Are you a sales gardener or a sales hunter? Can you be both?

Every organization should have a combination of great sales hunters and some sales gardeners. In some ways, the sales gardeners are more like marketers than sales. They work to master Inbound Marketing .

However, while a marketer may concern themselves with TV advertising and magazine ads a sales gardener is going to plant seeds to get customers to come to them.

A successful sales gardener is someone that uses Inbound Marketing effectively to more easily close leads that come to them. They might use SEO, Word of Mouth or Newsletters. There are actually many different kinds of marketing techniques that will help a sales person attract the right kind of leads to them.

What are the keys to attracting the customer?

• Asking for Referrals
• Free Reports and White Papers
• Building an Email List
• Encouraging Word of Mouth

In reality you need to do as many things as make sense for your potential customers to stay top of mind and make yourself easier to be found. That is why you must be patient to be a sales gardener.

Search Engines are the new phone book, and they are where many people go to find product and services. Not only will they look up where to find something, but they will look up reviews, word of mouth, comments and search for discounts.

To be a good sales gardener, you need to plant seeds of information all over the web for what people will be looking for. If your company sells specialty groceries, add blog posts to your website about the organic products. Simple, but most companies and most sales people overlook this critical part of Inbound Marketing.

Selling to hot buyers looking for your product is much easier than selling to someone that is not interested. A sales hunter will go out and produce generate sales quickly. But chances are they are going to have to keep working hard every day to keep producing results. A sales gardener is going to get a slower start, but they will build resources that over time will produce better and better results with the same effort.

You also do not have to be just a hunter or a gardener. You can be a sales hunter by day and a sales gardener by night. Many of the marketing attraction methods include writing articles and getting published, and doing those in the evenings will give you the best of both worlds. If you set up a lead capture form on the web, every morning the sales hunter in you can wake up to a fresh list of interested prospects that are waiting for you to call.