The Importance of Selling Skills in Everyday Life

Reflecting on my days as a sales trainer feels like it was just yesterday. The anatomy of a sale still resonates with me, especially as I see how these skills translate beyond business into daily life. Selling skills don’t just close deals—they help build relationships, foster understanding, and create effective communication in any setting, whether personal, professional, or social. Here’s a refreshed look at how the core stages of a sale—now with updated tools and perspectives—can positively impact our daily interactions:

1. Building Rapport

Building rapport remains foundational, especially in an age where both in-person and online relationships matter. Showing genuine interest, actively listening, and being present go a long way in making connections. Social media, virtual meetings, and professional networking sites make rapport-building possible on a broader scale than ever. Whether you’re engaging with family or networking professionally, remember: people are more receptive when they feel valued and understood. Strong rapport fosters collaboration, reduces conflict, and makes others more willing to consider your ideas or requests. Consistent, authentic rapport-building is the bedrock of lasting relationships.

2. Needs Discovery

It’s often said that we should listen twice as much as we talk. This idea has never been more relevant. Discovering others’ needs is about understanding their motivations, preferences, and challenges. In our personal lives, this might mean truly tuning in to a loved one’s concerns; in a work setting, it might mean identifying a colleague’s goals. Practicing empathy bridges the gap between what we want and what others need, leading to better compromises and collaborative solutions. The more we understand others’ desires, the easier it is to find common ground and create solutions beneficial to all involved.

3. Highlighting Benefits

Only after establishing a connection and understanding motivations should you present ideas or requests. In today's world, benefits should be clear, relevant, and focused on mutual gain. Consider framing benefits around how your request or idea supports shared goals or adds value to the other person. For instance, if you’re asking a coworker for assistance, explain how the project benefits the team, enhances their experience, or showcases their expertise. People are more likely to commit when they see what’s in it for them—or for the greater good.

4. Testing the Waters (Trial Closing)

Once rapport is built and benefits are clear, it’s time to check readiness. A gentle, non-pressuring approach—such as “How does this sound to you?”—can gauge the other person’s comfort. This step is useful even in non-sales interactions. For instance, when discussing plans with friends or family, you can invite feedback and test enthusiasm before solidifying decisions. If there’s hesitation, consider addressing concerns before moving forward. Trial closing encourages open communication and helps you understand where you stand, reducing misunderstandings and helping you avoid needless conflicts down the line.

5. Addressing Concerns

When you encounter objections, view them as opportunities to clarify, learn, and even strengthen the relationship. Instead of pushing back, ask questions to understand the reason for their resistance, then reframe the conversation with new insights. Showing understanding and flexibility often leads to a win-win compromise. For instance, if a family member is reluctant to attend a gathering, explore options like adjusting the timing or aligning the event with something they enjoy. Willingness to adapt shows respect for their perspective and often opens doors to consensus.

These stages in the sales process offer valuable lessons for life. Whether you’re fostering relationships, navigating negotiations, or simply aiming to communicate effectively, remember these tips as tools for creating meaningful, cooperative interactions that lead to mutually satisfying outcomes.

 

Why You May Need a Marketing Coach in 2024

The Purpose of a Coach

Let’s start by understanding the role of a coach. Traditionally, a coach is someone who trains, instructs, and, crucially, motivates individuals to perform at their best—whether they’re athletes, musicians, or actors. However, the role goes even deeper. The most successful coaches are known for their ability to see the bigger picture and guide their players from a vantage point outside the immediate action. They observe, advise, motivate, and keep their teams accountable, which is why their presence is indispensable for high-level success.

In athletics, a coach watches the game from the sidelines, analyzing everything that unfolds. They see opportunities and potential improvements that players might miss in the heat of the moment. They know when to encourage harder effort, refine a skill, or boost teamwork. Even the best athletes need this external perspective to stay aligned with team goals, refine their techniques, and adapt to new strategies. This principle of coaching—providing insight, motivation, and accountability—applies just as much in business as it does in sports.

What a Marketing Coach Brings to Your Business

A marketing coach serves a similar function in your business journey. They assess your current marketing strategies, identify gaps, and recommend tactics tailored to your business needs. As an outsider, a marketing coach has the advantage of an objective perspective. They can help you spot areas for growth and untapped opportunities that might be overlooked by someone deep in daily operations.

One of the most valuable things a marketing coach brings is knowledge of best practices. They stay updated on the latest trends, tools, and strategies in the industry, helping you apply these insights to your business in ways that can boost your revenue. By working with a marketing coach, you gain access to industry insights that are hard to acquire independently.

A coach is also there to ensure that good habits stick. During my own sales management and coaching experience, I noticed that people often fall back into comfortable habits even when new techniques drive better results. Change is challenging, but a coach provides accountability, helping you reinforce and sustain positive changes in your marketing approach.

Finally, a marketing coach can give you all of this in a very flexible timeframe. Even a few hours per month can lead to significant improvements, making coaching an affordable yet impactful investment for your business.

In Conclusion

Just as athletes need a coach to reach peak performance, businesses can benefit enormously from the guidance of a marketing coach. Whether it’s motivation, accountability, fresh perspectives, or up-to-date expertise, a marketing coach provides support that can translate directly to increased revenue and a stronger market presence. If you’re ready to take your business to the next level, consider how a marketing coach can help you get there.

 

4 Essential Steps to Achieve Success with Digital and Social Media Marketing for Small Businesses

Over the years, digital and social media marketing have become indispensable for small businesses, but it’s crucial to understand that genuine success takes time. While some businesses may experience “overnight success,” that’s often the result of a unique product, viral content, or a new solution that captures immediate attention. For most small business owners, especially those in B2B, success requires a consistent and strategic approach.

Here are four updated steps to enhance your online marketing efforts:

1. Optimize Your Website as Your Primary Sales Tool

Your website is often the first impression customers have of your business, so it needs to communicate your brand effectively. Ensure that it’s optimized not only for search engines but also for user experience on all devices, including mobile. Strong web content that clearly presents your offerings and a compelling call to action can make all the difference. Emphasize website speed, accessibility, and visual appeal. Regularly update your content to stay relevant and keep visitors engaged.

2. Invest Wisely in Paid Advertising (PPC and Social Media Ads)

Paid advertising, such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and social media ads, remains a powerful way to generate traffic quickly, even on a modest budget. Consider using platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager to reach targeted audiences. Be mindful of your budget and optimize your campaigns by refining keywords, targeting the right demographics, and tracking performance metrics. Success with paid ads depends on clear messaging, a strong call to action, and offers that genuinely resonate with your audience.

3. Leverage Social Media with a Strategic Content Plan

Social media is invaluable for building brand awareness, credibility, and engagement, but consistency and quality are key. Create a content calendar that combines educational, informative, and entertaining posts with subtle promotional messages. Use a blend of videos, infographics, and blog shares to keep your audience engaged. Respond to comments and messages promptly and use analytics tools to gauge what’s working. Build connections with other thought leaders, and consider collaborations to expand your reach.

4. Embrace Blogging and Content Creation to Drive Organic Traffic

Blogging is still one of the best ways to establish authority and drive traffic organically. By sharing valuable insights, you build trust with your audience and improve SEO. Each blog post serves as a potential landing page, attracting visitors through search engines. Don’t feel pressured to write everything yourself; outsourcing to skilled writers can ensure a steady stream of quality content. Beyond blogs, consider other forms of content like videos, podcasts, and case studies to appeal to different audience preferences.

By following these steps consistently, small business owners can build a lasting digital presence and drive measurable results. Let us know your thoughts and any other strategies that have worked for you!

 

Webinars and thought leadership: Are you providing valuable information, or just giving a sales demo?

Thought leadership is a term that is often used but, frankly, when I look at blogs, and attend webinars it seems to me that thought leadership is a term that is not well understood. That is odd because thought leadership is self defining. Establishing one's company as a thought leader shows that the company can and will provide valuable content free of charge.

Thought leadership is all about creating, providing, and publishing very valuable content about a specific area of business that others will benefit from and appreciate. The key is providing it free with very few strings attached. This should be true of your webinars as well. Webinars are in reality web-seminars and seminars should provide valuable content that your prospects can use.

If you start thinking of webinars as funnel builders that nurture prospects closer to being buyers you will then have embraced the proper intent for doing them. Here is the payoff: If you really provide valuable information in a way that appears that you are not looking for a sale in return you make the prospect feel as though they can trust you to help and be helpful to them. This will build up a generous amount of good-will and will translate into  the prospect being willing to receive email, news-letters and warm calls. Providing valuable free content is a very sound way of building a lasting rapport.

Think of the amount of times you have attended a webinar only to have it end up seeming like a sales demo. You are not very likely to attend another in the future are you. What's the old saying? "fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me.

Time is a very valuable commodity and you should realize that people are inundated with cold calls, email, and snail mail. They are on guard of their time and they don't often like intruders. If you get a director or an executive on the phone these days you are lucky to get a minute and a half of their time. You have thirty seconds to get their attention. Believe me I know. I work on the phones as an outbound marketing consultant a lot. In some cases cold calling is really the only answer for quick results.

What I am sharing here is a form of consultative selling whereby you establish yourself as a trusted thought leader that can nurture prospects and over the long run gain a larger chunk of their valuable time.

When is the time to begin? the answer is right now. The sooner the better. But realize that you are doing work that will yield rewards much later on. Let's give webinars a good name. Let's make them something that people are really interested in attending.

Small Business Branding; Making your new start-up known

You have a great idea. You perform a needed service reliably and inexpensively. You make the best pizza in your town. You can save companies a great deal of money on maintenance. This list could go on and on. One of the challenges of starting a new business, introducing a new product, offering a better, cheaper, more convenient, way of doing things is being unknown. If people cannot find you, do not know what you do, do not know if they can trust you, then you will not be successful in starting a business. You must have revenue to survive, and that comes from having clients or customers.

In this post I want to help you think about your planning as you consider starting a business. Many entrepreneurs are very good at a specific skill but may not have marketing skills. Added to the problem is the fact that Marketing is changing greatly and has changed at this time in business history. One has to consider questions like do I want to do outbound marketing or inbound marketing? What is the cost of each way of marketing my product or service?  What will drive the most potential customers to my business the fastest? What do I need for outbound marketing? What do I need to do inbound marketing?

Let me take a minute to explain the difference. Outbound marketing is traditional marketing that has been done for years. It is distributing flyers, making cold calls, sending out mailers, putting an ad in the yellow pages or a paper. The problem with this is that as the years move on these kinds of marketing efforts become less and less successful. Buyers, whether consumers or businesses are more sophisticated and a lot less tolerant of outbound methods of marketing. There is a do not call list for consumers and violating it can be expensive.

On the other hand, inbound marketing uses the internet, networking groups, word of mouth, email and it all starts with providing valuable content. Websites, blogs, social media can bring customers to you if you provide them with content that they want. The content can be in the form of blog articles, e-books, and whitepapers. What matters most is that it is content that will be helpful to people and will establish you as a though leader in your field. The way it works is content will bring people to your website and when there they can find out what products you sell or what services you offer. If over time you have provided great content you will find that potential customers begin to trust and respect you and all the while you are building your brand.

The drawback to inbound marketing is that it takes time. You cannot establish yourself as a thought leader in a short period of time. It has to be over time that this naturally takes place. Start-ups often do not have the luxury of time. Therefore they are forced to do some type of outbound marketing.

The best way to do outbound marketing is phone, flyers and mailings. It does take time and tenacity and is not for the faint of heart, but if you do it diligently it will produce fruit. I think that the best approach for a new business is to have a strategy that includes both inbound and outbound marketing. If you do both you will achieve two ends. One, you will get more clients, customers and thus revenue right away and two, you will begin the kind of activities that will drive customers to you over the long run.

You can find help with both from rijMarketing

Making and Measuring the Business Case for Social Media Marketing in 2010

Social media marketing is here to stay and, is gaining ground these days. The New Year will see a continuing increase in the use of social media marketing tactics and strategies. One of the frequent questions I hear about social media marketing from a variety of sources is how do you measure its effectiveness?

Demand Metric has developed several tools designed to do exactly this. Whether you are a marketing person trying to develop a business case to implement or expand your social media strategy, a business owner attempting to put together a RFP for social media consulting or, a marketing executive trying to develop a job description for a social media marketing manager, they have developed the time saving tools specifically for you.


 I really like the Social Media Readiness Assessment. It is an already prepared Excel spreadsheet with five tabs, instructions, weighting, self assessment, results and, recommendations. The formula’s are built in so that all you have to do is put in your evaluations on a scale of 1-5 and it will flow from tab to tab. It makes a series of statements like;” Senior Management is interested in leveraging Social Media as a new marketing channel.” You then can score that statement on the 1-5 scale 1 being strongly disagree to 5 being strongly agree. The recommendation tab gives actionable solutions to improving the score in a specific area. For example, if senior management is found to be not interested in leveraging social media then the recommendation is to “obtain survey results to help analyze senior management’s lack of social media sponsorship.”

The following is a list of the types of social media metric tools that they have available:

• Social Media Business Case Template
• Social Media Channel Map
• Social Media Posting Schedule
• Social Media Strategy Scorecard
• Social Media Policy and Guidelines Template

They have more than these few and they also have how to guides and other templates.


These templates are another indication of the growing interest in social media marketing within all businesses today. I know that these templates and tools are developed because one of their clients had a need for it. This points to the fact that more and more companies are pursuing social media marketing. Once the templates are built, they can be rebranded and used by a variety of companies. These templates are available for a reasonably priced annual subscription and member clients have access to all of the templates and tools they have developed and the number is well over 250 and growing.
I appreciate any comments or questions so feel free to interact or email me. I will get back to you for sure.

Examine your marketing strategies for 2010; Excellent food for thought!

Marketing should be the focus of everything you do in 2010. In fact, it should be the focus of everything you do in your business all the time. Properly done, marketing is a fine tuned cycle that perpetuates your revenue. I am amazed when ever I find small business people and entrepreneurs that do not see the value of marketing and, all too often it seems to me that many see it as advertising and sales only. This is not the case. Marketing should be the focus of every business action you take.

Target Customer and Product/Services Research

Ongoing research of prospective customers, clients and potential products or services is paramount to business success. You should be testing and researching all the time. One of the best ways is to ask questions of your current customer base or clientele. You would be surprised what current customers will tell you and how much value it has for marketing your business. You can find new products or services to offer by using this kind of research. Also, you can find how to position your product or service by researching your competition. Find something that they are not doing or offering that you can do or offer and differentiate on that. 2010 is the perfect year to begin this project.

Product or Service Development, Packaging and Pricing

You should always be on the lookout for products or services that you can offer. This can be an important part of your market research. You can bundle services together at a reduced price to offer special packages for your customers. This is as much a part of the marketing process as advertising and yet, so often people only think of advertising strategies w they think of marketing. This kind of research can be done with your existing customers. They can be very helpful in helping you decide packaging and pricing. How will this affect your overall business and revenue in 2010?

Advertising Promotion and PR

Advertising is a place where companies can give much thought to the strategies and tactics that will be used this year. What has worked in the past and is there an apparent change in how it is working? These are a couple of key questions that business owners and entrepreneurs should be asking this year. Is this perhaps the time to either begin or increase social media marketing? Is this the year to start a corporate or business blog? What about using LinkedIn face book and twitter? This is a great time to begin to strategize concerning social media.

Sales and Distribution

How will sales and distribution differ if at all this year? Is this the year to build a new website or, to increase SEO on a current website? Are you planning to expand your bricks and mortar location? Would this be a good year to start developing channel partners? The list goes on and on.

Customer Service

Last but not least, in this new year, re-commit to your high standard or, improve your customer service. Remember, it costs a lot more money to acquire a new client or customer than it does to keep one you already have.  Think about ways that you can improve your customer service in the upcoming year and make sure that you stay on top of the marketing cycle, taking in all of its facets.