Is Sales a science or an art – An argument with an interviewer?
It has been quite an intriguing experience when my education credentials and sales certifications were discarded in the first few seconds of the interview,He was a senior sales director of a $ 7 billion enterprise. He stated sales is actually an inbuilt talent, an art being street smart, not something which could be learnt a science. Oh My God ! now how do I contradict this?
Things prevailing on my mind at that moment.
a)Is the interviewed looking at resilience factor, so I combat with all logical conclusions and not give up without a strong fight?
b)The Interviewer with a strong background of 15+ yrs of field sales experience must genuinely have resistance to this idea, The advent of Inside sales are now shaping the future of organizations, So the question now is that should I subvert his ideas and experience and relate how productive this new process..
c)Or am I wasting my time as the hiring manager, my potential boss as anticipated is like senior sales leaders who would use insurmountable pressure tactics on you to deliver targets without any logical reasoning. Is it truly worth taking that risk…. Having said that I am not afraid of taking risks but not at the cost of my health. (That week, I was mourning the death of my mom’s younger brother aged 52 and we lost him due to extreme stress followed by a heart attack ).
I want to live a longer and a healthier life, Sometimes you have to evaluate is it worth the pain!
The above thoughts flashed on my mind …Time was running out ...I quickly came back to my senses and explained him vividly the how sales has changed over time, Using a common phrase “Nobody likes being sold to” we now need to avoid hard knocks , cold calls and using fancy scripts which would depict the sales greed in the tone.
The way forward is about looking for mutually beneficial partnerships, prospecting approach, adequate research on the potential clients, business through referrals.
Most important is effective marketing, story boarding, pitching our case studies and testimonials and how we helped solve the problem by avoiding technical jargon. Eventually I was not selected probably for other reasons.
However this experience had a lasting impression on me, I was always clear as a Sales person it was important for me to focus on understanding from the client’s perspective.
Client is investing time so the first thing that would attract is the what is he benefiting, and what kind of advantages it has followed by features and your company padding.
The recent economic times was celebrating Flip kart’s journey to $1 billion, it never spoke about how it made life easy for users to purchase on line….. Cash on delivery, buying process is reduced to a very few steps etc.
Amazon did not fail to realize the potential of Indian market but it failed to realize the problem in its e commerce portal…. Ease of doing business, user experience, and security.
When companies talk about their financial success does it not mean that they have robbed us to make that wealth, Have they offered any significant difference to pay that premium, This paradigm shift is very important for us to focus, before we evaluate to sell our product to potential client it is important how does the our solution suffice the needs of the client, have we identified what would we offer significantly different.
If you find someone over achieving his target by five to ten times then there is definite not potential integrity issue you would need to battle up as a leader.
GE, Toyota, Motorola and other companies have been using six sigma and various other tools to improve quality, I recommend you should use the same energies to improve sales quality by adopting scientifically proven statistical sales techniques which guarantees predictable revenues.
I am writing this to assert that a sales is a definite science and you would need to master it by researching deeply from a client’s perspective. Question skilfully and listen patiently.
Not the other way around.
You could also look at my article "how to deal with sales pressure".
Happy Selling !
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