The Truth About Sales Professionals
This is scheduled to run in the Capital Press in April of 2006I spend a good deal of my time advocating for farmers to move into a more active role in the sales of their products. I believe that one of the only ways for farmers to ensure the long-term viability of their operations is for them to become more vertically integrated: to either add value to their products or to create their own sales and distributions channels.
This is not easy work. I know this because I have done it for several years now. However, I have learned a few things about the process of producing and selling food that might help you when you go out into the often cruel world of sales.
Good sales professionals meet and interact with a wide array of diverse people. They try to find something memorable in everyone they meet and they work to remember people’s names. The true professionals build relationships with everybody they meet regardless of whether or not that person may be a viable prospect. The greatest sales professionals build wide and diverse networks of friends. They sincerely care about the people in their network. Salespeople who try to fake this are easy to spot and harder to stomach.
People who are generally miserable tend to take it out on strangers. Since good sales professionals meet lots of people, they are frequently abused. However, the great ones minister to the miserable. They understand that people act the way they do because they are either in a good or a bad place in their life. People who believe that unhappiness is an impermanent condition are generally positive, while those who believe that unhappiness is permanent, are generally miserable.
By ministering to the miserable, great sales professionals can actually affect positive change in the lives of those they touch. Sometimes, all that this requires is looking an unhappy person in the eye, sincerely asking them how they are doing, and listening to the response. Often, the resultant change in demeanor is nothing short of miraculous.
The greatest sales professionals are those who do the most homework and apply the least pressure. They often understand their customers better than their customers understand themselves. They follow the trends that affect their customers and are quick to find solutions to their customer’s problems regardless of whether or not they stand to make immediate gains. In the process, they extend their network to include other companies that provide the solutions to these problems.
In short, the greatest sales professionals truly care about their customers. They represent quality products and their innate talents, coupled with the quality of their products, make them indispensable to their customers. They possess integrity, empathy, courage, and tenacity. They understand that “No” simply means “Yes” with an unspecified set of conditions, and they realize that there is an audience for every product at every price point, however small it may be. They know that good deeds are always rewarded, that the reward is seldom immediate, and that the greatest rewards are frequently non-monetary.
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posted by Brian J. Kenny @ 3:40 PM
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