Have you ever known or heard of some­one that could, ‘sell an ice cube to an Eskimo’? How are those peo­ple so suc­cess­ful at sell­ing? Did they just hap­pen to find the right prod­uct to pro­mote? Did they just hap­pen to find their ‘per­fect mar­ket’? Did they fig­ure out the best times to approach peo­ple? The answer is yes, yes, yes and then some; a great sales­per­son is a mix­ture of all of those things and a whole lot more.

Who can be a salesperson?

Any­one can sell some­thing; truly there are some who have attrib­utes that give them advan­tages over oth­ers but regard­less, any­one can sell some­thing. Peo­ple are more recep­tive and will­ing to hold audi­ence with peo­ple that carry them­selves well socially and who are phys­i­cally appeal­ing. Every­one has weak­nesses that would not favor the career of a sales­per­son but the truly suc­cess­ful sales­peo­ple are those who have iden­ti­fied their weak­nesses and found equi­table ways to mit­i­gate them.

Sell­ing 101

Would you be sur­prised if I told you that sell­ing your prod­uct to another per­son has very lit­tle to do with the prod­uct itself? It is very true; the art of sell­ing a prod­uct is actu­ally more about sell­ing the per­son that is sell­ing the prod­uct than the prod­uct itself.

Here is an exer­cise to demon­strate my point; pic­ture a white room with two tables in it to start with. On each table is a pack­age of laun­dry soap and behind each table is a per­son offer­ing to sell you the soap. The sales­per­son on the left is a middle-aged male that hasn’t shaved or bathed in a few days with exces­sively long fin­ger nails and is wear­ing worn out cloth­ing that looks like it should be thrown away. The sales­per­son on the right is a middle-aged male that is very well groomed with man­i­cured fin­ger­nails and is wear­ing a clean, freshly pressed suit and has used a mod­est amount of cologne.

Both sales­men are offer­ing the same prod­uct at the same price; who do you buy from?  Try the exer­cise with your eyes closed and thoughts cleared. I can’t speak for you but I can tell you that more than not, con­sumers would buy the soap from the well groomed salesman.

The art of sell­ing is all about rela­tion­ship sell­ing; if you can get the con­sumer to accept you as a per­son and make an emo­tional con­nec­tion with you then you will be able to sell them just about anything.

Ethics

Ethics essen­tially comes down to a sim­ple mantra, “don’t take advan­tage of peo­ple”. For exam­ple, a bank’s loan offi­cer shouldn’t approve a loan for some­one that they feel can’t afford it even though they meet the loan qual­i­fi­ca­tions. Once you estab­lish a con­nec­tion with the con­sumer you need to take great care not to abuse that con­nec­tion and not sell the con­sumer prod­ucts that you don’t believe in, wont ben­e­fit the con­sumer or has no real value to the con­sumer. If you do, the con­sumer will even­tu­ally real­ize they have been duped and will not only not buy from you again but will tell an aver­age of 2 – 3 peo­ple not to buy from you either.