By Stefano Virgilli — Last week I had lunch with my friend. I will call him Mr M in this column. He has been working as a salesperson for 20 years. Mr M is now 43. All of his professional life was spent in sales. Last year he joined a consulting firm based in Europe and he was tasked to open the Middle East market. During the lunch we had, he confessed to me that he has already quit the company and he is serving his last month. When I hear such stories I try to look at them from both sides. From my friend’s point of view, the company wants to enter a market that cannot be seized with the current pricing and service structure.
From the company’s perspective I can only guess that they might be seeing my friend as a failure who quit for lack of results.
The interesting fact about sales is that nearly 90 per cent of the people in the world dislike the idea of being a salesperson. Despite so, approximately 40 per cent of the working world population have in the job scope some tasks related to sales.
An even more interesting fact about sales is that 100 per cent of the people in this world actually… buy! So if everybody buy, why are we so afraid to sell?
It turns out that majority of those who dislike sales are quite afraid of rejection. This is a normal human emotion that builds up due to circumstances from our childhood to our adulthood. Many don’t know that the cells of the brain we activate when we think of the past are the same that we activate when we think of the future.
Hence it is normal that if we have faced rejection in the past — and we all did — the actions we plan for future are going to be affected by similar experience occurred in the past. So our actions are based on our expected outcome, not specifically on the desired one. This behaviour makes the difference between wanting to close a sale or being afraid to engage in a sales pitch.
My friend Mr M is certainly a professional in sales and he has developed a sort of thick skin when it come to rejection. Hence he is certainly not afraid of a “no”, neither he is afraid of closing a million dollars sales. But for majority of the non-professional sales people — whom might have never closed a million dollar deal before — the expected outcome for such pitch is sure failure, whereas a professional salesperson is able to project success even after multiple failures.
A professional salesperson knows that success is only achievable after many failures, but the average newbie in sales takes failure as a permanent status that cannot be changed.
Mr M has also developed a sort of guts feeling that helps him to understand, not whether the client would buy, but whether the product or service would sell. For me at the beginning this concept was difficult to grasp, but then it became more clear as Mr M articulated it further. He is basically saying that some products would not sell regardless of how professional is the sales person. Hence, for him to stay in the same company would have been a waste of time.
He told me that he did not fear rejection, but rather he was sure the service provided by his company was not competitive enough for the targeted market. In other words he did not doubt his skills nor his determination, but he has been around long enough in the industry to know what the market would accept and what would reject.
He tried to bring up his views with the management, but the CEO seemed more focus on KPIs and immediate goals rather than building a long-term strategy. Hence, my friend Mr M, decided to quit.
Such stories happen everyday in almost any organisation. The management has expectations based on their own vision and KPIs, whereas the salespeople often sense the market from the “battlefield”.
Despite so, one of the greatest philosopher of all times, Confucius, said, “The man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can’t, are both right.”
Self-fulfilling prophecies are quite common in the sales profession. If the salesperson stops believing in the product or the service, there are only two possible outcomes: 1. He or she stays, but without delivering any results, or, 2. He or she simply quits.
— vs.voxlab.net@gmail.com
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