Learning to be good at sales can seem a little counterintuitive, because the best sales people aren’t loud, aggressive, or pushy. Just like a good friend is, a good salesperson listens, engages, and selfless. This gets to the heart of Core Concept #5: never ask an unasked question.
I won’t exhaust you with tips on how to be a good friend, but I will highlight key qualities that a good friend contains. A good friend is patient, slow to speak, and engaged with the other. Everyone has a desire to be seen, heard, and loved. A friend who interrupts or assumes, leaves you feeling frustrated and overlooked. You can’t properly connect with someone unless you’ve made the effort to understand them as people. Being a good salesman is quite the same.
In sales, the best way to sell is to understand the customer, and the best way to understand the customer is to ask questions and listen. When a salesperson treats the customer as a means to an end, they have already lost their customer. This is because before a customer is a customer, they are a person, and people have needs, wants, and feelings. When you skip the relational part of the sales process, you wade into the dangerous waters of overstepping and/or assuming. This is dangerous because you are not thinking about the customer’s stated needs and it deflects the interest away from those needs and the core issue that you are trying to solve. Instead of telling the customer what they need, the best thing to do is ask questions and listen. No one understands the problem more than the one experiencing it, and by stepping back and giving them the opportunity to express it, you are not only more equipped to find the solution, but you’ve also gained the customer’s trust. Both of these are crucial in completing a sale and building a relationship with the customers that could lead to more sales in the future.
BoweryJE22
The analogy between selling and relationships is spot on because as you showed in your post, they are extremely similar. In a way, you are kind of trying to sell yourself in both situations by demonstrating that you are worth spending time with and how you will be helpful in their times of need. Learning things from relationships can translate directly to sales and vice versa.
I like how you drew the parallel that the salesperson is supposed to be a friend to the buyer. I don’t normally think of it in those terms but that’s really helpful.
Sales should absoutley be approached relationally. You want to build a geneuine relationship because one, it is an ethical way to care for clients, and two, long-term sales relationships produce the highest amount of revenue in addition to refferals to people they know. These warm leads can be very hard to come by, so it is all the more reason to make sure that you are being relational im sales.
This was extremely well written as always. I really liked the comparison you made with sales as a whole and human relationships. In that regard, I agree completely. You must care for your customer much as you care for a friend or even a family member. By keeping that in mind you can grow the relationship and they just might become your longest and best customers. Because they trust you.