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Selling Sands to the Arabs or Selling Ice to the Eskimos?

Note: The next Selling Sans to the Arabs is on 23 Feb 2018 Friday 9 am to 12.30 pm, details at here.

Imagine me at the North Pole to perform the world's most difficult task: Sell Ice to the Eskimos.  The Eskimos have too much ice, why would they want to buy ice from a guy from Equator Singapore?

 But I know that I can easily sell ice to the Eskimos because I am not selling anything. I am just creating the conditions and leading the buyers to buy. Selling is not about convincing buyers to buy but let the buyers be convinced by themselves.  This is in line with Sun Tzu Art of War: Win Without Fighting.

 Hardly anyone is ready to buy what you want to sell  Often you have to sell when people don't see the need at all.  When WeChat was launched in Jan 2011, no one can imagine that people want to use WeChat when Whatsapp was so popular and successful as a messaging app. But today WeChat has become an indispensable tool for payments, marketing, search, messaging and brand building.  Some people now say that Tencent has managed to sell ice to the Eskimos!  The 5 Steps to Sell Ice to the Eskimos are:
  1. Define Your Customer - who are they? Many times the customer is not obvious, like in WeChat.  Who is the customer - the corporates paying advertising dollars or the laymen that use WeChat daily for watching movies and did not pay a single cent?  
  2. Define Your Defined Customer's Needs.  Like I know the Eskimos need lots of warmth and sunshine
  3. Propose a Solution that Meets their Needs and Satisfies their Wants.  My solution to the Eskimos is a free one-week stay with all meals, transport, sightseeing and accommodation in the sunny island of Singapore!
  4. Connect with the customer Emotionally so that they feel like a hero. With that, you will have closed the sale automatically.  
  5. Give them a 2nd Helping. This last step is to create regular customers.  Like I can create a membership for Eskimos where they can have a yearly free holiday in Singapore with all expenses (except airfare) paid.  The cost?  They have to buy ice from me!
By Andy Ng from Asia Trainers.  This article is copyleft, meaning you are free to copy and use it anywhere as long as you quote me as the author.  No permission is required.  Happy copying!  Related articles:
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