1st:
You have been business owner for a couple of years. Can
you share on business success lessons from you journey?
I bought a business that I've had no prior knowledge or experience with it. A
distribution company that sell variety of products to cafes &
restaurants such as paper/plastic cups, all kind of plastic trays, chemicals,
paper products and some food . We had a warehouse, a delivery truck
and of course employees. I had to start selling about 350 items
from day one, created relationships with existing and new customers as
well with suppliers. Huge task that people are astonished how did I took the
risk and managed doing it.
I have an extensive experience in sales and marketing, a people person and good
management skills. I had a dual role of
operations & sales manager. The learning curve was very short, I
worked more than 12 hours a day and eventually succeeded to triple the sales. I
eventually the sold the business after four years.
The lessons from this journey - one has to be a risk-taker plus
having a skills-set of creativity, flexibility & an ability to
build and maintain personal relationships, all the above helped me
tremendously along the way to achieve my targets.
2nd
Sales is an ongoing journey and process of implementation. Can you
share some sales strategies?
I believe sales is an art and to be
a successful sales person, you must love communicating with people, be a great
listener and problem solver, be genuinely interested in helping customers and
looking constantly as to how to serve them better and address all their
concerns & demands.
Those who lack patience or don't
have the above abilities "under their skin", wouldn't not succeed
in fulfilling this job, those are the ones who wish just to close the deal as
quickly as possible, and move on to the next customer, with no
interest at all in following up with the old ones or referring back to their
requests...
If you aren't willing to call back
your customer within 15-30 minutes (very uncommon response time in Toronto) or
respond to his email within that time frame - I foresee that within short
period of time, he would turn his back on you!
Hana Pereira
h_perahia@hotmail.com
