You Asked ...

Some of my readers have asked me to share my opinion as to what is the most important thing a one-person business owner MUST DO when selling his/her products and services. My answer is that if I was limited to suggesting only one answer, it would have to be this: you must always ASK FOR THE ORDER. It's been my experience that many individuals have a reluctance to ask the prospect to buy from them. The ONLY way you can reasonably expect to make sufficient sales of your product or service is to ALWAYS ask for the order.

Please consider the following story:

A young man was standing on the street corner of a large city. Standing beside him was a pile of hard-covered books. The young man would ask everyone who was passing by close to him: "Sir, would you like to buy a book? How about you Miss, would you like to buy a book? How about you Sir, wanna buy a book?

One day a well dressed older man approached our young man and asked: "What are you doing"? Our young man answered: "I have these books and as people walk by I ask EACH one if he/she would like to buy a book. Some buy my books while others say no. My friends call me a book salesman."

The older man said: "You can't sell books that way and son this is your lucky day. I happen to be the President of the largest book publishing company in North America. Two years ago we hired - at great expense - a team of experts to create a powerful sales system designed to sell books. Next week we will begin sales training classes based on the system created by those experts. And because you look like a nice young man I'm going to enroll you in that course and when you graduate you'll probably earn $40.000 per year".

To this, our young man replied: "I'm already now earning $70,000 per year. Sir, would you like to buy a book? How about you Miss, would you like to buy a book? How about you Sir, wanna buy a book"?

Enough said.