Are you selling right?

Till sometime back I would wonder about people pursuing sales as a career – it would amaze me how one has the capability of pursuing the customer, afterall the trait is not easy to learn and probably convincing people is one of the toughest nuts to crack.

Over time I realized that sales is not a mutually exclusive term to any particular career path but it is omnipresent no matter what you field of work you choose to pursue in life. At the end of the day it is about exhibiting your capability, and how well you exhibit it is sales.

Sales is no rocket science, seems fairly simple to understand on the outside as per definition. But is it really as simple as what the definition says (as per Wikipedia: Sales is activity related to selling or the amount of goods or services sold in a given time period). Well no, sales is not that transactional as what the definition states it as. And probably that is the reason a lot of people and companies falter on this crucial aspect. What they fail to recognize is that a bookish knowledge of selling along with innumerous y-o-y revenue growth graphs and pie charts of market acquisition are great to learn, but probably sales is one domain which takes a more practical route of understanding rather than the case studies quoted in the b-school curriculums.

So what makes some companies and people crack the toughest of the deals? For that you need to answer if you are doing the following things:

1)    Identify the problem, offer a solution: what many people end up doing to achieve those multi digit targets is hard selling. What does that mean? By definition hard selling is a direct, forceful sales technique, and that is where most people falter. They try to seal the deal by forcing the end user to buy and trying to convince how their product/solution is the best in the market. What they need to realize that the way to do sales it is more scientific and psychological than pushing your product or service to the customer. So what to do then? You have to break the clutter in your head that your way of approaching the customer is the best and the only way. Do not look to pounce on to the opportunity to sell, first identify the customers problem, you have to be a problem solver here. The more you are able to relate to the customers’ problem the better and clearer solution you would be able to provide in a more relatable fashion. You need to bridge the distance between the end customers’ problem and your solution by you way of filling in the gap via your understanding. The more problem solver approach you take, the more trusted, reliable you become.

2)    Listen to your customer: As a sales person you need to be a good listener. You cannot be providing any solution without being an active listener. So why is active listening so important? It demarcates you from all the rest of the people who are focusing on making a sale and not on the person making the purchase. Once you start listening and treating your account more like a person and less like a revenue point you will be able to build a better rapport and understanding the true need of the client. That will always help you come up with the best solutions. As it is often said, you have 2 ears and one mouth, during selling use it in the same proportion. Listening to the customer always offers the best insights. It not only helps in getting the most accurate feedback which not only helps to fill the gaps but also with product iterations. And is that it? No. because what build the best is trust. Your active listening gives the customer an assurance that you are just not selling, but you are listening to them.

3)    Patience is the key: generally a sales cycle does not adhere to a stipulated time period, depending on the company/client is the sales cycle could be long or short. But the problem is people look for instant gratification, so if the deal is taking longer than the anticipated time they tend to lose their cool and start getting pushy and aggressive. This could be fatal to an account or even worse to you as a sales person- where people will start perceiving you as being a pushy salesman going to any length to make the sale. A tag you wouldn’t want to go along with your name. It is understandable at the end of the day everyone feels pressurized with the targets, and it is but natural to feel so, but just let those numbers make you keep you moving the needle and not reach a point of self-doubt or aggression. Both of which is hazardous.

4)    It’s not one solution fits all (be flexible in approach): No book teaches you to do be doing sales in this practical world. What a book cites are some extraordinary examples of sales done well, or gives cases where it completely faltered. Reading them definitely gives an insight on the to-do’s and to-be-avoided situations, but sales is not like a mathematical equation where you can plug in an existing solution to give you a desired result. What one needs to do is constantly listen, understand, evaluate and improvise. Lot of times we come across cases where a person is hell bent on selling a particular proposition, but one solution does not apply to all. So what do you? In situations more often than not you can’t tweak the product, so alter the proposition it offers. A product or a service is generally capable of solving more than one problem. So what you need to offer is the proposition which best fits the customer requirement.

5)    Identified the right connect?: Though I have put this point towards the later part of the article it does not dilute the impact of it. There are a lot of times that sales cycle takes longer than usual, and it is not because of the product misfit or the convincing skills. It is the because of the time that has been lost in trying to identify the correct point of contact. So use all your LinkedIn contacts, Angelist network to find the person you are looking for. One should never under estimate the power of the LinkedIn emails. A lot of times a cold email might result in a warm pipeline for you. As the rule goes, everyone is 6 connections away from Kevin bacon! So if the rule can connect you to kevin bacon with just 6 degrees of separation, be pretty sure finding out the correct POC in the organization would be simpler than that.

6)    Relationship building: So many companies and so many people selling the same thing. How are you and your proposition different? Break the question and then answer the former, how are you different? All the people who are wizards at selling have had one thing in common, they just did not crack another account, but made a connect- that goes beyond the number achievement of target completion. What does this really mean? A lot of people will do the sales, some better than others, but only a few of them are equally proactive for any post sales issues, queries and amends. But this is the crucial part! If you nail this right you have a customer for life

None of the aforesaid things are too complicated to comprehend, in fact most of us know about these but mostly where people fail is in the execution. Sales has for long been referred as an art. How you take those prying consultative questions and then apply them to your conversation with your customers is an art. How you manage the personal and professional factors that affect every deal is art. So whether you are a rainmaker or a peddler the basics of this art will always remain the same, it is them upto the artist(salesperson) the picture he paints.