Everyone Sells!

Harry Joiner at MarketingProfs did a great post on how one company interviews its salespeople. I think this is a great exercise, and something that every business owner should do on their own to learn strengths and weaknesses they may not know are in their sales presentation.

What was that? You don’t sell? Surely you jest!

I’m having a sense of deja vu.

Just last night I was on the phone with a friend of mine who was lamenting that she was “bad at sales” and that made her sad because “people who sell make money” – I’ve always been of the opinion…okay, not ALWAYS of the opinion…hold on, let’s start over….

My great-grandmother (the one who raised me) worked her way from a mailroom clerk to the VP of a company in downtown Chicago. She believes in hard work and late hours to pay your bills and be a good person.

She has, to the best of my knowledge ALWAYS hated salespeople.

In the store, she ignored them (she was very polite at all other times, but to her, salespeople didn’t even exist) when she went to buy a car she would talk to customer service or sales to get the information she required. If a child at the door was selling candy/wrapping paper/whatever she would glower at them disdainfully while handing over a dollar, or buying a box of cookies. (Kids trumped salespeople, but barely, that’s why she purchased…but with that “I just tasted something icky” look on her face.)

I remember asking her why she hated salespeople so much. Her basic response was that she had zero respect for people who made money without doing any real work. In her opinion, sales was about lies, big smiles, and fast money. She felt that our great country was caught in a horrible catch-22 with sales. If you wanted to be wealthy you had to sell something, but no self-respecting person would sell anything.

As much as I’m trying to keep politics out of this post, I think that what she supports is probably obscenely obvious from the post thus far. It’s also what all of her friends and family believed as well. Heck, it’s what a VAST MAJORITY of the country believes. (I can’t speak for the world, I don’t know them.)

So, of course, I’ve always been utterly fascinated by salespeople and what makes them tick. I regarded them as a species that was totally unlike my own. I was an Office Manager, you see. Most definately NOT a salesperson. Ok, I’d upsell them home insurance when they called for auto insurance…but that was because they’d get a discount…it was in their best interest…that makes it NOT sales… (you see the issue here, right?)

It wasn’t until I started a business that I really started to understand that sales isn’t a task or calling or event…so much as one huge grey area. PR is sales. Marketing is sales. Advertising is sales. Upselling and suggestive selling are (duh!) sales. Being a cashier is sales if there’s a promotion or even those paper things you write your name on and donate a dollar to charity. It’s ALL sales.

The difference, once I started to actively try and figure this out, is that there are two types of people:

• Those that accept sales exists in all things and utilize that knowledge
• People that say “I can’t sell” or “I hate selling”
• People that sell reluctantly, or only have a half formed notion of why offering everyone fries with that makes them feel a little sleazy.

You’ve probably been there at some point in your life. Whatever version of “do you want fries with that” your company was having you do. You didn’t want to say it, you thought people would be mad at you for saying it. Yet, had you gone into that very same store, and heard someone else say it to you…would you really have minded all that much? Probably not.

But when it’s you doing it – you become chicken little and the sales sky is going to fall on your head!

The key to sales is this…not only do people not mind being sold to, if it’s something they want, they’ll APPRECIATE being sold to. The only way to find out if someone wants what you have to sell is to ask.

As a service-based business, I’m selling myself. My personality, my skills, my work ethic.

It’s probably the first product I’ve ever sold that I believe in 100% – and that, to me, makes all the difference.