I just wanted to talk about an interesting difference between a “hard sale” and a “soft sale“.  These are important business terms and useful strategies to know and understand.

A hard sale is very aggressive and “in your face”.  The whole point is trying to sell something.  You just keep explaining why your product is good and why the person should buy it now.

A soft sale technique is quite different.  You try to build trust and build a relationship with a person.  You don’t put pressure on them to buy something and you just recommend a product and let the person make their own decisions.

Both of these can work.  I personally prefer using soft sale strategies.  I like it because it seems friendlier and I like to let people make up their own minds.  If you have a good product and can build trust, a soft sale technique should work well.  Friends recommending products to other friends is a little bit like doing soft selling.  The friend doesn’t really care if someone else buys the product.  They are just giving their honest opinions and trying to be helpful.

I sell a product that does really well online.  I have used both hard and soft sales strategies.  The soft strategies work better and make for happier customers.  But that is just my experience.  I think it depends on the type of customer and the type of product.

I make an online spoken English course that sells very well.  I’ve sold over 8000 of these last year.  Some people buy immediately after looking at the site but I truly believe that you should try out the free PDF ebook and make a decision later.  You can see some examples of both hard and soft selling together on the website.  The reason it looks a little fake (hard selling) is because Google finds that type of writing style more easily.  I’d prefer to use a different writing style on the website but I have no choice or no one would find it.  Anyway, it should be interesting to take a look at my website for my spoken English course to understand some of these sales strategies.

Product placement is an advanced marketing strategy.  A lot of consumers often hate watching commercials.  They know the companies are trying to sell them something so it’s a time when people get up and go to the bathroom.

If a company is trying to introduce a product, they may pay a TV show to get one of the “cool” actors to use the product during the show.  People often don’t realize what is going on but this is a very powerful tool to get people to change their opinions and buying behavior.  If you watch a lot of American TV dramas, you may notice a lot of the actors and actresses use and Apple computer.  I was watching a show today and I noticed that the people were doing a search on Microsoft’s new search engine “Bing”.  You may also see many actors drinking a Coke during the show.

It’s not always true that companies pay for this kind of advertising, but it’s often the case.  It’s a very interesting and subtle strategy.  Watch TV and movies carefully and see if you can notice examples of this.

I highly recommend this program if you want to learn business English fast

It’s great for ESL teachers as well as students who want to learn a super high level of English.

It’s important to have a trusting relationship when doing sales of any kind.  It’s even more important if you want to do international sales.

Think about it.  Trust is a hard thing to find in the business world.  Everyone is trying to sell you something and no one knows who to believe.  You would certainly take a recommendation from a friend far more seriously than you would take a television commercial on TV.  We know our friends care about us and that company on TV just wants to sell us something.

In international business relations, trust becomes even more important because one thing true about human nature is that we trust people from other countries even less than we trust people from our own.  We have language and cultural differences.  Our way of thinking is different.

It is important that we build what is called “rapport” with our clients.  “Rapport” is kind of a fancy word for trust and mutual understanding.  We need to show them that we are different than the competition and we can be trusted.  Trust takes time to build.  You need to always be honest with your clients and really respect them as people.  You want to make sure you only recommend products to them that you truly believe they would want.
Even if you can trick someone and get a few sales, this is a terrible strategy in the long run.  You will get a bad reputation and people won’t want to buy from you again.  Be honest and upfront.  Tell your customer about your product’s weaknesses.  They will find out anyway.  Help them in anyway you can and they will keep coming back.  It’s pretty simple, if they believe you, they will consider buying from you.  If they don’t, they won’t.