I got my first proper sales training as a consultant back in 1995 when I had been with Gemini Consulting for about a year.

Back then Gemini was growing at a phenomenal rate and one of the reasons was that we took sales seriously and taught selling skills to our consultants very early on in their career. Even those, like me, who were far from natural salespeople :)

I remember very clearly we had one of our most successful VPs come in to talk to us about his experiences selling and one of the things he said that really stood out was “don't be like the greedy guest at a wedding that cleans out the buffet just because he can”.

What he meant was that the skills we were learning were powerful, and because the majority of our competitors were very traditional in their approaches we had a big edge. It would easily have been possible for our more skilled practitioners to convince clients to spend almost all their budget with us on huge projects.

But as the VP said, “it's much better in the long term to get invited back to the next wedding and the next”.

I sometimes think we need to remind ourselves of that with online marketing in particular. There's so much emphasis on “optimising funnels”, creating upsells and split testing alternatives to maximise sales that we sometimes forget that our best bet long term is to do a brilliant job for our clients so they keep coming back.

Rather than spending our time figuring out how to squeeze every last penny out of that initial transaction, we're better off thinking about how to create a brilliant first impression post-sale and deliver great results as fast as possible.

That'll get us invited back to the buffet time and time again.