How to actually sell without selling (B2B)

We’re just hiring our 2nd operations manager for our project Localization Guru and I came across some people who would be excellent for sales or as account managers. When I told them that idea, I started to notice a terribly wrong pattern what people think about selling.

I don’t know how is it in your country but back here in Slovakia when you say “to sell” everybody suddenly imagine the sleek salesman in a suit who’s trying to sell you every sh*t that makes him few dollars into his pocket.

After being in the B2B (more likely P2P, person to person) sales for last 6–7 months as a co-founder, let me tell you what is terribly wrong with this thought.

Maybe you’ll argue that half a year is quite a no-experience to speak out, but with this approach, we’ve actually got 1000%+ month-to-month growth at the end of the year without any marketing or extensive sales effort. The other months were as good as 30%+ to 200%+ month-to-month revenues so I guess, we do something right.

So how exactly did we manage to do it?

It’s quite simple.. don’t push it and be a “real human” first. As we were talking (not only to) potential customers, we did listen first. We cared (but really, honestly cared) what he/she is doing, how is it going, what does he/she struggles with and then we try to provide some value first.

Don’t push it and be a “real human” first.

If we were talking to an account manager from some affiliate company, we tried to introduce her to the few contacts we got; or if was a company running a new marketing campaign we gave him a feedback on how do we like (or don’t like) the campaign idea and what would we do to make it better.

That’s certainly not a new approach. Before they used to call it “customer first” approach and Gary Vaynerchuk is also talking about it a lot. And it’s a bigger truth than you probably realise.

Now we still continue with such approach and it brought us even more value from different partnerships and synergies we’ve created even if it’s not our core business.

As we help more people, connect them to relevant business partners, distributors or customers, our business network spread really fast and so do amazing references. And that’s what drives our growth even more.

To get back to the point — to be a salesman does not mean to try to sell every sh*t in your sales portfolio but to deliver value first. Even if you can’t do any sale with that very person.

But if you put a real value into the relationship first, you’ll probably end up with more value that you’ve expected. Maybe not on that particular day or the day after, but the effect will get back to you.

I would like to hear your thoughts on this.. leave a note below.

If you like this article, consider upvoting it. It helps me create more content that you like.