Selling your product by selling yourself

Those basic principles
First, you’ve got to know your product. You’ve got to know it thoroughly and speak about it with confidence and authority. You also have to know the competition thoroughly. This allows you to speak well of your competition while emphasizing your own strengths. Second, you have to believe in your company, your product, and yourself. You have to be proud to represent your company. It’s obviously the best in its field. After all, it hired you. Third, “Ya gotta know the territory,” as Meredith Willson said in one of the songs from The Music Man. That means you need to know who the decision-maker is and sell to that person. It’s a total waste of time to make the sale and then discover that you have to make it again because you’ve been selling to the wrong person. I realize that sometimes you have to do it twice, but if once will do, why repeat? Integrity is the hallmark of the salesperson who has long-term success. Yes, a lot of fly-by-night people make megabucks at other people’s expense, but the customers of a salesperson with real integrity keep coming back because they know they’ll get honesty, quality, price, and service. A person can’t have just a little integrity. It’s something you either have or you don’t. And that’s what the customer becomes aware of very early in the selling game. You have to have a good name, and the only way you get that and keep it is by having integrity.
Initiative is the ability to get in the door, to make the presentation in a unique, interesting, imaginative way, and to know you did a good job for yourself and the company even if you didn’t make the sale.