Learning Sales the Hard Way

Sales is one of the most important aspects of a business but can be very difficult to get or understand. I can say that from past experiences it takes many attempts with frequent errors and messing up to finally learn and get the sale.

I’ve had experience in sales but my biggest sales that took the most effort came from selling my entire business/website. It takes a lot to sell individual products but to sell a whole business takes a lot more work. My website at the time was called visiontrendz.com and I was looking to sell that business.

The first thing I did was list my site on Flippa which is an exchange where you can buy and sell businesses. I used this site to list my business and then wrote a detailed outline, covering each end of the business, so potential buyers would be able to get all the information on the business. I would then receive messages from potential buyers asking for more details on the business. This was my first step, then, after receiving messages from potential buyers I would get on the phone as soon as possible before they lose interest. This was very key because there are thousands of websites on the platform, which makes it very competitive. Once I was able to get the potential buyer on the phone, I had three priorities.

First, understand their personality, second find out their experience and how knowledgeable they are in this type of industry, and third, what their budget was for the business after the sale. That way I would be able to figure out within the first couple of minutes if they were a credible candidate to be able to buy and operate the business successfully. Once I was able to identify that they were a credible buyer, I would go right into showing them the data and sales of the store because that is my main selling point and I knew that when a potential buyer sees the numbers it creates credibility and trust on my end.

Numbers speak louder than words.

If the potential buyer was excited and interested in what they saw, this was my opportunity to close. I would pitch them on helping to operate and guide the website for the next month to make the buyer feel more confident and at ease with their purchase.

This outline that I have for myself helped me eventually sell Vision Trendz to a person in the United Arab Emirates. Months down the line I was wanting to sell another website of mine and followed the same outline and was able to close the sale within two days of posting it on Flippa. I know everyone has their different strategies when selling but by far the last step is what made the difference.