soft sale. No one’s pushy. No one’s jumping all over you when you hit the door. You can stretch your legs, walk around, kick the tires, and hey, if you want to, you can take their services out for a spin before you make a decision.

New salesmanship is also about giving til it hurts and trust it’ll come back tenfold. In our highly competitive new world your list of subscribers, friends and prospects is everything. It only makes sense to put more time into giving than selling. They’ll buy later. Build value first, as much as possible, I mean cram in loads of value and then…Wait.

The rain will come. Hey, I like that line. (*saving own page to favorites)

Can’t give it away? No problem, just make really great stuff and people will buy it anyway. The better your products and services the less selling you have to do.

Have you ever been to an Apple store? You can tell their salespeople aren’t worrying about sales quotas. Apple makes great products so their customer reps don’t need to talk you into a purchase; their job is to help you buy the right item. The biggest complaints I’ve heard about the Apple Store shopping experience is the reps spend too much time with customers. Basically, their reps are too helpful. That’s what Jobs can call “one of those good problems”.

Circuit City wish they had that type of problem, so does Target and so does the ghost of this guy:

Sorry, i couldn’t resist