Sales Tactics from The Office

This past week in class we watched a clip from the office and I think that it brought up some really good points with how to sell to people. In this Clip Michael and Jan were trying to sell to a potential client but they both had different tactics. Jan was trying to get straight to the point and immediately  started talking about business.  Michael on the other hand wanted to take a different approach. He decided to play the long game and try to let the sales talk come up naturally in the conversation. Michael’s plan ended up getting the sale in the long run but I do think that Jan’s approach could still work. I think that you can get straight to business but it takes some prior research. If you want to get straight to the business I think that it would be beneficial to do some research about your prospective customer. This research could give you some details about who they are and what they want. If the find out the customer is running on a deadline and does not have time to wait around then that could be a green light to get right down to business. On the other hand, if you can not find anything out about the customer you should play the long game like Michael did. Michael took his time to figure out what the pain points of his customer were. Once he figured those out he was able to formulate a strategy to be able to make the sale and meet the customers need. While there could be a time and a place for Jan’s sales tactics I do think that most of the time the way that Michael went about the sale is going to be much more beneficial.