After work on Wednesday I made my way down to the Nepean Sailing Club to gain some insight into marketing and selling from a sales guru named Ray Fisher. Andrew Moizer had emailed me about the event, which is organized by The Ottawa Network - in efforts to bring together people from all over Ottawa to do some networking and to listen to some valuable words of wisdom. To my surprise, the people that attended were not all marketers. There was a good mix of marketers, salesmen, software engineers and others.

Ray Fisher is the Director of Business Development for Semiconductor Insights in Europe, Middle East and the Eastern US. He talked about various practices and sales approaches that dramatically changed the way he sells today.

Ray covered a lot of interesting points but the one that was more so the topic of discussion was how to make a sale not sound like a sale. How certain things salesmen say scare people away, things such as sending an email to a potential client then ending it with “I will follow up with you later on this week”. Ray pointed out that things like that put a lot of unwanted pressure on people, which of course makes sense - who wants to be pressured or feel like they have a deadline when they haven’t even agreed to anything? Ray said that even though the competition continues to do this, he rises above by letting the client contact you. If they want something, they’ll come to you after you’ve made the first move, no point on pressuring. This may be a risky move at first but wait awhile until you start to see results.

He talked about how people only want something if they get something out of it. Sounds pretty straight forward, if the whole idea of your pitch is just about benefiting you or your company, your potential client won’t want anything to do with it. People like to feel like they’re talking to another person, not a salesman. It’s important to break the barrier of the “salesman” title, you have to earn trust. This can be done by asking simple questions because you seem like you care about what the person might need to improve a part of their life.

Ray also mentioned how, the odd time, he will send out hand written letters to people. With how the world is today, people really value hand written letters as opposed to an email that just gets lost in the clutter of your inbox.

Overall it was an incredible presentation - I only wish I would have brought a pen and paper to take down some more notes. The Ottawa Network does this every week so check their site to see where and when the next event is going to be held.