To Sell is Human: Selling is Moving People

To sell is human and everyone is a salesperson, because selling is about not selling but moving people. Most people are in non-sales selling, that is, they are not defined as salesperson but their job involves communicating, influencing and persuading people. We call these Moving People.

Moving People is not about getting your way with others but helping others to get their way. And when others get their way, you'll get your way too.

Moving people is not about how much conviction you have but about conveying your conviction to people.

Moving people depends more on the creative, heuristic, problem-finding skills than the reductive, algorithmic, problem-solving skills.

From Caveat Emptor to Caveat Venditor. We've moved from a world of cavet emptor (buyer beware) to caveat venditor (vendor beware). This is because of the information age we're living right now, buyers have more information than vendors and thus buyers will mislead vendors more often than the other way round.

Finally, one of the fastest way to Move People is to let them know of their challenges that they themselves are not aware of. Better still, solve the challenge for them. This will surely move people.

By Andy Ng of Asia Trainers, whose courses on Sales Power, How to Close Every Sale, Selling Ice to the Eskimos, Successful Selling Strategies and Sales Success System have created many tangible benefits for companies in 13 countries.

Comments

What an Executive Coach and Business Coach Does

The Secret Under the Mattress: Why would a 79-year Man Bet So Big on 4D?

It was 2007 when we discovered his secret. While moving my father’s mattress, we found them: heaps and heaps of Singapore Pools 4D tickets. They were stacked in layers, a paper trail of lost hopes. What shocked us most wasn’t just the volume, but the stakes. He wasn’t betting a few dollars for fun. He was punting hundreds of dollars per draw—nearly ten times a month. At the time, my siblings and I were furious. Our father was a 79-year-old retiree. We wondered, with a mix of anger and confusion, why a man at his stage of life would need to win such "big money." What was he going to do with the money? We saw it as a reckless habit, a sign of poor judgment in his final years. Some of us would say, "If I were to give him money to buy 4D, why don't I use the money and buy 4D myself? At least I have better discipline". It has taken me two decades, and the experience of raising my own three grown-up children, to finally see the truth that was hidden under that matt...

Head Bleeding when the Chair Falls

The Weight of Silence: What Were We Really Arguing About? My earliest memories are punctuated by the sound of shouting. In 1970, when I was barely 6 years old, I stood as a small witness to the fierce quarrels between my father and my late eldest brother Kah Yang (he passed away in 1971 at the age of 17). As I grew up, these contradictions became the soundtrack of our lives, usually centered around our family's shoe shop and clothing stalls in Chinatown. In the court of family opinion, the verdict was almost always the same: my father was "wrong." He was judged as a man who didn't fulfill his role, who wasn't "burdening" enough for the family’s success. But as I look back from the vantage point of 2026, I have to ask: Was that actually true? Let me finally put to rest what my father did right: the truths that were buried under decades of criticism: Unseen Labor: He worked grueling, long hours. I remember him hauling boxes of goods and equipment to set u...

Business and Money Tips

Search This Blog