--- title: "Food Industry Professionals: If Your Goal in Sales Is to Start a Business, Read This Article!" description: "Many people enter sales with the goal of gaining experience and skills to eventually start their own business and achieve success. However, as the author engages with such salespeople, he finds that they often lack the unique mindset and actions required for entrepreneurship, instead falling into common traps. This article provides six key principles for 'alternative salespeople' to follow, including maintaining a positive mindset, thinking like a boss, surrounding oneself with successful people, learning from different perspectives, and continuous learning." author: "石头哥谈营销" publisher: "New Distribution" email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com" telephone: "+8615854817671" published: "2016-05-01" language: "en" canonical: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/food-industry-professionals-if-your-goal-in-sales-is-to-start-a-business-9e9b9dc1/" markdown: "https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/food-industry-professionals-if-your-goal-in-sales-is-to-start-a-business-9e9b9dc1.md" original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Ll3mPLxFvfwVmlR0YrY1Aw" translation: "https://xinjignxiao.com/zh/articles/%E9%A3%9F%E5%93%81%E4%BA%BA-%E5%A6%82%E6%9E%9C%E4%BD%A0%E5%81%9A%E9%94%80%E5%94%AE%E7%9A%84%E7%9B%AE%E7%9A%84%E6%98%AF%E5%88%9B%E4%B8%9A-%E8%AF%B7%E6%8A%8A%E8%BF%99%E7%AF%87%E6%96%87%E7%AB%A0%E8%AF%BB%E5%AE%8C-9e9b9dc1.md" attribution: "New Distribution — https://xinjignxiao.com/en/articles/food-industry-professionals-if-your-goal-in-sales-is-to-start-a-business-9e9b9dc1/" usage_policy: "https://xinjignxiao.com/ai-policy.txt" --- # Food Industry Professionals: If Your Goal in Sales Is to Start a Business, Read This Article! > Many people enter sales with the goal of gaining experience and skills to eventually start their own business and achieve success. However, as the author engages with such salespeople, he finds that they often lack the unique mindset and actions required for entrepreneurship, instead falling into common traps. This article provides six key principles for 'alternative salespeople' to follow, including maintaining a positive mindset, thinking like a boss, surrounding oneself with successful people, learning from different perspectives, and continuous learning. Many people enter sales with the goal of gaining experience and skills to eventually start their own business and achieve success. The author always begins conversations with such salespeople with a serious and responsible attitude. However, as the conversation deepens, he discovers that the problems they reveal are not like those of an 'alternative salesperson' who embarks on the road of struggle with entrepreneurial dreams. The reason for using the term 'alternative' is that the author believes that friends who enter sales with the purpose of starting a business, because their initial intentions are different, must have their own unique thinking and actions when facing difficulties and problems, and cannot go with the flow, because the future they are to embrace will be different. 1. No matter how big the difficulty, learn to give yourself chicken soup for the soul. Stone Brother is not a person who likes to give others chicken soup for the soul, but the word 'mindset' is something that must be mentioned for friends who aspire to start a business. Starting a business is about creating a career of your own and striving for it with the rest of your life, perhaps 10 years, 20 years, or even longer... In such a long river of time, fighting for one thing can encounter storms at any time. If you cannot adjust your mindset in time to face it, how can you walk the long road? Alternative salespeople must learn to give themselves chicken soup when encountering various sales problems in daily work, and not complain about small difficulties. The reason for forcing yourself to do this is simple: what you face today is what you will face on the road to entrepreneurship in the future. Today, you can attribute difficulties and problems to the company or the boss, but when you are the boss in the future, who will you attribute them to? I'm afraid you will have to face them alone! 2. Learn to demand yourself with the boss's thinking and actions. An alternative salesperson said to me: 'Stone Brother, the company recently asked us to sell a large amount of inventory, and even formulated an assessment system for this. Inventory is inherently hard to sell. I don't know what the boss is thinking!' The most fundamental reason why employees do not agree with the boss's requirements is different thinking. What alternative salespeople need to do is not complain, but to figure out why the boss wants to do this. The reason for dealing with inventory is actually very simple: inventory is money! If you were the boss, would you watch the inventory sleep in the warehouse? That is your real money. If you don't find a way to sell it, you are losing money. In reality, many of our alternative salespeople shout that they want to start a business and be the boss, but when things happen, they suddenly do a 180-degree turn, and their thoughts and actions return to the crowd of workers. 3. If you want to become someone, be with them. Let's make an assumption: If you were in the same circle as Wang Sicong and could get his father's approval, I don't believe you wouldn't have the opportunity to make money? Of course, this is just a metaphor. Birds of a feather flock together. Although this saying is a bit unpleasant, the truth is so. Some people may say, Stone Brother, you are dividing people into classes, which I think is not good. Please don't misinterpret my meaning. Being with different groups of people will make your thinking and vision different, and more importantly, your chances of success are different, not that we disrespect certain groups of people. Look at the current business elites; they all have their own small circles. A person who wants to become a boss but has no boss friends around is a bit like a fool's dream, isn't it? 4. Enter their circle and have in-depth contact with bosses. Sales is a job that provides you with more opportunities to contact high-level people. Alternative salespeople should know how to mix into their circles and enter their world. Many young people often ask me, 'They are all bosses, and I am just an ordinary low-level salesperson. How can I enter their circle?' Everyone may think of bosses as too mysterious, as if dealing with bosses requires some magical means. Based on Stone Brother's experience with bosses, bosses are also human, and many bosses are not difficult to approach. The reasons why some young sales colleagues find it difficult to interact with bosses are as follows: First, you may be too utilitarian in dealing with people. The job of sales is to close deals, but overly utilitarian sales can be difficult to gain recognition. Bosses are also businessmen. Your so-called little tricks and gimmicks are laughable to them; they played those games decades ago. Whether they cooperate with someone, especially for long-term cooperation, besides interests, they value the other's personality and character more. Maintaining authenticity, sincerity, and genuineness is the basic requirement for good interpersonal interactions. Second, the reason why some salespeople cannot have deep interactions with bosses is that you know too little. Besides products, prices, and the company, you have almost no understanding of the industry situation. Many people do not focus on enriching themselves in this area, but always try to get closer through small talk. I'm afraid your efforts will be in vain. This is because the initial interaction between sales and bosses starts with work reasons, not friends met in life, so the best breakthrough point is to have more topics about his industry and his business chain. Third, learn to actively create opportunities. Today is an era of vigorous development of social groups. Many bosses will participate in some social group activities, such as public welfare group activities, offline salon exchanges, etc. You can consciously participate in them, take the initiative to create opportunities to contact them. Since everyone does not have too much utilitarianism and wariness, and breaks the boundaries between sales and customers, entering a life-oriented space to get to know each other actually allows us to go deeper. 5. Learn to look at problems from different angles. Everything has two sides. Looking at the same thing from different angles will produce different thinking, form different behaviors, and lead to different results. For example, the problem of fierce market competition. One view is that homogenization is serious, everyone is competing on price, and customers buy from whoever is cheaper. From this perspective, your behavior must be to find ways to sell products at a lower price. If the company provides high-priced products, you will definitely feel it is too difficult to do, and negative emotions such as complaints and entanglements will naturally affect your results. Let's look at it from another angle. Fierce market competition indicates that the industry you chose may be profitable. If it were not profitable, why would so many manufacturers join? Are they all rushing to lose money? The reason manufacturers are competing to lower prices is that they all make money; otherwise, no stupid manufacturer would lose money desperately. It's just a matter of making more or less. So the real reason customers choose lower prices is not that they want to buy low-priced products, but that everyone is undercutting each other, making customers at a loss. Since it's all the same, they might as well find a cheaper one. What is differentiation? It's when you all act like grandsons, I act like the grandfather! When meeting customers, directly tell them that the market is too chaotic now, our company only sells the most suitable products for you, and we would rather give up cooperation than go with the flow! 6. Learn, learn, and keep learning. Sales is indeed one of the conditions that entrepreneurs need, but it is by no means the only one! A few days ago, a friend engaged in sales wanted to do a part-time job, hoping to sell some products through the Internet. After chatting with him, I found that the guy didn't even know what soft article marketing is. Internet marketing and offline sales behavior are different in some cases. Offline sales can be face-to-face, while online requires soft articles, pictures, videos, and other visual marketing means to communicate with the audience. At this time, you need to learn some related knowledge and skills. Therefore, for alternative salespeople, you must keep learning, learning, and learning again! Alternative salespeople must be different. Being different does not mean being unconventional, but making yourself have unique insights, understanding, and behavior towards things that are different from ordinary people, because those who truly succeed in entrepreneurship are bound to be in the minority! Stone Brother Talks Marketing (Grassroots Entrepreneurship Incubation Marketing Mentor, Founder of China Grassroots Marketing Alliance, Ximalaya Self-Media Network Radio Marketing Talk Show Host) ****************-**************** END- The best FMCG distributor learning platform in China Focusing on providing professional, practical, and actionable tutorials for enterprises and distributors Committed to helping Chinese FMCG distributors grow rapidly **The most professional and practical knowledge base in the FMCG industry** Reply with the red number below to get the corresponding content Reply with number 1 to view the complete knowledge base | **001** Excellent article selection | **002** Distributor market operations | **003** Terminal visit management | **004** Sales supervisor skills | **005** Sales improvement techniques | **006** Channel expansion | **007** Managing distributors | **008** Distributor development | **009** Distributor internal operations management | **010** Team management | **011** Efficient distribution techniques | **012** Sales manager's eighteen skills | **013** KA operation methods and strategies | **014** First lesson for new salespeople | **015** Internet, brand | **016** Distributor B2B transformation | [Long press QR code to follow] --- ## Copyright and AI use This article is sourced from New Distribution. 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