As a professional salesperson, you will represent your own company or a combination of client companies. You will need a combination of sales strategies to ensure that your style meets different consumer needs. A one-size-fits-all sales approach could mean that you miss out on important segments of your target market. With direct and indirect sales strategies, build a customer base and get referrals from satisfied customers.
Direct Sales
A person specialising in direct sales is going to meet the customers, whether they are businesses or consumers, face-to-face. This might involve being a direct sales rep on contract for a larger company or selling your own products and services to clients. Set goals for your direct sales strategy to ensure that you can meet your income requirements. For example, you need to consider what kind of commission each company might pay you before choosing whom to represent. Get more tips for selecting companies to represent in direct selling by visiting the websites of direct selling associations.
Home-Based Direct Sales
Some people use direct selling as a part-time income source, and they find that selling from their own home base meets their needs. They may also choose to build a team of sellers underneath them, but they have to remain active sellers. Direct sellers use every networking opportunity they can find to build their business. For example, if you sell beauty products, start with family and friends and build up your confidence to approach total strangers or friends of friends about buying your wares.
Outpace the Competition
In indirect sales of business-to-business products and services, you might face direct competition with other companies selling the same or similar products or services. Indirect selling relies on your ability to find the right contact in a prospect company to which you will make a sales pitch. This person must be in the right position to suggest how your goods will benefit the company, helping it reach its own goals while finding your company to be a good partner.
Visionary Indirect Sales
You also need vision to succeed in indirect sales. Be able to describe to a customer, or a client company’s representative, how the product or service that you sell will help it service its own customers better. Your vision is based on information that you have already researched, including which products and services a specific customer needs, what you have researched to be the customer’s needs for change and what the relationship will do for the customer’s bottom line. If you must pitch another business contact, she might have to convey your vision to her own superiors, and so your vision must be clear.
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