<p>As a women entrepreneur, professional, or up and coming female professional, selling to men is going to be a part of your life, afterall we take up 50% of the population. Many a deal has been lost by a professional women because she wasn’t able to read the mind of her male clients, colleagues, and bosses. Knowing how men think, what causes them to choose one deal while blowing off another, and how to keep a guy’s attention, is key to a professional woman’s success.</p>
<p>If you ask yourself <strong>“Why should I care about selling to men?"</strong> <em>Women make up 85% of the consumer buying decisions but men make up 80% of the business to business sales decisions.</em></p>
<p>It always mind blowing to me that there are so many women’s groups out there that automatically cut themselves off from selling to men and establish ‘women only’ business networking events. If they just took some time to understand how to sell to men, what drives us, and understand that there are misconceptions about selling to men there are huge opportunities that women can take advantage of, not to mention you’re not cutting out profitability by cutting off 50% of the population.</p>
<p><strong>Some of the biggest misconceptions that women have about men:</strong></p>
<p>- Men only care about the bottom line <br />- We buy like women for the same reasons women do<br />- We want all the power and control over every situation</p>
<p><strong>Some of the main pitfalls that women make to throw a deal off track when trying to sell a man, go in asking for a raise, bonus or promotion are:</strong></p>
<p><strong>1) Not getting to the point.</strong> Men are goal oriented and are driven by the end results not the process, women feel as though all the details are important for us to know how we are getting that result, we just don’t care about the details, if we want to know we’ll ask otherwise, just get to the point.</p>
<p><strong>2) Telling us what your father, brother, boyfriend, husband have done.</strong> This is a big one. We see ourselves as the king in our own worlds, we don’t want another dog in our pen. When women talk about their husbands, boyfriends, former male bosses, and their fathers as in “my husband worked it this way or my father did this…” we don’t want to hear it. We align and measure ourselves against other men and when you talk to us about what other men are doing what we hear is “You suck, this is the way that a successful man I know does it”.</p>
<p><strong>3) Introducing problems rather than solutions.</strong> This goes back to men being goal oriented we don’t want you to bring problems to us, we want solutions that will get us to our goals and we want to know that you are bringing solutions to the table not more problems.</p>
<p>Selling successfully to Men is not about a Women acting like a man or looking to be inauthentic. It’s about understanding how we think and looking to make some minor tweaks to your sales/promotion/raise pitch to be successful selling to us.</p>
<p>Cheers,</p>
<p>Liam</p>
2009-03-12T02:00:08Z
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selling-to-men
4
2009-03-12T19:21:20Z
2009-03-12T19:21:20Z
Ladies, this article is for you!
Selling To Men
1
2009-03-12T19:21:20Z