Those of us involved in selling on a regular basis know that sometimes selling is more of an art form than a science. Selling at its most basic level is convincing someone to buy something from you, regardless of its worth to him and his need of it. As you deal with more market savvy people though, you really need to move up to a higher level of selling. This selling method needs to take into account what the person is there for, and what he needs, and then find the right solution for him. This brings us to the discussion of Technical Selling Vs. Cliche Selling.

In case you haven’t heard about it yet, I recently posted about Apple entering the cell phone market with the iPhone. The exclusive wireless provider for the iPhone is Cingular, which wasted no time in debuting it on their main page. This is just the latest attack on Verizon’s marketshare by Cingular.

If you look closely at the world around you, you will notice that although many new technologies aim to “converge” several different uses into one machine, we somehow always end up buying more specialized items, or “divergent” products. Let me give you an example:

Ovens

Ovens have been around throughout the ages, in one form or another. Many years ago, a wonderful new product came out on the market - the first toaster oven. People would place all sorts of food in there to “toast” it, and even placed slices of bread in the hopes of toasting it. Only a few years after that someone came out with a great idea - why not create a smaller oven, which is made especially for toasting bread - a toaster. This seemed like a great idea, and before you knew everyone and their mother had a toaster.