One of the most important skills you can ever develop is the ability to sell. You are required to sell yourself all the time. You do it when you apply for a job or a pay rise. You have to sell yourself to your potential love partner. When you go to the bank to apply for a loan, you are selling yourself there. To get other people to agree with you, you have to sell your ideas. Even if you want to do something creative and arty, you ultimately have to sell people on liking it. It's not much fun admiring your masterpiece all by yourself.

So, marketing is vitally important in all areas of life. Hence, you may as well learn to do it well, since you have to do it anyway. The failure to do so is why so many people let themselves down badly. However, most people do not want to know the least bit about it and treat the whole subject with repugnance.

I have a friend who came up with a very useful invention. It took him several years to develop, and the benefits of this device could help many poor and needy people around the world. He sweated blood to develop this thing. Then he turned over his marketing to a so-called professional marketing company. The last I heard, he was struggling to make a sale. When I took a quick glance at the marketing these "pros" had created, it was less than mediocre.

What's wrong with this picture? You spend years on your pet project and then turn the job of getting your message out to a bunch of people who work for a fee and are not even specialists in your field. Now, some agencies may be good (actually, very few are), but the key is to check the results they have obtained for other clients. In any case, who should really be creating your marketing? Surely, the answer must be the person who knows most about the product, whatever it may be. That person is YOU!

The scenario described above is very common indeed. People often look down on selling as beneath them; as something dirty. Alternatively, they consider it the domain of the experts; something they can delegate and forget about. But if you work on the principle that YOU are always responsible for the results in your life, whatever they may be, then you are responsible for the people who represent you and the results they obtain. There is no use blaming them. In general, unless you can afford to hire excellent marketing people, the best person to do the job is always YOU.

Some top marketers even maintain that the marketing is MORE important than the product itself. In many ways, this is true. Even if you have a superb product or service, abysmal marketing will guarantee that you fail to get the message out to the people who need to hear about what you offer. Thus, by being a poor marketer, you are not in some misguided way being "pure" and above such worldly affairs. On the contrary, you are doing your customers, or whomever could benefit from knowing about what you offer, a massive disservice. You are depriving them of the benefit that they might have gained, the additional ease or pleasure that they might have had, if you had troubled yourself to do your marketing job properly!

Here is the sad truth of life. The best do NOT always make it. This is contrary to what you may have been taught. However, it is true. Many times, excellence falls by the wayside whilst the less excellent, but better marketed, go all the way. Too many people think that once they have built a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to their door. It simply does not happen that way. You could have the best product in the world, but with rotten marketing it will go nowhere fast. Alternatively, you could have a medium product, but superb marketing will shift it faster than an excellent one coupled with bad marketing.

Of course, you know this from personal experience. Doubtless, you have been in the situation, or know someone who has, where you deserved some sort of recognition or advancement as a result of your skills. Instead, it went to someone else, who was a better self-promoter. However, that person was NOT necessarily more skilled at the specific function in question. In such a situation, there is no use whining. The other person understood the rules of the game. You simply refused to learn them. Each of you received your commensurate results.

You owe it to yourself to maximize your potential. An integral part of this is knowing how to promote yourself effectively. Nobody else will do this for you as capably as you can do it yourself. Moreover, it does not matter what you are promoting either. It has been truly said that if you are trying to reach the widest audience for your product/service, take the SAME approach as you would if you were planning to make a million dollars out of it. Either way, the techniques are EXACTLY the same. This is true however pure and spiritual your product itself may be.

Moreover, do not fall into the trap of thinking that selling is a dumb person's job. If it were, copywriters (the people who write those junk letters you keep getting in the mail) would not be THE most highly paid writers of them all! Word for word, copywriters earn more than any other kind of writer, bar none. Some can charge $25,000-30,000 for a SINGLE sales letter! The really top face-to-face salespeople are NOT caricature high-pressure encyclopaedia pushers. You may be interested to learn that many of the truly excellent salespeople are actually introverts. Their particular skill is listening to, and empathizing with, the customer; understanding the person's needs and building true rapport. The all-time best life insurance salesman in America - a man who had sold literally billions of dollars worth of insurance - was so shy that when he was called upon to give a speech before an audience, he did so from behind a curtain!

Marketing is not a con. It requires empathy, recognition of a person's needs and wants, mastery of psychology, and excellent communication skills. Only mediocre salespeople manipulate their clients. The truly excellent ones are as concerned that you are just as happy with the transaction as they are.

So what can you do about all this? Learn about the science of promotion and marketing, as it best applies to you. Everyone has different needs, but it's certain that everyone DOES need sales skills in some area. It may be that you need to improve at communicating and relating to others in the workplace. You may have just written a book (or want to), and need to know how to get the message out to the world. Maybe you are an artist, and want more people to get to know about and buy your work. Don't just "wing it" and hope for the best, as so many people do. Develop an action plan of what you want to do and the resources you need to do it. There are many excellent sales and marketing courses available online and offline.

Almost everyone could benefit from learning Copywriting - the art of writing advertisements and sales letters. It teaches you to write clearly and to the point. Copywriting is all about persuasion in print. When you know how to do this, you need never fear creating an excellent product, and then have to rely on others to promote it at great expense. You can do it all yourself. Persuasion in print has powerful applications in MANY areas of your life.

Check out the works of expert marketers like Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham, Gary Halbert, Ted Nicholas, Marlon Sanders, and others like them. As regards learning how to effectively present and promote yourself, the works of people like Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy are well worth studying.

The point is that each of us is responsible for the results we get in life. So why settle for mediocrity in this key area when, with a little effort, excellence can be yours? Achieving excellence in this one core skill will impact EVERY area of your life. Think seriously about which area would best benefit from improved sales and marketing skills. Get to work on it today.

© 2001 All Rights Reserved Worldwide Asoka Selvarajah
Dr. Asoka Selvarajah is an active author/researcher on personal development and esoteric spirituality. Asoka's work helps people achieve their full potential, deepen their understanding of mystical truth, and find joy in their true soul's purpose. His new book, "The 7 Golden Secrets To Knowing Your Higher Self" is available at http://www.aksworld.com/7gs.htm Visit the Mystic Visions website, and subscribe to his FREE ezine, Aspire To Wisdom at: http://www.aksworld.com.