It’s easy to sell your bottled water if you have the only
bottled water stand in the middle of the desert.
What do you do when there is a bottled water stand every
mile? What about every 100 yards? Now, what if every bottled water stand in the
world were 2 feet in front of you, all in the same place?
Well, the strategy a lot of people take is one of price
competition.
“Buy from me because my bottled water costs less than that
guy’s!”
Another strategy is one using the quality argument.
“Buy from me because my bottled water is better than
everyone else’s!”
You could also use the branding method.
“Buy from me because you can trust that my company stands
behind its bottled water!”
Now take off the sales hat, and put on the consumer hat.
Who do you buy the bottled water from? Why did you make that
choice? What factors contributed to that choice?
Most of the time, we are told how consumers would choose our
bottled water over the “other guy’s”. Someone, somewhere, sat down with a lot
of analytics, focus groups, case studies, market research and a lot of other
people and decided that this way was the best (or at least most successful) way
to sell our bottled water.
They handed you a script and said, “Do this.”
If it doesn’t work, it’s easy to blame “those people”.
You did what “those people” said and it didn’t work.
Do you have a strategy? Do you have something that “works”?
Could your “something” work better than what “those people” handed to you?
Don’t be afraid to be different. The people that are the
most successful in this world did things differently. They tried new ideas.
They probably failed more then they succeeded. That’s how they became
successful.
In my automotive sales career, I did things differently. My sales managers hated that I did what I wanted. At the end of the day, however, it worked. I don’t know whether they were bothered more by the fact that I wasn’t doing what they told me to or by the fact that what I was doing was actually working.
How do you sell your water?
You better figure that out because every bottled water stand
in the world is, right now, 2 feet in front of the consumer’s face… and they’re
all only a mouse click away.
