Have you ever played a football game and lost? I have so many times. later on, I found out why this happened so many times, what I found had surprised me.
It’s repeating again n again because I am not understanding the right smart work and hard work.
The subtle difference between smart work and hard work is similar to a game of football. When your team strategically passes footballs to each other and you score a goal almost tirelessly.
And on the other hand, when you all chase a football, like a mad dog chases a food truck, and still manage to score a goal but all get completely exhausted, then move on to the next game. The smart team aims more and you’re all still chasing, so you lose the game.
Choose the path of smart work
There is no doubt that everything depends on your efforts and the way to pursue something. The outcomes you expected and what you got, heavily rely on the efforts you put in to get things done, whether it’s your studies, getting a job, in businesses, or even online selling.
The term ‘efforts’ I mentioned here might indicate extremely deep work or super-smart work, or even perhaps the fusion of both. Their combination may vary differently for different people. But when it comes to online selling, it gets a bit tricky, because being a seller you’ve been told and motivated this way that to achieve a specific goal and the number of sales you must go some extra miles, put in some more effort, put in all your sweat. Despite being knowing that online selling has gone through a revolutionary change in the past few years.
Now online selling is the most crucial part of every business and requires focus either to work hard or work smart as per the competition in the field. The world has changed a lot and now especially after the post-pandemic era, online selling got a huge boost’ it will see in all these years.
If you’re an online seller like me, I suspect you must’ve done a lot of hard work for selling your products to meet the goal. But there is one thing I would like to say from my own experience doing hard work may help you meet your goal, but doing a bit of smart work may help you meet success in online selling.
Being involved in online selling means keeping looking for signals and marketing reality to swap the strategies accordingly. But if you ignore those signals and keep your focus only on meeting deadlines, you won’t get any success near in the future. And perhaps after failing to meet deadlines, the sellers blame themself for not doing enough hard work.
More sales do not necessarily mean more work; instead, you can work smarter and can gain the same amount of revenue and surprisingly more productivity because you are saving much more time for yourself.
LOok Smart Move For Instance,
From the millions of products on marketplaces, what do you think your product will be shown to your target customer easily? Let’s suppose what a hard work person do in this situation, he will surely burn money on ads, promotions and hope for sales and even he got sales he surely burned that money above profits, but a smart seller will calm down in this situation, will learn the depth of how algorithms working, good product research and launch it with at least a review on that product bcz in online selling review and rating directly means to trust, that is gain by an experienced buyer who is giving is feedback to help for another buyer.
If you’re already an online seller, you probably know about how Amazon, Shopify, eBay, etc., how to work in a dynamic business environment. There’s always a cutthroat competition. For one product there are over hundreds of sellers. Their algorithm and the process to keep recommending products to buyers are way more complex than you think it is.
But surely having a higher rating and reviews is still the biggest advantage to stand out in the crowd and win the trust of the buyers. Algorithmically software like Amazon keeps those products on top that are trustworthy and have good ratings. So, despite putting your hard work into promoting a product & cold calls, you can do a little smart work in focusing and increasing your product ratings & reviews (Reviewtesifty had made that easy for you).
It’ll not only give you an advantage over your competitors but can dramatically increase your sales over time without putting in a lot of hard work, and you can use time in catching opportunity signals and building strategies. This way you can be a successful online seller.
Pro sellers Apply 80/20 Rule In Online Selling
Having a sales background, you probably heard about the Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule. It indicates that your 20% efforts lead to 80% outcomes. But what does it simply means in Online Selling? And how does it perfectly apply in businesses?
In marketing terms, it is said that 80% of sales come from 20% of products and 80% of total sales come from 20% right efforts of the sales team. In nutshell, the majority of outcomes you’re looking to achieve are prompted by a disproportionately small input or effort.
Though the actual outcome may vary from the Rule defined, it creates a mindset that what you have to do and how much work you need to work on and building a team.
And, if that’s true why not think smartly to get the optimum outcome from less but extremely quality efforts? Let me explain in simple terms.
Suppose you are doing an online selling business and you are carrying all the work by yourself from bringing products to answering customers’ queries. By doing all this you are only burdening yourself because 80% of the work you are in is unproductive and isn’t even related to the outcomes you expected from the sales of your product.
If we follow the 80/20 Rule here, you just have to focus on that 20% of work that is of much importance and needs to be focused enough to get the optimum sales or outcomes. For the rest of 80%, you can simply delegate and outsource to an expert in the field. Save time earn more!
By doing this you create more productivity and can work on that 20% of productive work more effectively & efficiently.
So, what do you have to do now? Firstly focus on that work that you can do and is directly proportionate to productivity and sales. Secondly, create a list of those subordinate work that is not much related to productivity but a part of business activities and then carefully outsource them to an expert so that you can be more focused.
Why you should stop chasing money?
Most often the seller seems to be engrossed in selling a product anyhow and earning money, but despite putting in all the efforts he is unable to sell as much as he would like. Marketing has its requirements that need to be fulfilled before you run your product in the tough market. Its easier to say that your product is beneficial to the customer and worth the money, but it is too hard to do the same.
Gaining the trust and giving them an equal value might take some time but has long-term benefits that you can’t easily ignore. The solution is not always to sell the product by doing enough marketing, instead spend time to think how you can give value to your customers. If a customer cannot find the value, they will simply pass your product.
Work to build a brand that people trust.
Consumers are always willing to spend more when they trust the brand and they know they’ll get the satisfaction and the value here that they can’t find anywhere else in the market. Building a brand takes time and sweat, but once you realize that one valuable product is worth thousands of sales that can lead to millions of sales in no time.
Understand this, a consumer doesn’t buy products they buy benefits. This is what Steve Jobs did when he invented iPod. Know the customer psychology and what they are looking for. Creating a value and brand is worth chasing than doing unnecessary marketing and focusing just on money.
Therefore, put your efforts into building a brand that creates value for customers, by doing this you’ll not only be gaining the trust of the buyers but unlocking the doors of the market and becoming a successful seller.
In a nutshell…
Many sellers just made an online presence like someone is online on social media but nobody knows he/she is online. so nobody talks to them.
do you want similarly like that no customer recognize you, after buying your product?. what do you want really? hide behind amazon, Flipkart marketplaces and sell your products.
or you want that there should be a brand of your ‘own’. whom customers love and go on amazon Flipkart to shop your brand.
All is in your hand – “choose the smart or continue the hard work“.
My friend Ritish describe it right.
“Through Hard-work you can achieve your goal, but through Smart work, you can achieve success.” – Ritish sharma, co-author.
I thank 'Mr Ritish Sharma' for being a co-author and inspiring my online selling family in this blog.
