Cold calling? Don’t want to do it. Travel? Trade shows?… No thanks. Follow up calls? Networking?… Not really my thing. Let’s face it – I am not a salesman. But wait a minute… I am part of a successful, growing business and in order for that to happen “sales” obviously must be made. But really, what do salesman do? What is our sales strategy plan?
“What about your people” you say? If there are functions of your business for which you are not strong, hire people with better sales techniques, right? That makes sense, but again, we appear to have an organization with no sales people at all – no cold calls, no pounding the pavement, no up selling, no commissions, no prodding people to “act now!” So how do we improve our sales strategy plan?
Here’s my thought – perhaps active “selling” is just a small part of what may make a good salesman. Knowing the product, believing in the product, wanting to help all customers as much as possible – this is the other side of selling. As long as there are existing customers and new prospects coming in the door, outstanding customer service and high quality products are a better sales technique and a good sales strategy plan.
At Websticker we have a great, tried and true staff and there is NOT much thought put into “selling” or specific sales techniques. What keeps us interested, motivated and the company profitable is actively “helping” people. Yes, we still need to put money and efforts into marketing, attracting new clients and communicating with existing clients, but, we let our service and products ‘seal the deal’, not a sales person. To me (and I think our whole staff), it’s about serving, not selling. Improving service and products is also improving sales strategies and better sales techniques.
This isn’t to say selling and sales don’t have their place and there are certainly exceptional and effective sales people. We just seem to do alright without traditional salespeople and sales techniques. We have a small business where justifying another salary would require more added sales than we necessarily want to inject into our systems. We like being a small micro business. We like spending time working personally with each customer. We like where we live and work. We believe in and have fun with the custom stickers we design and sell.
Could we have better sales techniques? Could we improve our sales strategy plan? Sure, there’s always room for improvement. But, perhaps, for right now my staff and I are the perfect salespeople for meeting our company goals and, more importantly, meeting the custom sticker needs of our existing clients and some of the people that find us on-line or hear about us from other happy customers.
For those small businesses that do have a sales team and are looking at improving sales strategy this article may help.
Jeff Nicholson is the founder and Creative Director at 
