We love making things simpler here at PledgeMe. We’ve created three simple ways to involve your crowd and bring your ideas to life: Project, Equity & Lend. And we love the power of simple analogies. We want to make it more simple for more people to get their heads around startups. So many aspects of startup life are abstract and tough to grasp, and the guides that are supposed to help just leave you without a ground-level understanding of what’s what. We’ve found that one of these murky areas is sales.
So what is sales?
We used to think sales was greasy. That’s the misconception that’s planted in many of our minds. We hear “sales”and we recoil a little bit. We think “manipulating”, “ruthless”, “soulless”and “squeezing problems to fit a solution.” But with Tan now guiding us as we sail the selling seas, we’ve realised something. Sales is like friendship.
Simply put, sales is about exchanging stories, understanding one another, planning to do stuff together and then doing stuff together. Sounds like friendship, huh? It’s about meshing your different perspectives and skills together so that you can help each other get stuff done, and get it done better. It’s all about that real relationship that you create together with your customer and the time that you spend connecting.
So much of sales is letting your customer hear the real story – why you’re doing what you’re doing, your journey so far and your vision – and helping them believe in it enough to want to be a part of that story. But arguably, the most important thing about sales is passing the mic and listening to them. Asking questions to understand your customer’s problem so that you can truly empathise with them.
Your customer isn’t king (controversial!)…your customer is a friend who you create an authentic relationship with, who you can sit with on the same level and enjoy spending time with. Magic happens when friends get together. You make each other’s lives better.
