People say they hate to be sold to, but very often then don’t know what they want or how to get it. And in the world of computers and on line sales we are now bombarded with more and more information that we have to trawl through before we make decisions. Take clothes shopping on line for instance, it’s great if you know the brand, have worn it before and know how it fits on your body, but if you don’t, chances are it will arrive at your house and you will have to return it. The whole process of looking on line is a computer giving you parameters such as colour, style, material etc to help you decide on what to buy. And after you have searched for an item, google then advertises it back at you in the side bar to help you to make the decision to buy or not.

I’ve had plenty of different jobs in my life time. I’ve worked in hospitality, secretarial, advertising, retail, real estate, nursing, midwifery, tantra teaching, massage therapy and currently in marketing. The common thread through all the jobs that I have had over the 30 plus years that I have been in the workforce is the want to help people. This requires compassion, commitment, the ability to build rapport and an incredible sales ability! What, I hear you say? How can you say that. I don’t mean money necessarily. I mean the ability to sell an idea or a product to someone to help them get what they are looking for.

Before you get too caught up in what I’ve just said, think about this. When I was a midwife, I would walk onto a shift in labour ward at 11 pm and after being advised about what was happening with my patients I would go and introduce myself. Whatever stage of labour the woman was in I needed to be able to build rapport and quickly, be with her and her birthing partners wherever she was at and assure her that I was her support, her advocate, her partner in crime until the baby was born or my shift ended, which ever came first. I had to build trust very quickly so that we could make decisions together about her birth as she progressed. Ultimately this is sales, displaying the options for the best outcome. In a birthing mums case it might be a shower or using the birth ball but ultimately I was building rapport, helping to comfort and encourage, calm and soothe until the baby was born. My outcome was a healthy mum and baby, that was my job and it required the skills of negotiation, coercision and perserverance to get the job done.

Tantra teaching, massage therapy, hospitality and being a secretary all involve being with people and they all require sales and marketing. Tantra teaching is about educating people on the practice and then encouraging them to use it in their lives. Massage requires showing people ways that they could do some of what I do at home to alleviate pain and suffering between visits, secretarial work requires team work (a form of sales) to get the job done and hospitality is selling or upselling a product to customers who want to buy that product. The art of helping people is in finding out what they want when they don’t know themselves, through building rapport, trust, investigative questions, good communication and then giving it to them and that my friend is definitely sales.