Your ability to sell in a VUCA world is your ability to scale your career and business
In a VUCA world we are living in, our senses and nervous system are constantly stretched and stimulated with changes. Compared now to a few months back, you would probably see that demands & complexity are increasing. New trends & needs are arising with uncertainty. Business conditions & the sentiments of people are so much different.
In short, nothing gets moving without a shift of worldviews, visceral and experiential transformation, which is driving everything else that we do, especially in this VUCA world.
There are two major reasons many professionals and business owners are stuck in the new normal of VUCA.
ONE is their resistance to selling.
Selling is not about getting people to buy what you have; whether it is your idea, message, product or service. It is not a mere transaction or exchange.
Selling is about facilitating a process of transformation, by first getting people on board a journey of change and growth.
Think of it this way, when you cannot get people onboard with you towards a direction or outcome for a better future, everything stops there. It doesn’t matter how great your solution, idea, opportunity, product or service is.
There is another major benefit for your ability to sell which I'll cover in the next segment, so read on.
The second major reason professionals find themselves stuck in their career is their inability to help other people grow.
On an individual level, equipping oneself with versatile coaching capabilities enables you to serve your clients or stakeholders with resourcefulness as they go through different life stages or changes in their career. When you grow with your clients or stakeholders in your professional journey, they would entrust you with serving their network in forms of referrals or help strengthen your professional reputation, enabling you to scale your career expertise.
Many successful people come to a point in their career or business that they are so good at what they do. The problem is, no one else can replicate their success. So one day when they move on, everything dies with them. They hit their plateau. There's where they build teams in their career.
For grooming a team, developing coaching skills is the key to overcome this professional bottleneck. It empowers a team of people to express their fullest potential to ensure continuing success - a critical component for promotion, leadership and scaling the business.
We will cover more on coaching in a separate article.
To scale your career or business, both selling and coaching need to work hand in hand.
In this article, I’ll expand more on selling and the most critical selling paradigm to master. To grow your career, whether or not you are in the sales industry, you wouldn’t want to miss this and the upcoming series.
The most important selling ability everyone should master
In the desperation to achieve results, many people resort to tasks, systems, techniques or their habitual routine, hoping that those approaches will bring them the results they need. What that brings is a transaction, devoid of a human touch.
Thus, the most critical ability in selling is to develop your BEING-ness in delivering an extraordinary human experience. Sales, from this perspective, then becomes a vital life skill as a human BEING, not human doing, nor human thinking.
To be effective, excellent, and value adding in your role that comes from your being, whether or not as a sales professional, one needs to have a dynamic IQ-EQ (mental-emotional) connection.
One who has high IQ but low EQ, is good at analysing and relating to information, but may lack the ability to read people, to connect, to pace & lead them effectively. One who has high EQ but low IQ capacity, is good at having rapport with people, but may not be good at communicating wise strategies to help their stakeholders or clients make well-informed decisions.
When one integrates their mental and emotional ability, they become versatile at presenting vital benefits that are relevant, useful and contextualised to people’s emotional needs. Selling with a well-developed mental-emotional capacity creates an irresistible buy-in.
By mastering mental and emotional abilities to connect, he or she gains trust from others who believe that their lives will change because of his or her presence.
For sales professionals especially, a major bottleneck and challenge they face is this: how to deepen their relationships with their clients/customers?
A primary factor that kills their sales performance is having an increasing number of clients dropping out along the way in the journey of business. Either they move on to other competitors or stop continuing the services for some other reasons. In such cases, you can be doing well in getting the sales numbers but after a few months, you have a significant number of them asking for refunds or cancelling the services.
To deal with that, most companies think of "retaining" their clients as a strategy. But what that creates is a culture of scarcity - fear of losing people or business. Usually, it is a tactical fight-or-flight situation where companies resort to price wars, incentives, better product features and so on. But they lack the human qualities for people to stay on.
When you sell with a well-developed mental-emotional capacity, you create a nurturing deep relationship with your clients, which inspires them to keep coming back for more. We are now shifting from a material-based economy to an intangible-based economy. People today want to invest more on intangible benefits such as personalisation, empowerment, growth and areas that shape their personal identities. These are some deeper motivations your clients want to stay on and be part of! Here is a list of some examples of intangible benefits and value people want to invest in.
With a well-developed mental-emotional capacity, you are in a strong position to deliver value!
In order to create a deep positive impression in others, build long-lasting mutual trust and an excellent reputation, work on developing your being in selling as a whole human, not as a job.
Remember, by continuing to stay in your field of work on what's expected, you'll soon be 'outsold' by the VUCA conditions.
So start tapping your potential and SELLING as a whole human to lead your career or business forward in disruptive times.
I’ll expand on transformative selling skills in the next series. So let’s hear from you. What are the challenges you face in selling your capabilities, ideas, products or services?
To hone your ability to sell from a space of authenticity and alignment with your values, coming from your heart that gets extraordinary results, get in touch with me at (+65) 8186 7508
