---
title: Selling Before The Buying Process Starts
description: The definition of a great salesperson – or a Demand Creator – is someone who can sell when there is nothing to buy.
---

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# [Selling Before The Buying Process Starts](https://www.liftenablement.com/blog/selling-before-the-buying-process-starts)

 Written by [Doug Davidoff](https://www.liftenablement.com/blog/author/doug-davidoff) | Sep 10, 2010 10:00:10 AM

The definition of a great salesperson – or a [Demand Creator](https://blog.imaginellc.com/are-you-a-pest-peddler-or-demand-creator) – is someone who can sell when there is nothing to buy.

I don’t mean that you can sell ice to Eskimos, but that you can get conversations started *before* the customer/prospect has identified their need and begun the buying process.  When you can do this, you gain two critical advantages:

To be able to create demand like this, you must stop thinking of yourself (or acting) as a salesperson.  Instead, you must truly become a businessperson who sells.

To begin the process of creating demand, and selling when there is nothing to buy, follow these four steps:

**Step 1:** Identify the problem you intend to solve.  This should be a high probability/high value problem that impacts the types of customers you best serve.

**Step 2: **Answer the question – “Who gets fired if this problem isn’t solved?”  The reality is, in today’s [sales drought](http://thefastgrowthblog.com/?s=drought) if the problem you want to provoke isn’t big enough for someone to potentially lose his or her job over, it’s not a big enough problem to create budget for.

**Step 3: **Determine if the person you have targeted has the authority to do something about it.  There are two types of authority worth pursuing:

**Step 4:** If the answer to Step 3 is “no,” then you must go back to Step 1 and identify a bigger problem you can impact.

[View full post](https://www.liftenablement.com/blog/selling-before-the-buying-process-starts)

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