In Sales? You’re A Business Owner!
No matter who you sell for,
you run a home business!
There’s no escaping the fact that no matter what you sell or who you work for, if you’re a sales professional, you’re also a small home-based business owner and operator.
I’m not talking about the waves of fly-by-night multi-level marketing quick-buck scammers out there. I’m talking about the millions of honest, sincere, hard-working professional sales reps who are fighting their way through this catastrophic economic mess we’re mired in.
Every morning you get up and get on your horse and make sales calls and visits and networking contacts. Every night you come home to run the business that supports your daily sales mission.
Neither your neighbors nor your dysfunctional in-laws can figure out why you need a home office to sell products or services for existing businesses. Why do you need to duplicate work?
Aaaaacht!
You tell them that selling is just part of the job and that the full sales function consists of 37,462 other tasks that you are required to do and that only you can do, like maintaining accurate CRM records, and expense and travel reports, and scheduling, and on and on.
In many cases, you need to be able to straddle opposite force-field careers, like entrepreneur and corporate rep, and salesperson and bill collector. (How much more opposite could these mindsets be?)
And it’s not just a matter of being a self-starter or having enough capital to support the administrative costs, as I heard some clearly ignorant bank commercial suggest today.
You need to be constantly on the alert to new product/service and market knowledge. You need to shore up your “non-business business” with the right kinds of input and advice and support services and marketing know-how . . . because you cannot any longer rely 100% on the company(ies) you represent to provide all this for you.
So now I’m going to complicate your life even more. If you’re a sales professional and you don’t have your own personal website, you are not making the most of your ambitions or your energy. You are not making the most of yourSELF, and you’re not helping yourself build or strengthen a meaningful reputation.
Why is this so important? Because you may leave or disengage from the company(ies) you sell for, but you will always carry your reputation forward. Your reputation will create new and improved circumstances for you whether you stay where you are or go to the greener grass. Your reputation is what people use to size you up and judge your integrity.
A personal website is the best tool you can have toward those ends because it’s YOUR tool about YOU and not something that belongs to and is manipulated by others. Your website can feature your professional self as well as your personal self. It can give you a place to be yourself in a professional light.
Show off your family, your church, your sports and community interests, your hobbies and past-time interests, the vacation you took, the fish you caught, your dog. And you can write about it all with a free blog in your own words, as often as you like. It gives you a special tool to help you sell yourself (which is mostly what customers and prospects “buy” anyway.
Imagine a salesperson handing you a business card with her company and logo and contact info. and on the back, she hand-writes her personal website address. Do you think you’d check it out? Do you think you’d think that this person is pretty sharp? And, no, it doesn’t have to cost alot to get your own site up and started. It’s really just an issue of how professional you want to be.
www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US
Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. God Bless America.
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]
Make today a GREAT day for someone!
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