Quick…what are the top 5 beliefs that pop in your head when I say the word salesperson?

Don’t edit your thoughts, just what comes into your head when you think about salespeople in general. Salespeople that you deal with in your everyday life; whether you are making work purchases, shopping for groceries and clothes, or making large household purchases like appliances or even cars.

 

If you’re like most people, some of the words that come into your mind are “pushy, arrogant, liars, hard sellers, used car salesmen and even sleazy”. There may be a sprinkling of positives like “knowledgeable” or “helpful”, but in over 12 years of running workshops on sales, over 80% of the responses we get to this question are negative.

 

This doesn’t mean that sales people actually are all these things, it just seems that somehow society has programmed us to have these negative impressions. On the contrary, I believe that the vast majority of salepeople are actually out there doing their best; it’s just that they fall into the trap of being product pushers.

 

What’s a product pusher? That’s a salesperson who talks about nothing other than their product. For example, try shopping for a laptop. I did this. I walked into three different retailers and had the exact same experience.

“Can I help you?’.

“Yes, I need a new laptop because mine has died”. (By the way, this is a red hot buying signal).

“Well, I think you should look at the ABC brand because it’s got a gazillion megabytes of RAM, a trillion megahertz speed and a screen resolution of a billion pixels”.

 

Not a single question. Amazingly not one sales person felt they needed to know what use I was going to put this knew laptop to. Was it for work or home? Crunching spread sheets or running the latest version of Mortal Combat?

Why do sales people do this? I think it’s because most sales people themselves share these negative beliefs. They subconsciously know that you are approaching them with these underlying negative views. Instead of engaging you in conversation and asking you some questions to find out your needs, they retreat to the safety of the one thing they have positive beliefs about – their product. So they prattle on about all its features while boring you to tears and making you feel like they don’t care. Actually they are trying to be helpful, but don’t quite know how to do it.

 

If you want to change your sales results or those of your team, the first step isn’t fancy “closing lines” or techniques to “pin the customer down”. The first step is understanding the beliefs you have about what selling truly is, and how these beliefs impact on everything you do as a salesperson.