Why are people writing about “soft selling” and “soft closes?” There’s no such thing. These folks must think that salespeople are pushy, in-your-face, push product, and don’t really care about the customer. Well, some are like that, and those people give sales a bad name. But most of us are better than that. Much better.
Good salespeople always have the best interests of their sales prospect in mind. They ask good questions, listen, probe for the real business issues, and are willing to walk away if they don’t have a solution that dramatically impacts the client.
Nothing’s really changed in sales—just some new names for sales pros.
Actually I use this term to mean the difference in the parts of the selling event. The ‘soft’ part is the relationship, the communications that goes on and can be entered in a CRM as historical information or followup to do with the contact. The ‘hard’ part is the transactional event, when a sale is made and the information is entered in the accounting system, the numbers.
Thank you for your excellent book ‘No More Cold Calling’. Finally that convinced my partner to implement your Referral-Selling System. I must have read it 3 times so far. We are starting this week to implement it.
I like your example on page 52, about a CRM company having a strategic alliance with a sales training company and I have started such an alliance and will be doing a seminar on CRM for their students starting in March.
My partner and I are also now members of two different BNI sections.
We are consultants and implements a CRM application to the self-employed and businesses.
I invite you to visit my blog about CRM that I have indicated in the website field.
Thanks again you have given us a great map for referral-selling and we are going to follow your directions.