People do business with people they like…

This is the first rule of sales

Maybe sounds a bit old fashioned but, let me assure you it’s a powerful truth.

People do business with people they like

At a time where we do less and less business face to face, this is being forgotten about, but bear with me its important.

If you want to be successful, you have to build a connection with your sales audience.

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Standing out from the faceless crowd

This is a huge challenge today, and one thats being embraced by influencers.

Transcending face to face business and taking those same principles and applying them to vlogging is a great example of how people have successfully reinvented older sales principles to make them work in todays world.

While their audience is a video camera as they present or talk about the product or service their selling, what you see on the other end of that is a face and what you hear is one side of a conversation, this builds a connection.

That connections leads to you liking that person (Or the person they project themselves to be on-screen), the result, your much more likely to buy something they recommend.

Not everyone is on social media or wants to be an influencer of course, but its a great example of standing out from the crowd and building a sales audience with probably the oldest sales rule.

In business day to day there are other ways that we can make those same connections without having social media:

• Pick up the phone — Its amazing to me the amount of people who try to do business over email only and wonder why its not working. Develop that human connection with someone, if you can have that call over video phone even better.
• Integrity and honesty — This means being honest about what your trying to achieve and how what your selling benefits the person or the business your selling to, if it doesn’t benefit them chances are they wont buy it so be upfront about that. If you are not sure, then use calls and face to face meetings to work out how it would benefit them, you will thank yourself later. The prospect will also thank you because you will actually understand their needs and can tailor your sales towards that.
• Talk Plainly — Leave the acronyms and buzzwords back in the 80’s where they belong, this kinda ties back into integrity and honesty, no one talks like that in the real world so don’t talk like that in the business world, a natural conversation with the real you, builds that connection.
• Don’t present, converse — Death by power point is horrible for both the presenter and the audience, so don’t go there. Instead adopt the corporate story telling philosophy. Just have a conversation with some visual only slides for context as you need them. Its a much more natural way to present and puts both the presenter and the audience at ease.

If you can do these things, it will help you to stand out from crowd, build an honest relationship with your customers and get you more business.

Never forget that people really do more business with people they like, this is what makes sales and business development such a richly rewarding career option.