Attitude and Sales

A couple of months ago in an article on sales I wrote briefly about the importance of a salesman’s ATTITUDE in maintaining their sales.  This is such an incredibly important topic as to deserve a full article.  So here it is.

What do I mean by attitude?  A salesman has to remain upbeat and INTERESTED in order to be successful.  All of the many motivational sales conferences are addressed to this one point.  Yet they fail usually to give attendees a full understanding of what they are doing and why it is so important.

A salesman should be hungry for sales.  But his desire to make the sale shouldn’t overwhelm his interest in the prospect.  He should be relaxed, confident, and interested in his prospect, their requirements and desires.

It’s not the SALESMAN’S desires that make the sale.  It’s the CUSTOMERS’S desires, and the salesman’s ability to fan those desires into a buying flame.  It’s the salesman’s interest that makes it happen.

Your Life

Many new salesmen never make it in sales because they never achieve this state of interest.  This can be because their own life is too defective.  What if the salesman HAS to make that sale or else he won’t be able to make the mortgage payment? He’s going to be too introverted on his own needs.  He won’t give the prospect the kind of attention required to make the sale.

Sometimes a salesman is under stress from a bad relationship, problems with a child, parent or health or something else in his life. To succeed, the salesman either has to park it at the door when he arrives for work, or he needs to handle and get that stress out of the road.

Be a People Person

A salesman needs to be a genuine people person.  All the used-car-salesman, Dale Carnegie approaches to sales miss the boat completely on what sales is really about: It’s helping someone (the customer!) get what they really need or want!

Sales is not an adversarial relationship.  Someone who gets suckered into treating it that way is going to find their sales graph going down, down, down.

A salesman needs to be a genuine people person; someone who CARES about the prospect or customer, someone who likes people and likes to make them happy.

A Product You Know and Believe In

Now to take sales out of rose-colored-glasses territory, it is possible to sell people things that make them unhappy.  Drugs, automobiles they don’t really need and can’t afford, products that don’t actually do what they are advertised to do.

So a salesman had better be selling a product or service he believes in, one which he knows is going to satisfy the customer’s needs and which they are going to be happy owning or receiving. Of course that means the salesman has to be familiar with what he is selling, has to be familiar with its successes and when and what is the right product or service for any particular prospect.

Can you see how this works from the angle of interest?  The explanation   usually given is different.  Sure, product knowledge is important in order to explain benefits and handle objections.  But it’s just as important from the viewpoint that the salesman has to KNOW that what he’s doing is the right thing for that prospect.

When a salesman doesn’t do right by a customer – anything he himself doesn’t feel good about – it’ll knock him off that point of being interested in his prospects.

Sales Management

A whole other area is sales management – how the company deals with its sales force. Anything which strains the relationship between a salesman and his company or management will adversely affect sales because it affects the salesman’s attitude.

The classic way of accomplishing this is to reduce bonuses or commissions. I’ve seen so many managers explain why this was necessary, or the right thing to do. But if you want to crash your sales, that’ll do it every time.

Anti-Social Types

The final area I want to mention is the anti-social personality.  Every salesman is going to run into the occasional person who looks on a sales call as an opportunity to give someone a hard time.  It’s just their personality, but anyone, salesmen included, is likely to take it personally.

If you ever have walked away from a sales call ready to throw in the towel, chances are you met one of these walking disaster areas.  You’ve just got to recognize that’s what happened, and that not everyone, by a long shot, is like that.  Psychopaths are rare, but they are out there.

There’s a lot more that can be said on this subject, but that hits some of the high spots.  Hope it helps!

Richard R. Byrd