We’ve all heard that saying “”People love to buy, but hate to be sold,” right? Well, this applies across the board, even (and sometimes especially) in business to business sales.
We’ve seen this a lot even in the deal industry. Almost every time one of us at Daily Deal Builder goes out to dinner with our wives/girlfriends, or we visit other types of establishments, we like to talk to merchants. We ask them if they’ve run a daily deal. Many have, and so we ask them how it went and we get the full spectrum of responses, and it’s truly disappointing to hear any merchant say they had a poor experience simply because they were pushed into running a deal without the salesperson thoroughly explaining how everything works. This caused the merchant to oversell, or undersell, or not price their deal correctly, or in the worst case scenario caused a merchant to go out of business.
Now, for every merchant who voiced this complaint, I’d wager that there are another five merchants who turned down the deal site salesperson because they felt they were ‘being sold,’ or they declined to run another deal with that same salesperson.
This is the same problem we’ve all experienced with used car salesmen, or those people at malls that hose you down with cologne before you had a chance to politely decline. Half of the art of closing a deal is treating people well, and by that I mean take a minute to get to know the person before launching into your sales pitch; teach them something about their industry they might not have known. Make the merchant feel like even if they decline to accept your sales pitch they walked away from the meeting with you smarter and armed with more knowledge to better succeed in their industry. Then, when the day comes when they decide to run a deal, they’re going to remember you, and call you.
This is the same old information you find in any sales related industry, and I don’t really understand why in the deal industry ‘the sale’ is treated differently. It’s almost as though the salespeople for deal sites truly believe they are helping the merchant more than the merchant is helping them/the deal site. I for one say the opposite is true and it’s time to close more merchants in the deal industry selling them right!
