My Take On Sales

What Is Sales?

Sales is a multi-facet beast, to understand all aspects will take an eternity, as sales are based on our understanding of psychology and as our society evolves, so does our understanding of the human mind.

Sales is the transference of confidence in its simplest form, you need to be 100% confident in your product or service. As I dove deeper into it, I noticed that it is more than just confidence and I had to understand the conscious aspects of sales. More importantly I had to learn about the subconscious aspects of sales. When I took a broad look at Sales, it showed me that it’s was actually just communication, at the highest level and I needed to understand the emotional responses I gave off throughout my interactions.

Think about when I engage with others, I look for energy levels, body language, the tonality of their voice, the meaning of their words and most of all emotional stability. The last one most won’t see the link but as I looked closer into my life, I noticed that I tend to avoid emotionally unstable people and I looked to minimise any time with them. Why do I do this, well it comes back to an understanding that we are lights and energy in our simplest form and unstable people tend to require more energy from me in those interactions.

I found that I am sensitive to the energy levels of others, when someone is emotionally unstable I feel this and it makes me feel less comfortable around certain people. I have seen this in sales interactions where prospects will avoid emotionally unstable people and even avoid confronting them so not to upset the balance.

History

I wanted to give you my take on the history of sales from the ’80s through until now. sales have been a part of the business culture since the move from a feudal society into one of the industrial/ capitalism society that was created in the late 1800s. Sales has been an important aspect throughout the evolution of business, without salespeople how would a business, identify potential customers, start conversations directed at finding out if their customer need the products or services.

An important evolution of sales, has been the evolution of ethics and how past actions have left consumers today have disdain for sales people in general. Leading up to the ’80s we had a lot of door to door/ in home appliance salespeople and they relied on heavily building strong/ honest relationships in a short period of time. The shift in the ’80s, to the adoption of using phones to engage with potential customers and cold calling required salespeople to create tempting hooks in the first seconds of the call.

Unfortunately this saw some salespeople using unethical means to acquire sales and lead to many government interventions to protect consumers. Some key issues revolving around legalities/ ethical conduct, where many salesmen realised that if they embellished the truth around the results the product or service would get and the rise of high pressure sales tactics. While this would lead to exponential increases in sales, it did create a detached culture, where ethics were not the responsibility of the salesperson. Which in today’s society, would legally and ethically be identify this as illegal behaviours.

In today’s market governments and consumer watchdogs, protect consumers against this sort of behaviour and with the increase in consumer demand for ethical acts. I wanted to touch on the evolution of manipulation in my eyes with the use of fear, pressure, boxing in strategies and many more tools of sales/ influence as they would call them. As my understanding of psychology grew, I identified how large companies had invested heavily into finding ways to use this knowledge as a tool and most of them did not have their customers best interests in mind.

take for example car sales industry, fast food chains, the beauty industry and more all investing in developing strategies to maximise every lead. You will see it a lot today in telemarketing, scamming, media and the government all utilising fear, manipulation, limiting information and flat out lies to sell their products. So this makes it easy to understand why consumers have a high level of resentment toward sales agents and why there is a high level of mistrust in the market. How can we as sales agents overcome this, by understanding that this is just the environment we operate in and the onus is with the sales agent to take responsibility for taking the steps to resolve this negative stigma.

The Process Of a Sale

sales is a process, like any good process it should be simple, but it needs to be very thorough so that you can find out your prospects needs, wants and pain points. There are 4 stages of the sale process qualifying, presenting, overcoming objections and following up for the close.

Qualifying

No matter what you sell your sale should always consist of a highly intense information gathering session where your aim is to find out your prospects wants, needs, beliefs and pain points. From this, you should have a comprehensive understanding of your prospects motivations, challenges and most importantly you will find out where their focus is on current pain in their life or business.

Presenting

Once you have this information you now have enough information to begin your presentation, by understanding where your prospects is currently and where they want to be you can tailor your presentation to be highly personal to them. The key to understanding your prospect inside and out give you leverage when your prospect lies to themselves and you. As they will do this because it is ingrained into our psychology to avoid conflict and the easiest way to do this is by misdirection.

Overcoming Objections

So every prospect will misdirect you, only if you fail to understand their motivations for taking action and why they want and need your product. When you tailor your presentation to your prospect’s motivations for taking action you will be able to give them a highly personalised experience. Now in saying this you should never use high-pressure tactics to move your prospect forward as this will only lead you to burn relationships and push your prospect further towards other providers. The key is to work with your prospect to get them an outcome, the key in communication is to have an open discussion about their wants and needs. If they are failing to take action you can talk with them about how not taking action will negatively affect them in the future and what will fail to resolve their problem cause them.

Closing

Now to show a prospect the negative aspects of not taking action, is not a bad thing as sometimes we do not fully understand the outcomes of our actions. The benefit to doing this right is you will build a stronger relationship with your prospect and you will develop a higher level of trust with them. The key here is to put your prospect before your profits, as pressuring someone to buy because you want a commission will be very see-through and when you help a prospect take action because it’s in their best interest is see-through as well.

Different Forms of Sales

In everyday life, you sell every minute of the day, be it selling yourself on happiness or selling yourself on benefits of doing tasks and mostly in love do we have to sell the hardest. For example, think back to your high school days of dating where we would promote how cool we were and it was promoted through society to use manipulation to get the girls. Personally, I lived this life when I was a young adult, thankfully I was able to change this behaviour, unfortunately, I was not able to see not the damage I did to young women and this for me became a reason to question the socially acceptable behaviour.

For me personally, this has been very damaging, as when I realised that what I was doing was highly damaging and worst of all there was no purpose to it other than fitting in. What chose to take from this, was to never define my standards or ethics of how I treat others based on what others think is ok or ethical. This is the same in your business, job, marketing, sales and you cannot use the excuse “but others said it’s ethical or ok”. You need to be accountable to you, not anyone else, as I would rather be alone, be broke, lose a job, be told I am a failure or whatever others may say because inside I want to feel ethical on the inside.

When I realised this I started to see all of the negative stigma around sales agents, to which I was able to then communicate effectively and understand my clients perspective in a deeper way. Now days I would argue that all sales agents start every interaction at a disadvantage, as the start of a relationship with your client has been set by all previous experiences. By understanding my clients perspective better, it allows me to tailor the information and presentation more directly to my client to elicit an emotional response.

face to face

In face to face sales, we need to understand previous experiences consumers have with sales agents as a whole, but also we need to understand what experiences those other agents in our industry have given. Because if you overlook these factors you may miss that, for example, last week this consumer may have experienced a high-pressure sales agent and this would leave that consumer hating sales agents. So when you approach them, they will replay the emotional experience, that this other agent made them feel and now in their mind they are back in that experience. So even if you are different, to them you are the same, no matter how much you try to promote how ethical you are and your company to a consumer why would they trust you. As a professional sales agent, especially in a face to face interaction, you need to be aware of this and you need to regardless of the sale give the consumer an A+ experience.

phone sales

Unlike face to face sales, you lose the ability to measure their body language and you also cannot see facial expressions. Now, why is this so important to be able to see facial expressions and body language, simply put when we communicate with each other. We feed off of the subconscious traits given off in facial expressions and body language to be able to gauge how our information is landing. You can tell just by how some face changes as to if they agree, understand or have been offended and in a sales situation, these are how you measure your prospects readiness to move.

When selling over the phone it is important to understand tonality as the tones we use when communicating are a close second to our body language and the use of our tonality is vital when conveying information to your prospect. As just with the use of tonal shifts in your voice, will imply different messages to your prospect and can be the difference between a prospect actively listening to you or ignoring you calling bullshit. It is vital when selling over the phone to understand how to manipulate your vocal tonalities to add more impact to the words you say. But also you are trying to keep their attention fully focused on your information and you want to use tonalities to lead prospects to follow your focus. If you do this right the conversation will be highly engaging for the prospect, they will focus on and understand the important information you provide.

The next aspect is conditioning your client to understand you are the expert in this field and nothing says hey I know nothing like someone who talks in a monotone. You want your prospect to feel like you are deeply passionate and professional especially when you are telling them to buy your product or service. Sales is a performance, the key to running a good show is to be confident and passionate about educating your prospect about how your product or service will solve their problems. The onus is on you as the sales agent to make sure for the first seconds of the engagement you are perceived as the expert and to throughout the call remain in that position. No one will trust you if you do not put the effort in to win and hold their trust you need to be better it’s that simple. When selling over the phone you have two tools to do this your vocal tonalities and the words you use to formulate your presentation.