Passion? Isn’t that just about hearts and flowers?
There’s no doubt that passion is great for the romantics among us. But passion is also great for selling. In fact, every great sale starts from the heart!
My sales career started at school
Can you remember your first sales job? I remember mine – selling pens and erasers at school when I was just six! Sadly, I also remember the school director shutting down my first venture.
If you asked me now what made my very first sales venture a success, or what my unique selling point was, I would say it in one word: passion. That’s what made people buy from me.
Of course, I also sold better pens at a better price, which helps. But passion was my X factor and it always has been. It’s what drew my very first customers to me!
I saw the sale before I made the sale
My passion would begin just by thinking about the project and then imagining the very moment of buying the products from the wholesaler. Then the passion grew as I visualised myself selling them to my classmates. I could see them happy and excited, thinking back, that having one of my pens was cool. 😊
Great, but what is passion?
In case you were wondering, passion is the intense, positive feeling you get from pursuing activities that are deeply meaningful to you. Plus, pursuing something you are passionate about is essential to achieving success in any field. (Carmine Gallo, 2014).
So, how passionate are you when you go out selling your products and services to others, or when you present your business or even yourself?
Share your passion
You know how you often yawn after hearing someone else yawn? Or you start laughing when you hear a friend laughing? Passion is even more contagious than that!
What if you could pass your passion on to the people you speak and present to, whether that’s your customers, your boss, your work colleagues or your friends and family?
What difference do you think that could that make to your business and your life?
Is something important missing from your sales process?
It could be if you’re not using passion in a genuine, authentic way to build respect and trust – key elements of any sales process.
Selling is the process intended to transfer emotions from the salesperson to the customer or prospect. (It’s so important that I put it in bold!) The main emotion you transfer is certainty, which ultimately will be the decisive element between a successful or an unsuccessful sale. And that’s all about passion.
We’re all salespeople now
I know what you’re thinking… “Me? A salesperson? I don’t think so”. But think about whether any of these scenarios sound familiar to you: attending a job interview, presenting a marketing or business plan, persuading your boss about a change of budget to your boss… Yes? You’re in sales. Any time you need to persuade others to see your point of view and take a related action, that’s sales. Daniel Pink certainly claims that we’re all in sales in his book To Sell is Human. And that involves the P word. Because if you want to encourage somebody to take any action, you need to convey your certainty with passion.
Can passion change your life?
Yes. It definitely can and I’m living that fact right now. You might not think that the passionate approach to business is for you. But you’d be seriously missing out if you stuck with that view. For example, if you’re a start-up looking for funding, you’ll get much better results by incorporating passion when presenting to potential investors. This is unlike many of the start-ups I see where they have great ideas, but the passion has somehow got lost along the way during those all-important presentations.
I whole-heartedly (and passionately!) invite you to bring passion into your presentations and you will start seeing new and improved results. Remember, passion is contagious. Not only that, but finding, communicating and sharing it can be learned and you can improve how you do this over time. Just get out there and start speaking passionately about what you do. What are you waiting for? It’s time to power up your sales process with passion!
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