Understand the Art of Selling ………..”Oga wait make i go bring am from my other shop”
I am sure a lot of us have heard this popular lines more than a number of times from our ever street & market savy Igbo brothers in popular cluster markets like Alaba International, Computer village , Balogun , Idumota and the list goes on and on.
Now in the past i use to get very pissed at this deliberate ploy to waste my precious time by these market savy guys. Obviously in my mind there was no other shop but rather they wanted to go source for it from another shop and sell. Well this is probably the most brilliant sales lesson a lot of us seem to have ignored.
They never miss an opportunity to sell. Now this is freaking profound. I was hater of this until a few years ago when i started to hit the ground to sell my SaaS products to the end users. This when i understood why these guys never wanted to miss an opportunity to sell.
Selling is an art, people often confuse it with marketing. Well quite understandable but fact remains that they are miles apart and different. Selling is the art of Killing while marketing is probably wooing for a kill.
Any time i remember Editi Effiong’s profound law on “Sell First and Think Later” it helps me connect all the dots because survival is all about selling. Forget the razzmatazz of marketing and advertising. The bottom line is to get the customer to drop the money and pay for that product or solution at a price that you can break even and say you hit a home run profit.
So now understanding that a customer is a terrible thing to lose and the opportunity to sell regardless of if you have the product or not. It all makes sense why a trader in Idumota or Balogun would go the extra mile to source for an item he doesn’t have but wants to hit a home run sale by sourcing it and giving me the usual story to wait while he go fetches the product from his other shop.
We all know that other shop is called Outsourcing in the actual sense. They say art of Sales is good for the soul and your bank account. I believe it;s true. – Tunde Mo’ Aguda