Great Sellers LOVE Their Clients!!

A super well-trained sales person can be just as much a liability as an untrained sales person. 

A thousand years ago when I was an inside sales rep on a big sales team, the management invested a lot of money to get us Sandler Sales Training. 

This is really good stuff, all about finding pain and overcoming objections, asking questions and skillfully leading any conversation down the path you want it to take. 

We had training every single week, and some of us got really good at it. 

But one day, there was a murmur around the office.

My coworker, Scott, was in trouble.

A customer had called all the way up to the CEO and complained about him.

Accused him of being extremely rude, treating her really badly on the phone, etc. Apparently it was bad enough to call the CEO.

We looked at the transcript of the call, and honestly we sales people were a little confused.

Scott was only saying exactly what they had been teaching us in Sales class.

He didn’t miss a trick! Ask these questions. Use this tactic here to dig deeper into the pain.

He did everything right so…what had gone wrong? 

Well we learned a very important lesson that day, which is that all the best sales training in the world still leaves out the critical ingredient that makes a really great seller:

you need to love your clients!

See, when you take all the tactics of sales, but leave out the heart, it’s easy for the sales call to become a battle.

This is, unfortunately, what gives sales a bad name. The idea of the Sleasy Car Salesman, preying on unsuspecting victims to sell them a junk car they don’t need. 

But a great salesperson’s job is to make their customer’s life better.

And to do that genuinely, you’ve got to have their best interests at heart.

You ask the right questions at the right time, run your call in just the right way, but behind all of that, the motivation can’t be “I’ve got to make this sale”.

It always has to be, “I’ve got to help this person.” 

Scott’s mistake had been that he’d let himself go too far down the side of using Sales Methodology to get what he wanted.

He took all the tools in his tool belt and threw them at the customer in a barrage- one right after the other.

Rather than the kind of experience that every brand hopes their customers have, he came off as pushy, impersonal, and the worst: combative.

Perhaps you’ve also been the recipient of kind of sales pitch...

Anyone can course correct here, of course.

Ask yourself before you go into your sales calls this week:

In the zeal to hit my goals, have my customers my enemies?

Is every phone call I take a battle of wills to see who bends first?

Do I see the money in their pocket rather than the person themself?

Get great at sales. Learn all you can.

But always prioritize humility.

Prioritize listening, understanding, and make your job about bringing GOOD NEWS to everyone you come in contact with. 

That’s how you become a great sales person.