Selling Scuba Gear to Ski Bums: 3 Sales Lessons My Daughter Learned
My 6-year-old daughter was recently inspired to make some money.
She got an empty box from the basement, gathered up a bunch of miscellaneous trinkets (pencils, erasers, plastic jewelry, coins, etc.), and then marched out to the curb to sell her “wares.”
Of course, she brought her younger brother along with her.
So there they were, sitting on the sidewalk, waiting for people to drive by and buy stuff.
Oh, by the way, we live in a cul-de-sac. And it was early Sunday morning.
As you can imagine, a few minutes later my daughter came to me, clearly frustrated. “Daddy, nobody is buying anything. We need to make a big sign or something.”
I admired my daughter’s enthusiasm and motivation to “take action now.” Unfortunately, doing the wrong things with more effort only makes matters worse.
So I took the opportunity to teach my daughter three simple lessons of selling.
Selling Lesson #1: Make your message visible.
My daughter was never going to sell a single thing to drive-by traffic on an early Sunday morning in a cul-de-sac… because… there is no drive-by traffic!
To sell whatever you’ve got, you have to make your message visible. You have to get it in front of the right people.
In my daughter’s case, I recommended going out to the main road through our neighborhood because a lot more cars would be driving by.
In your case, that might mean putting your sales message on the Internet and driving traffic to a sales letter. Or it might mean running space ads in local papers. (There are LOTS of ways to distribute your message.)
Selling Lesson #2: Give people what they want.
If you’re trying to sell scuba gear to ski bums, it just ain’t gonna work. So in addition to making your message visible, you have to give people what they want.
You might call this “message to market match.”
I told my daughter that, unfortunately, most people driving by wouldn’t be interested in coins, pencils, and erasers. But that if it was a hot day, they might be persuaded to buy some lemonade or a cold can of soda.
Even better, I suggested, let’s go down to the big park where a whole bunch of kids and adults are already hanging out in the hot sun and sell drinks there.
Many times, it’s easy to deduce what your market wants. But when in doubt, run a survey. It’s hard to go wrong if you can get your market to tell you exactly what they want to buy.
Selling Lesson #3: Sell your product at a price people are eager/willing to pay.
My daughter was trying to sell individual nickels and dimes for a dollar. Literally. Again, a clear recipe for failure.
And while this seems obvious to you and me, people do this all the time in their own businesses — they price their products and services not based on what their market is eager to pay, but rather on how much they personally want to make.
Okay. It can work. You can charge what you want to make and you’ll sometimes do all right if your prices aren’t too far out of line with what the market will pay.
But here’s the thing: Price is one of the BIGGEST factors in whether or not people buy, especially when it comes to commodities. You’ll have much better luck selling cans of soda at fifty cents each than you will if you try to sell them for $3 each.
If you have a product that your market wants, and you’ve got a solid sales pitch in front of them, but they’re still not buying… you might have a pricing problem. Test multiple price points to find the one that maximizes profits.
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After teaching my daughter these three lessons, she seemed to “get it.” So next time she wants to make some money, you’ll find us down at the park giving our little idea a real-life test run. :-)
-Ryan M. Healy
