Often businesses focus on the bottom line when trying to gain leads that turn to active sales of products or services offered by the business. This is the wrong way of looking at gathering business, the best way is to take a customer focused approach which requires that we seek needs instead of seeking clients. When we seek clients we tend to impress upon a candidate a possibly false sense of need for our products or services, when this is done we are being disingenuous and are not customer focused but are self focused and this doesn't maximize long term returns. In the event that after the sale the client determines that our offering does not mesh with their processes as was promised they will keep this in mind and be sure to warn their friends who could be potential clients about your non customer focused tactics. The best way to ensure that right sale after the pitch is to be 100% honest about how our product or service can be useful to the prospective client by isolating if they have a true need for our businesses services. This involves actually caring enough about the client to find out how their business works and to determine if adoption of our product or service can make those processes more cost effective and over all more efficient. So when dealing with potential customers always seek to determine their need for your service or product and if it doesn't exist, provide them with the honest truth of that fact... by doing this you will gain the respect of yet another business that through its contacts and clients may bring you potential clients whose needs your business can serve perfectly. Sales is about both getting the deal now from those that need your services and delaying services from others later by proxy of those who did not need your services but remembered the fact that you took the time and effort to tell them the truth about that fact in your interactions with them. This is how a good business builds long term interest and ensures steady growth.
As the US economy continues to suffer the doldrums of stagnant investment in many industries, belt tightening budgets in many of the largest cities and continuous rounds of lay offs at some of the oldest of corporations, it is little comfort to those suffering through economic problems that what is happening now, has happened before. True, the severity of the downturn might have been different but the common factors of people and businesses being forced to do more with less is the theme of the times. Like environmental shocks to an ecosystem, stresses to the economic system lead to people hunkering down to last the storm, but it is instructive to realize that during the storm, all that idle time in the shelter affords people the ability to solve previous or existing problems. Likewise, economic downturns enable enterprising individuals and corporations the ability to make bold decisions with regard to marketing , sales or product focus that can lead to incredible gains as the economic
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