Going through pg. 10 of Lifestyle Selling made perfect sense.  Selling is really simple:

1.  Fine Tune your Niche Market

2.  Identify Your Client’s Level of Interest

3.  Use the Nine Methods of Inspiration

However it’s one of those things in life, that for some is simple but not easy.
And for many-to master the mundane, it’s very boring to do day in and day out.

In my telemarketer days,  I was just stuck on step 2 and step 3.  My boss or marketing manager was the one deciding who to call or who was the ideal prospect in step 1.  They were the ones that picked who to sell to.  Sometimes it was “everyone’s your niche.   Call from this phone book or knock on all these doors in this neighborhood.”  Or joining some network marketing companies the niche would be “who are the closest 5 people you know?”

But that never worked for me.  Here I had some generic product, and I was asking people to stop buying whatever they usually used to buy from me, a product that was supposed to do more, better, faster, and sometimes for less/same price but many times for more money.

And I always found, that even though I was using pre-made scripts from a company, with pre-made rebuttals to objections from whomever I was paid (or not paid if I was working on commission) to call, they were usually useless because I was selling to people that had no interest in buying my type of product or service.

Basically, I was always selling to the wrong crowd of people!

I was using every rebuttal and every persuasion technique until I was blue in the face to try and sell something to someone that didn’t want to buy from me.   All this frustration because I was paid to sell to the wrong niche.  But hey, I was getting paid to test this niche by marketing manager or boss.

When you get control of who you can to sell to, the types of clients you want, the people you want to serve and whom also have a need for your service, things become much more easier and stress free.

So I’ll admit it.  I suck at sales.  Rather, I suck at lead generation, but when the client is in front of me, I usually can close them no problem.  And in this economy, you’ve got to find enough people to get in front of.

I’ve been in the property and casualty insurance business for a few years now because in my head I figured it would be a good business.  Everyone needs insurance right?  The mortgage companies won’t lend unless you have insurance and if you drive in my province, the government forces you to buy insurance or they issue you a $600+ ticket.    So, it’s an easy sell!  Well…the reality was sort of.  It seems everyone in my industry thought the same thing and the margins just get crushed.  Isn’t that the same thing everywhere else.  You can sell something hard, and make fewer sales as long  and make a good living doing it because the sales commissions are bigger.  Or you can sell something easy, but barely scratch out a living because the margins are small and you’ve got to sell a lot of it.

So here’s the dilemna.  I want to quit my job (don’t we all.)  And I want to do something better with my life.  (Again, don’t we all.)  But no matter what job I do, I still have to make a sale.  Either to my boss, or to a customer, or to someone I’m trying to recruit to make a sale for me.   So I’m always running into the problem of making a sale.  Although you don’t like doing it, it has to be done.

When  I was in college, I was paired up with a mentor, Pauline O’malley of Rev Turbo.  Back in the day, her training company was called the Revenue Builder.  It was a very effective sales seminar and the sales course work broke the sales process into very simple steps.  But I hated the work.  But the work was what made it worked.

I bounced around a few careers and was always looking for a way around cold calling.  Joining networking groups like BNI, advertising through direct mail and flyers, building online websites that would page rank in google and asking for referrals.  Many ways of generating leads, but eventually I hit a wall.  Today I’m doing something about it.   I’m going back to the basics and cold calling and generating new clients out of no where again.

9 years later, I looked up my old mentor, and found out that she’s remodelled her training program.  Here is my story of my online sales seminar training with Pauline O’malley’s  Rev Turbo.