In order to ensure that your company remains a going concern, you must master every sales tool possible. If you do not, you may still sell; but it will only be to those precious few customers who buy your product or purchase your services because they are curious – not because you have successfully sold to them.
If that’s the case, your abysmal sales pitch and market positioning will not entice them to come back for seconds, even if your product is good. Bona fide selling occurs your positioning and sales pitch successfully enhances the public’s view of your product. The end result is that one sees a great product when it is only good, and they return for another purchase – and another, and another. Through this process, the customer becomes loyal.
Loyal customers require little to no effort to sell to in the future, because they trust you enough to take you at your word. What should you learn from this? When you plant trust, you get loyalty. And when you get loyalty, you get more business. But in order to achieve this loyalty, you must first get trust. How do you go about winning the trust of your potential customers?
In a word: authority. Authority comes from the Latin word auctoritas, which means opinion, decision or power. Authority is comprised of three facets that form the whole: knowledge, authenticity and consistency.
Knowledge is understood. It is having all information relevant to your field at the fore of your brain. Were someone to wake you from a deep sleep to question you on your field, you could answer them without effort. If someone spoke of a topic only related to your field, you would explicate that relation and add onto the topic he or she spoke of with knowledge of your field. If someone asked you to expand on an area in your field that no one knew of yet, you would sit him down and give him some words that would leave him with the satisfaction of knowing all in that area.
Authenticity is simply being true, especially to yourself. For example, if there’s an opinion in your field that you disagree with, but you know that appearing to accept it will earn you money, agreeing with it would be inauthentic. You will eventually slip up, and your potential customers will detect it. They will leave you, because you have become to them yet another “authority” who will lie when there’s a whiff of money. Being truthful in those times will be hard, but it is helpful in the long run.
Consistency means having a learned viewpoint and never diverging from it. Or, when new knowledge emerges that affects your perspective, you explain to your audience why you changed. For consistency’s sake, you must also align your words and your actions.
These three – knowledge, authenticity, and consistency – can be used to gain authority. This authority will lead to customers, customers to loyalty, and loyalty to larger profits. Following this path, you will reach success.