I’m spending 30 days in Mexico City and one of the things that strikes me about Mexico is the Culture of Hustle.From the street taco vendors to the doormen to even the ladies that clean up the condo that I’m living in, there is a spirit of hustle. And I use the term “Hustle” in the most positive sense possible. It’s not in a sleazy, kind of hustling type of way. It is definitely very elegant.
I love street tacos because they’re really quite tasty and if you’re up at 2:00 in the morning, they can be quite relieving for anything you might have been doing earlier, if you know what I mean.Street taco vendors … have to hustle, because there is literally one on every corner in this city. So how do you differentiate from one to another? Well, you don’t. But you gotta hustle to get the business.They’re calling you over, rather than just standing behind their stand and waiting for you to come up and order something, they’re calling out to you and saying, “Amigo, come here, what type of tacos do you want? Do you want two? Do you want four?” They’re always up-selling. Do you want this meat, that meat, what have you.It’s so authentic and it’s just part of the way that they are. It doesn’t feel sleazy at all.
I just did my laundry today and I say I did my laundry, which means that someone else did it for me… This very, very sweet woman that was down in the laundromat (La Lavandaderia) that’s in the building. I think she cleans some of the apartments here for people.I don’t speak a lot of Spanish, and she didn’t speak any English, so we had a little bit of a language barrier, but she was showing me how to use the washing machines. But finally, she was just like, “I’ll do it for you,” or just made the motions, and she ended up just doing my laundry for me and folding it for me as well.In a way, it didn’t seem like she was hustling to get business, she was just doing it out of the kindness of her heart. Of course, she was selling the fact that she was doing my laundry for me and of course I paid her to do that, but it was just that spirit of helping other people to solve a problem. And that’s really what sales is all about — solving people’s problems.When a salesperson is just hammering people over the head to buy, buy, buy. You’re not solving anybody’s problems. You don’t even know what the problem is for that client. It’s understanding the questions that they have in their head, answering those questions, but also asking the right questions in the right order to get them to realize that they have a problem.You have the solution to fix that problem. So that my friends is all about the hustle and asking the right questions. In addition you should have the spirit of helping other people solve problems. It isn’t about beating them over the head and making them buy from you, but rather, you are allowing them to buy from you. That is so much easier than selling.It’s a whole other way of selling isn’t it? Asking questions and telling stories. So I encourage to think about how it is that you are selling personally. Are you asking questions or are you just hammering that prospecting over the head? And I encourage you to think of things in a little different manner.
If you’d like to chat more about this then schedule a 30 Minute impact call so we can discuss how your sales are coming along and design some questions to get more sales, with less work.
