If Vacuum Cleaner Sales People No Longer Exist How The Hell Do They Sell Vacuums?

Ask Dyson or Roomba.

You don’t sell by selling anymore, you sell by doing something different.

Different enough to get someone to talk about you. That’s it. Not different to be goofy, no, different to be top-of-mind in your market space. That spot is left to the most innovative companies in the world, and you can do it too.

Vacuum cleaner sales people no longer exist. At one time what a great profession! Think about it, you choose your own hours, you get exercise while working, you get to meet new people all the time and you choose how much money to make. Based on the amount of hours you put in, you can make a lot in a very little amount of time.

You can see why many people went into this profession, good wages, fun work, what more could you ask for. The better you could manipulate sell people on a vacuum, the more money you were to make. The problem is that way of thinking doesn’t work anymore.

You can’t manipulate people into buying your product. 

Sales has always been one of the most valuable jobs in a company. Without sales you don’t grow, if you make a lot of sales you grow a lot! But relying solely on a “sales process” is completely flawed in 2017 and beyond. Sales as we know it will do a complete 180 degree shift.

Focus on the innovators and early adopters.

In a now famous Ted Talk, called How Ideas Spread by Seth Godin, talks about the “idea diffusion curve”. The bell curve that categorizes where all consumers are in regards to their purchasing patterns. From Innovators, to early adopters, to early majority, late majority, and lastly laggards. Seth’s pitch is that there are too many competitors trying to get your attention to focus on a mass amount of people to market to. Instead you’re better to focus on the Innovators and get them to talk about your product.

The shift from push to pull marketing.

• Instead of pushing your product on your audience you’re now going to pull in the attention of your audience and find out what they want in a product.
• Don’t sell me, intrigue me.
• People have too much access to information. It’s hard to sell me something I’m not already in the market for.
• If you do succeed in “selling” somebody something they don’t want, they can now tell the world about their post purchase disappointment. Word-of-mouth online spreads fast, you want customers who love your products.  
• Better focus on being a unique offering in your market, unique enough people want to talk about you
    

If it were up to you and you could do anything you want, would you hire door to door sales people? If not, what would you do? What’s the opposite of direct sales? How could you provide so much value and create so much demand that people show up on your door step waiting for the chance to buy?