You’ve heard it before — a business can’t be successful if you can’t sell. Well, at 16, I learned this the hard way.
The Beginning
At the age of 16, my brother, a friend, and I decided our town needed some more fun. So, of course, we bought a miniature golf course. Long story short, after a lot of hard work and ametuer sales pitches, this miniature golf course was ready to go.
We had a successful beginning due to excitement. Then came a drought of nothingness. We were thirsty for business but we were getting no rain.
Enter social media. To get our name out there, we researched how we could utilize social media to our advantage.
Not Solving a Need
We had no idea how to create a good sales pitch — which I now understand is by acknowledging a problem and proposing a solution. We just proposed a solution. “Five dollar mini golf, trust me it’s fun” is how our selling went on social media. When people asked me about the course in person I’d talk about my story of obtaining the course, completely missing opportunities to sell the product based on their unique values and interests.
I had a fun personality, and when I did try to sell the product to people I sold it the same way every time. Not knowing to change up how I sell due to different personality types. I always threw jokes in, even to the stone cold never smiling lady at the gas station. (She still doesn’t like me.) I pitched to everyone, often wasting my time on people who were the wrong person to pitch to in the first place.
When I sold, I tried to sell that the course was fun. I never took time to ask myself why the prospect I was talking to would find use in the course. The number of people coming to the course reflected our sales skills.
That is until we sharpened our sales skills.
Solving a Need
The mindset eventually changed after reading a couple books on the topic of sales. I actively searched on Facebook the word “bored” in people in my area and provided discounts if they came to play mini golf. I actively searched for significant others needing something to do for a date, a family looking for something to do for family night, and high school friends needing something to do after school.
As soon as I noticed that I needed to stop selling this one product to everyone, I realized my course could create value in new ways to different people. In fact, as I thought of these people and their problems, I came up with new ideas to add to the course. These new additions made it even better overall but especially for the people who had the problem that inspired the addition.
This new mindset resulted in explosive sales. The people I pitched to were the right people and how I pitched to them varied depending on their personality. I no longer had the same pitch for every person. I became good at finding the right people and changing my pitch to hit their problem.
We eventually added the service of birthday parties which became a new challenge to sell . I looked for people online who had kids, and kid’s whose birthdays were coming up. I would offer our service and try to solve the problem most parents face with birthday parties, the cleanup. We’d clean up those dirty kids' pizza stuffed in their coke cup and the parents wouldn’t have to worry about anything.
Realizing how my product could solve people’s problems not only felt amazing, but turned me into a sales machine.
Chase Taake