Fake It ‘Til You Make It

When you are first starting out in a sales position, especially if you are selling big money items, it is very difficult to secure those first few sales. For many people it feels unnatural to approach someone who they don’t even know and pitch their product to them. Sales in one industry can be very different from sales in another, and picking up on the subtleties of each sales environment can take some time. That being said, new salesmen oftentimes face a lot of rejection when they are first starting out and it can be very easy to get discouraged about your performance. As we talked about in class, a major part of overcoming this is distinguishing between the “real you” and the “role you.” This means that losing a sale is no reflection on you as a person, it just means that your sales skills could use some improvement. This is an important way of not allowing yourself to get discouraged, but this I would argue is not quite enough.

Next time you are in the market for a car swing by a new car dealership somewhere. One of the first things you will probably notice about at least a few of the salesmen is their clothing. They will all have freshly pressed uniforms, dress pants, and expensive dress shoes on. In addition to this you will probably notice that the majority of them are wearing some very high dollar watches, like Invicta’s and Rolex’s, and that many of them will carry around custom gold embossed business card holders, wear expensive sunglasses, or have a plethora of rings on their hand. You might be tempted to think that these are all the best of the best- the salesmen who make $200,000 a year flipping corvettes every other day, but 99% of the time your perceptions are completely contrary to reality.

You see one of the first things they teach you when you start in a sales job like that is that to be successful, you need to act successful. This grand display that many salesmen put on is most of the time just that- a display- but I think that their is a good message to be learned from this. Nobody wants to deal with a guy who looks like he lives in a tent and hasn’t showered in a week. They want to deal with the guy who looks like he’s been selling cars his whole life. This means that when you are first getting into a sales job, one of the first things you need to do is act successful. Look at what the experienced salesmen are doing and copy them. You don’t need to be successful to act successful, and if customers think you look like you know what you are doing, it won’y be long before you start making sales.