People love to buy, but they hate being sold.

Originally published on WomenCentric

Alyse Hart

Alyse Hart comes by her sales skills naturally. Her father, uncles and grandfather were all successful salesman — all without using a hard sell. In fact, Hart says of her father, “I didn’t even know he was in sales. I just thought he talked to everybody.”

She used the techniques she learned working during summers for her dad, a manufacturer’s representative for several lines of kids’ clothing, to become a million-dollar producer for a magazine group. Eventually, she started teaching women colleagues how to sell, then left the corporate world to become a coach and founded her company, Sell It Like a Woman.

Hart, however, has learned that life needs balance. She uses drumming and dancing to center herself, dissipate her nervous energy and as an alternative to meditation. The dance she does is called “conscious movement.” “You just do what feels good to you. Eventually, it becomes very genuine.” She also participates in a drum circle. There, too, she says, “You can do anything you like.” Both activities represent “total expression, uncensored.” In the drum circle she attends, “125 people are all doing their own, crazy beats — and after an hour everyone blends to one another and it becomes like a heartbeat.” The result? “I step out in the world more daring, less worried — and I improvise much better.”

Hart recently ventured into the world of social media — but she didn’t leap into it blindly. She read Clara Shih’sFacebook Era and took a four-week class through the online community In the Know Resources. She also received training from a friend’s daughter.

Hart uses social media as a stepping-stone to face-to-face interaction. “I ask people if they want to have coffee,” she says. She’s astonished by the number of people who ignore the interactive nature of social media. “There are plenty of people wanting to ‘friend’ me,” she says, “and they tell me all about them, and they don’t ask or comment about me.”

Hart also is doing what she can to make her business scalable. She went from one-on-one coaching to developing teach materials, to group calls and workshops. In June, she launched a home-study program called “Zero to Hero: A Sales Makeover Program.” It consists of 10 reports, or lessons, split into two reports each week. Next, she wants to take it global, offering foreign rights and translating it to different languages.

Her top sales tips:

1. Practice, practice, practice
2. Don’t listen to what they tell you.
3. Throw away the notion of selling. You have to be a good explainer and educator. The greatest thing you can give anybody is to make something understandable and to be able to relate to them.
4. You have to have your secret sauce. Don’t be afraid to be different.
5. It’s not all about the closing. If you’re not good at opening, you have no one to close. Alec Baldwin was wrong in “Glengarry Glen Ross.“ ABC isn’t “Always Be Closing.” It’s “Always Be Connecting.”
6. The reason we have a hard time with closing is that it equals finality. We hate endings. If women can look at closing as an opportunity to take their relationship deeper, it’s a big change. “Once we tie the knot with somebody, that’s when you can take your relationship deeper, because someone’s invested with you. Instead of wrapping it up, you can take it to the next level. It’s a new beginning.”