So Why Have These Traditional Sales and Marketing Approaches Failed?

The Secret Truth that No One is Telling You.

The traditional sales and marketing techniques that are taught in books and by gurus fall into one of two flawed camps: relationship selling or features and benefits selling.

• Feature and benefit selling was created to sell products, not services.
• Relationship selling is a client retention tool, not a sales tool.

Do you agree? Want to know what you can do instead?

Don't believe me? Then read on...

First, features and benefits selling. This is the most basic sales technique used for selling products and services. It is all built leveraging the idea of creating a unique selling proposition (USP). If you go to YouTube you can find hundreds of videos on USPs and they all say this. Create a selling proposition around what is unique about your product or service. Simple, isn't it? Just figure out what is unique about your product and service and tell people about it. What if it is not unique? What if you do not know how it is unique? What if how you explain the uniqueness is really long and complicated? Quite simply this is a process that was developed for selling products, not services.

For service-based businesses it is even worse than that. The process creates a situation where you end up talking about the features and benefits of the products that you use to deliver your service. And guess what, there is nothing unique in the products you use. So, you are instantly commoditized and forced to sell on price or perhaps relationship.

To learn how to break free of the being commoditized click here.

Relationship selling is flawed for a number of reasons.

• You can only have so many relationships,
• It takes time to build a relationship,
• How do you build a relationship when it is hard to get a meeting?
• What if the salesperson that builds the relationship leaves?
• What if the person I have a relationship with leaves?
• How much is a client really willing to pay for relationships i.e.: will they buy from someone cheaper?
• Maintaining relationships is expensive.

And the big secret that no one is telling you... it is a client retention tool, not a sales tool. This is why your business is growing slowly and is taking lots of effort.

Don't believe me - read this article written by a relationship sales expert. Pay special attention to the sections titled It's the People and Win-Win. In the first section the author talks about this sales technique being best for generating repeat sales (client retention). In the Win-Win section he discusses that it is important that you the seller feel that the buyer gets a fair price. So don't think in a moment that relationship selling will help you increase prices.

To learn how to break free of the being commoditized click here.

I don't want to learn expert sales.  What are some of my other options?