Many people think product knowledge, motivation/self-improvement, and sales skills are all you need to increase sales. This is especially true of large organizations. Those things are the basic requirements for sales, yet not enough to increase sales.

If you’re in a service industry and you’re the business owner or a commission only sales person you must do one thing before you get the opportunity to practice your sales prowess and increase sales. That one thing is you have to market yourself to attract qualified prospects who reach out to you, and want to do business with you. But please don’t confuse traditional marketing with the way you need to market yourself.

Traditional marketing is nothing more than a costly ego trip. You have to use an approach to marketing that gets real leads entering your sales funnel, and pays for itself. If the attempts at marketing yourself you’re using now don’t pay for themselves then you know you’re using the wrong approach to marketing.

Your approach to marketing needs to produce results on a small scale and produce those results fast. You’ll never send out a mass mailing, run a TV or radio ad on a mass appeal program, or put ads in a general readership publication. All those things cost you big bucks and don’t produce the sales to pay for them.

You may have a bad attitude about marketing yourself just like you may have had a bad attitude about sales before you really understood what sales is. Sales isn’t about coercing and manipulating people it’s about helping them to buy. Marketing isn’t about products and ridiculous claims, it’s about helping the people that need you to find you and want to talk to you.

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Proudfoot Consulting reports that salespeople only spend 11% of their time actively selling! Just imagine what would happen to your sales if you were to increase that to 12% or even 15%. There are several reasons you actually spend so little time selling: administrative tasks, travel time, responding to existing clients, etc. However, the biggest reason you spend so little time selling is you lack people to sell to.

That isn’t to say you don’t make large time investments prospecting. It is to say that you aren’t getting the return on those investments that you should be. Your sales success starts long before the sales appointment, and that realization alone will help you to hold more sales appointments and spend more time selling.

The difference between hot water and boiling water is only one degree. The difference between the winner and the second loser in a race is only a fraction of a second. And the difference between spending large amounts of time trying to scrounge up an appointment, and spending less time getting more appointments is just two small steps. It’s the difference that comes from understanding that until you can market yourself and successfully produce qualified leads you’ll always fall short of the finish line.

In order to spend more time selling you need to spend time now developing a marketing system that provides the qualified leads you need to sell. Marketing is actually the first two steps in your sales process. The first step for marketing is getting the attention of the right prospects. The second step for marketing is getting those qualified prospects to reach out to you. Once you have a marketing system that consistently and predictably produces qualified prospects entering your sale funnel you can spend far more time actually selling.

Not only does your selling time increase, but so does your closing ratio. Why? Because you’re only meeting with people who want what you have, and they’ve already demonstrated they’re interested in buying now. During the sales conversation you just need to follow the buying/selling process to establish a relationship, and help them to buy what they want.

Enjoy the time and financial freedom you deserve: “7 Secrets Top Producers Know that You Can Put to Use in the Next 9 Days” [http://increasesalescoach.com/]

Get a daily boost to increase your sales: the blog for Top Producers and Future Top Producers [http://increasesalescoach.com/blog]