Some products are easy to sell.
By easy, I mean you don’t personally have to get involved. Pizzas, paperbacks, and potato peelers are easy to sell. All you really need is a web page and a buy button. If there’s a limit to how many of these products you can sell, it’s mostly governed by how much traffic you can generate and at what price.
Other products are hard to sell. Maybe they’re expensive, or have a lot of options, or require a lot of configuration. Coaches, consultants, and chief executive officers are hard to sell. Before you close the sale, you’re going to have to have a real conversation with a real human being: a relationship.
When every sale requires a relationship, the dynamics change. Your sales are no longer limited by the amount of interest your product generates. Now the long pole in the tent is YOU, and how many relationships you can effectively establish and manage at once.
When scaling your sales means scaling your ability to handle relationships, how can you maximize your revenue? Every solution uses some combination of these three strategies:
- You can more efficiently distribute relationships, and spread the load across a larger team. That’s the old-school approach.
- You can more efficiently process relationships, and spend less average effort on more but less profitable ones. That’s the sales-funnel approach.
- You can more efficiently choose relationships, and spend more average effort on fewer but more profitable ones. That’s the Tribify approach.
Each of these strategies has its own set of pros and cons, and there is no universally right answer: everybody solves the relationship scaling problem according to a unique set of constraints imposed by the product, the market, and the unique strengths of the seller.
This is the premise of RELATIONSHIP SALES MASTERY. Every month or so, Tribify pulls together a collection of professionals who sell hard products in different fields, and we ask them: how do YOU do this?
The answers are interesting and instructive. Please join us for the next one, on 10 Aug 2021 from 10-11:30am Eastern time! Click here for more info.
