There’s good news for those of us who think we can’t sell. The salesman as we have known him is becoming extinct.
The unprecedented access to information that is available at our fingertips on the Internet and elsewhere is causing his habitat of hype, bravado, and manipulation to shrink, and soon he will disappear.
He’s met his match—the educated consumer.
The stereotypically aggressive salesman is being replaced by people who have the skills to access and communicate the information we need to make good buying decisions. This means that in the future, effectiveness in sales will no longer be dependent on being a certain type of person, the type of person which many of us are not and have no desire to be.
Last December I decided it was time to replace my aging Subaru and I went shopping for a car. Like more and more people today, before I set foot in the showroom I already knew what I wanted and what I could expect to pay for it, all of which was easily accomplished by visiting the websites of CarTalk, CarFax, Consumer Reports, etc.
What I was looking for in a salesperson was an “inside partner”, someone who would work with me to help me find what I wanted, or suggest alternatives that would meet my goals. What I got was a dinosaur—big body, small head, no ears—who wanted me to get so excited by the car-buying experience that I would jump at whatever he happened to have on hand. He neither respected my budget nor listened to my concerns—I told him three times while test driving an Accord that it felt too big, and the word Civic never crossed his lips. He artificially inflated the sticker price to try to make me feel like I was getting a big discout and he pressured me to close the deal that day.
I was so furious about spending my precious Saturday afternoon being hustled and not listened to that I went right home and found a Civic on the Internet with the features I wanted at a dealership down the road. I brought it the following Monday.
Clearly this salesman and I live in two different worlds. And his world is dying as more and more people let their fingers do the shopping via a computer keyboard. He was so preoccupied with his own sales agenda that he totally missed the opportunity to become a resource in my search, thereby building a relationship which might have resulted in his being able to sell two cars, since my husband was thinking about buying one too.
WHY IS THIS GOOD NEWS?
The stereotypically aggressive salesman is being replaced by people who have the skills to access and communicate the information we need to make good buying decisions. This means that in the future, effectiveness in sales will no longer be dependent on being a certain type of person, the type of person which many of us are not and have no desire to be.
According to the futurist Harry S. Dent, Jr., in the Information Age we have entered, the classic salesman is being superseded by those who have previously been in support roles. The solo voice is giving way to the backup singers, the ones who are able to sing in harmony with the customer. The people who know how to put the customer’s agenda first are moving to the frontline.
This is a new way of going about the business of selling, whether you’re trying to sell merchandise to a customer, or a service to a client, or an idea to your boss, or your skillset to a potential employer, and I find it incredibly exciting. Because it is far more inclusive, more people will be able to master it, and that will give the person who knows how to get things done the edge over the fast talker.
What’s more, this new stage in the evolution of the sales professional has come just when we need it most, when the Internet and other forces are creating a global marketplace and along with it competitive pressures which means that everyone is “in sales” of one form or another.
EVERYONE IS IN SALES
In the Industrial Age, a person’s job was defined by a box on an org chart and a concise job description. As long as you lived up to it, you could look forward to a retirement party after you’d been with the company 25 or more years and it didn’t matter that you’d rather hang by your heels than sell.
Today, however, to obtain or retain employment, and to grow professionally, you must contribute to the flow of revenue through the organization. This means that you will have to serve, and serve well, your customers, whether they’re internal or external or both. You will have to be fully engaged in a sales process which makes them understand the value you bring to them.
Even if you had the luxury of not having to think of yourself as a “sales type” in your job, the permanent changes that have occurred in the workplace over the last couple of decades now mean that you aren’t going to be able to avoid having to go out and sell yourself to a new employer every 4 to 6 years. The truth is that, like it or not, looking for work is a sales “job”.
While there is no way to escape becoming proficient at sales—what I call consultative sales (next month’s column will be entirely devoted to this topic)—the fact that the old ways of selling are becoming extinct means that you don’t have to dress like a car salesman or become a master manipulator, like Ricky Roma in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, to succeed.
In fact the opposite will be true. It will be your ability to make genuine connections and keep your attention on the other person’s agenda rather than your own that will make you effective.
