Sales is one of the most important business skills. It is showing a customer that you have something of value, and asking them to buy it from you.

Always Be Closing

The the most important part of any sales transaction, whether you are at a job interview or selling a product or service, is asking the customer to buy from you. Sales people call this the "close". If you want to sell, make sure you ask the them to hire you, or buy your product or service. There are so many ways to ask, just make it clear. Doesn’t it make sense that you will get something only if you ask? Most people only think about how they buy things. They see something they want or need, then they pay, and the transaction is complete. They expect the same when they try to sell something. What they don’t see is the behind the scenes things that people or businesses do to sell that product or service to you. They put a cash register right up front and center. This makes it clear that this is not a museum with nice things on display, but a store where you can buy those nice things. This is one of countless ways to ask a customer to buy your product.

Be careful not to "unsell"! Each time you explain a benefit, or other reasons the product you are selling is valuable to a customer, you should ask “is this reason good enough for you to buy my product/hire me?”. If not, ask why! You will be much more successful if you find out why the customer does not want your product… yet. Maybe they don’t have money, in which case you are wasting time. Maybe they just want to know if it has one specific feature, but after telling them about 100 other features you forget that very one they want to know about. When you ask your customer what they want, it is a lot easier to give it to them and get paid.

You probably heard that you will need to sell at some point in your life, whether it is selling products, or selling yourself to potential employers. Improving your sales skills is probably the fastest way to make more money. Your boss wants to keep costs down. Do you think he or she wants to give you a raise? If you just got a raise, then there is small chance the answer is yes. Most likely the reason is that it is part of your contract or they are trying to be a competitive so you don’t leave for another company. Maybe you were smart enough to show them how you are valuable and then asked for the raise. If you did not just get a raise, then that last point is what you should be doing.

I will be compiling information I write on business skills on my website, TheNetGen.com.

I was trying to think of something catchy that you could enjoy every time you came back to read posts on my blog.

I decided that I am going to include one application or cool programming trick in each post.  I will be back soon to edit this post and add my first cool programming trick.

update:

This is a small script I came up with so that a webpage can load ultra fast (no waiting for extra http requests and loading time for images), then you choose which images to display:

show image

-Frank Forte

About  a year ago, I came up with the idea of Signup7.com, where a simple ajax script would fill out forms for you, using the information you maintain on the one website. This is how it would work:

1) You register on Signup7.com

2) you keep your info up to date

3) any website that has the Signup7 script allows you to simply enter your username and password, and your information would automatically fill out their registration form. Those websites can also get up to date information from Signup7 automatically so you don’t have to worry about outdated information on those websites.

After reading Chris Sukornyk’s post about OpenId I started thinking about the idea of using one login across multiple websites again. This idea is backwards!  With websites like twitter, you no longer need to log into multiple websites to send your information across the internet. You post it once, and let those websites do the work of coming to get your information. Twitter allows you to tell people what you are doing. People can track what you are doing from their mobile devices, computers, and probably some other obscure places because twitter makes it easy for programmers to get that information and put it practically anywhere. (Why would you want everyone to know what you are doing??  There’s a lot of reasons, but I’ll save those for a future post. ) Where does RSS come in?  It is a method of presenting content so other programs can grab it and use it. This is the technology that will allow websites like twitter to flourish in the coming years.

Among other ideas I am working on, including www.bandmaking.com to find band members, savemymoney.ca, and countless others, I think I have a new idea that might hit the top of my priority list.  I’ll tell you about it in future posts.

-Frank