Selling & Buying.

You've got to learn that getting a job is about selling and marketing yourself as a package; but what you need to be clear about is that if someone is SELLING then someone equally is BUYING and each has a defined process that they will follow, either consciously or subconsciously. In other words there is a SELLING CYCLE and a BUYING CYCLE. 

So in order to effectively SELL yourself, you need to understand HOW people buy. You do it yourself every day. No matter how small or how big the purchase you go through a conscious or subconscious buying cycle. Take buying a newspaper for instance… you either always buy the same one because you know that what it contains satisfies your needs, you like the look of the paper, the writing style of some or all of the columnists etc. Generally most of us don’t think too much when we reach the news stand but just occasionally we might be deflected towards an eye-catching headline in another publication and decide to investigate that. Now you have a decision to make – is the new one better than the old?

And if so why? Is it enough to make you buy it? Will you buy the new one as well as the old one or instead of? Or will your evaluation lead you to decide that you should stick with the original and move on to your next decision?

The point is, people make decisions all the time about all sorts of things – it’s just that they don’t register as decisions because they are generally familiar and occur every day. When it comes to major purchasing decisions the subconscious cycle is generally the same but the conscious buying cycle changes in intensity where larger amounts of money are at stake or where the product or service purchased can have long-term implications.