My “Sales in the Startup” class was assigned to preform a five minute sales conversation as part of the final grade. This project which involved a single student and the professor was designed to give students a real world look into sales and what a sales call might look and feel like. although the student was allowed some control over the situation they had to wrestle with a lot of uncertainties. As I watched a lot of my fellow classmates complete their assignment I began to notice a lot of similarities. The first similarity I noticed was that the more the salesperson spoke the less control they had. It was interesting as typical and maybe even convetional sales training involves throwing a lot of information in the direction of the prospect. This results in one of the worst outcomes in the world of sales, a product sold to a customer that is not a good fit for them. This can happen in many different ways but it is the duty of the salesperson to prevent that from happening. The reason why it is important to not speak as much is because it allows customers to share their experience. The second thing I noticed was how important digging for pain was. A lot of times, as seen in Sandler, the prospect is not being fully honest during the sales conversation. Although this might be because they are lying it might be purely because they do not know what their pain is and its is the salespersons duty to help find it and hopefully solve it. I noticed that this did not happen if the prospect began to ask questions. If they began to ask questions then that meant the salesperson could not dig for pain.
BoweryJE22