Every day of your life you are selling yourself, nothing
will happen until you're successful at doing that.

We're all in the selling business whether we like it or not.
It doesn't matter whether you're a lawyer or an accountant,
a manager or a politician, an engineer or a doctor. We all
spend a great deal of our time trying to persuade people to
buy our product or service, accept our proposals or merely
accept what we say.

I've been hearing for years that a successful business needs
to have a USP (unique sales point). The problem is that most
businesses find difficulty in identifying what their USP is.
And even if they have a USP, eventually they find their
competitors doing the same thing.

Do you know what one of the key secrets of success is - what makes people successful in business, sport or any other aspect of their lives? Let me come back to that in a minute.

Ever since I discovered that I wasn't invincible and that my body would fall apart over time, I've been a member of a gym. I've attended regularly over the past fifteen years and my body deterioration is almost being kept in check.

However I've always noticed a lot of new faces at the gym, some of which seem to disappear over a short period of time. Most gyms and health clubs have a high turnover of members or "churn" as the marketing people like to call it. One club I know of loses around fifty members a month and has to work hard to sign up that number just for the business to stand still.

I'm regularly asked to speak to people, that have either just started a business or have been going for some time. So many of these people are absolutely brilliant at working "in their business" but not so good at working "on their business" In other words; they're good at making the product or providing the service but they're not so good at finding new customers and generating more sales.

Like them, you may not be too keen on making cold calls and selling your product or service but you DO need new customers and lots of them. You might be thinking - "I have customers and as long as I keep them happy things will be okay." However, I hate to tell you - but no matter how good your product or your service is, you will lose customers. They'll either leave the area; they'll die, they'll go out of business themselves or just decide to deal with somebody else. So you need to find new customers just to stand still.

If you've ever flown economy class on an international flight then you've probably noticed that the airline makes you walk through Business or First Class to get to your economy seat. You become very much aware of the wider isles, the more spacious, comfortable seats and the greater leg room.

As you squeeze into your "cattle class" seat you wish you were in front of that curtain enjoying the better food and the extra service. The airlines do this deliberately; they want you to wish you were in Business or First Class.

Only 20% of the aircraft is reserved for "big comfy seat class" however, that 20% contributes 80% of the profits.

A few months ago I spent time training some telephone sales agents who were new to selling. They'd mainly been involved with handling incoming calls but now their company needed them to do some out bound sales calls. I spent two days running a sales workshop for them and another three days coaching them on the job.

The biggest challenge I had was trying to stop them selling. Or at least their idea of what selling is all about.

Many people who are new to sales and also some experienced sales people want to keep talking about their product or service. They open the conversation with one or two general questions which are often irrelevant to the customer and then launch into their sales spiel.