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.

There is a huge market for English as a second language and a lot of money to be made.  Unfortunately, this fact invites a lot of businesses into the market that offer poor quality courses in all areas of English.  Competition doesn’t always bring high quality.  Often it brings good marketers and sales people.  I don’t want to mention any particular names, but some of the top English teaching schools in the world offer really terrible lessons.  Teachers aren’t paid that much money compared with other industries, so many foreign teachers are of low quality.  Also, most students buy mainly on brand image and a good “sales pitch” rather than focusing on quality.

The reason for this is simple:  Students don’t know how good a school really is.  They see advertisements, they read reviews (which are often fake) and they see what the school looks like.  Some of the more expensive schools have a nice looking brand, attractive staff, high quality computers, but a very poor program.  At first glance, everything looks great, but finally when it’s too late, the student realizes that they’ve wasted their money.

They might tell some friends about how bad their experience was, but the school can still make money by finding new students and repeating the process over and over with new advertisements and a slightly different “sales pitch”.  This makes sense from a business perspective but it leaves the world uneducated in English.  The reason I’m writing about this is that it’s important to understand how true this is and make use good judgement before buying anything.

I’ve spent years searching for the best English learning programs and I’d like to recommend the Best Online Spoken English Course I’ve seen.  It’s an amazing price and it will help your speaking and your understanding of international business.