How many of you love to buy something but don't love to be sold something?  This plays on Winston Churchill's quotable quote "Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught" and is appropriate today more than ever in sales.  Many sales experts have emphasized pulling in interested buyers rather than pushing your message out to them by cold calling, spamming, or talking to people about what your company or you do.

How many of you are only working the activity of cold calling to drive new sales just because there is an old habit that proved successful, or there is someone else's metric to be achieved because it was successful for someone else before like a manager, owner or stakeholder?  My suggestion is that rather than investing in broadcasting outward whatever it is that you do, that you instead focus on tools to follow up and direct customers with casual interest into people who love to buy something from you. 

Five common sense approaches that sometimes get lost in the heat of chasing opportunities that definitely convert into sales is to:

1. Have something of value to offer (it doesn't necessarily have to be the best quality or price, biggest, fastest, etc.,), but it does have to have intrinsic value that can be conveyed in a simple value proposition statement to a prospective customer.  If you can't explain it in 30 seconds or 1 minute there could be a problem with how you're saying it.
2. Be authentic, genuine about your offer's shortcomings if any and sincere about yourself and your product and whether it will help the person interested.
3. Be prepared to go out of your way to give the person interested more than they expect.
4. Figure out what the customer's emotional reasons for buying are and meet those needs (either they have a sense of reward, fear, pride, shame, altruism, envy).
5. Let the customer make the leap and choose what they want when they want, and think long term relationship rather than close the sale right now. 

The stronger your analytics that tell you when someone is interested or is searching for information or clicking around for information that you offer is one of the keys to Google's ad words program and is also something any small operator can easily implement or on linkedin or other social media sites by posting ads. 

Just make sure your engagement strategy is all about asking the prospective customer what it is they really need to accomplish and why they are looking for this product or service.

Have a great week end, and I leave you with the sales pitch from Parks and Rec: