Selling is an interesting pursuit. Pure selling, as in calling on potential clients or customers who may or may not be interested in learning about or purchasing what is being offered, is distasteful for many people and exciting for others. There aren’t too many in the middle. They either find selling unpleasant, or they love it. As a profession, sales generally is well-paid. The real issue though is not in making sales but in how people perceive it and how they relate it to their personal experiences.
For many people, selling means talking someone into buying something they don’t want or need for more money than they are comfortable in spending and not taking “no” for an answer. Often, the insert themselves into the equation and remember all of the times they were in a store looking at something with no immediate need or interest in purchasing it when they were confronted by a salesperson who proceeded to try to talk them into purchasing it anyway. This persuasion is what people object to having done to them.
That’s what’s different – and better for many people, about selling aging in place services, products, and solutions. Rather than being someone who has to try to create a need or interest among people when none might be there, we get to work with people who do have a need or interest in what we offer.
We have no quotas to meet, no established clients or customers to call on for repeat orders, no particular products or services to push for the company, or even a specific territory to farm and create business within. The typical rules of selling – both in how we meet and engage the client and the way we engage them are quite different. The objective is still the same – find someone with a need and present reasonable solutions or alternatives for addressing or solving the issues they have. They consent, we get paid, and they get the project they need.
Selling aging in places services definitely is atypical selling according to the way professional sales normally are done. We don’t have to rely on calling upon dozens of people in a certain demographic or territory and hope that we find enough interested people to buy our products – we can do this, but it’s not necessary. We are not trying to find people who don’t know they might have an interest in what we offer and then try to convince them that they have such a need and that they should purchase what we are offering.
Generally, we are going to be contacted by people looking for what we offer, or we are going to be referred to them through our network of professionals that we have identified and cultivated. They know what we offer, they have people who need what we can provide, and they put us together with their clients. There is no selling as in trying to demonstrate that the client has a need or trying to convince them to spend the money. They have been presold by the referring professional that has brought us into the situation to simply fulfill the prescription they have given their client.
When we walk into someone’s living room or sit down at their kitchen table with them, it’s much different than knocking on their door cold or calling them on the phone to introduce ourselves and our opportunity. We already have set the appointment (they may have contacted us, we may already have reached out to them, they may have seen a booth we did, or we may have been referred to them). We aren’t relying on “the law of averages” where we make a certain number of attempts to secure an appointment or to convince someone to buy what we are offering to make a sale.
When people invite us into their home, they know why we are there. They may not know what we can do for them or how much it will be, but they are at least open to discussing with us what we can do for them. In most cases, they will have a specific need rather than just doing a general remodel to update the appearance, although that is fine as well.
With our services, solutions, or products – or a combination of them – they either think we are the company to provide these for them to make their lives safer and more enjoyable in their home or they don’t. We may have to establish priorities and work within a smaller budget than what we envisioned, but generally the need or desire, or both is there when we meet with them. We are not trying to convince them that they need what we have because our making a sale for our company is more important than serving their needs. That might apply to traditional selling, but it’s the opposite of what we do. This is why selling aging in place services is different from other forms of selling, more rewarding, and to many, not even selling at all.