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Don’t believe that because your bottom-feeder competitor sells by having the lowest (or a lower) price means being competitive requires you to match or beat their price. This is not selling; it is the opposite of selling. Selling is the creation of value worth paying for, not helping your prospective clients take money out of their solution and underinvest (if the investment they are making now could produce the result they needed, it would already be doing so).

Don’t believe that your product is the sum total of the value you create, believing that it needs to be so good as to eliminate all competition. This is the approach of someone who struggles to sell because they don’t create enough value to be a large part of the value proposition. Avoiding being a value creator and hoping the product does the work of selling is also the opposite selling.

Don’t believe or behave as if marketing is supposed to generate your leads and that those leads are supposed to be “ready-to-buy.” The idea that marketing is going to cause your dream clients to beat a path to your door is expecting too much from their effort, and it is completely unrealistic. There is no reason to suspect that you should succeed in sales by sitting back and waiting for deals to come to you through someone else’s efforts.

There is a difference between being likable and the need to be liked. Your dream client needs someone with the chops to help them produce better results, and that means candor and the willingness to engage with the difficult parts of helping people change. The need to be liked manifests as fear and avoidance of difficult issues. This too is the behavior of an order-taker.

You cannot be both an order-taker and value creator. You must pick a lane here. The decision to engage in what is difficult makes selling easier. A decision to avoid it means you are irrelevant.

Tags:
Sales 2017
Post by Anthony Iannarino on December 12, 2017

Written and edited by human brains and human hands.

Anthony Iannarino
Anthony Iannarino is a writer, an international speaker, and an entrepreneur. He is the author of four books on the modern sales approach, one book on sales leadership, and his latest book called The Negativity Fast releases on 10.31.23. Anthony posts daily content here at TheSalesBlog.com.
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