During my sales internship at an online education company, I\nmet Gary, a sales rep who had almost zero social awareness. Dan Pink explains\nthat, by becoming a keen observer of behaviors and environments, a salesman can\nattune himself to his customers and win more business. Gary did the complete\nopposite. His lack of attunement reduced trust and eroded business\nrelationships. For example, he often gave his customers (largely middle-aged\nmen) fist bumps. He spoke in 90s lingo, greeting customers with \u201cyo\u201d and\nsigning his emails \u201cG.\u201d Worst of all, Gary made inappropriate jokes at the\nworst possible times. These jokes proved to be harmful to Gary\u2019s sales\nperformance and the company\u2019s reputation among customers. Some of Gary\u2019s\ncoworkers recognized his strange behavior, but Gary never seemed to understand\nwhy his actions were inappropriate for his business setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At a conference in his sales territory, Gary was supposed to\ngive a presentation on the company\u2019s newest products. Before going on stage,\nGary made a joke about the host organization\u2019s secretaries being overweight \u2013 to members of the host organization<\/em>, a major customer.<\/em> This incident and\nothers like it made it difficult for Gary to build rapport with potential and\ncurrent customers. His sales fell, and within the next year, Gary was out of\nwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although Gary was a good coworker, he failed to observe\ncustomers\u2019 behavior as well as his environment. As a result, customers viewed\nhim as off-putting and unprofessional to say the least. I hope that Gary learns\nto strategically mimic customers and succeeds in the future. In the meantime,\nwe can learn from his mistakes, appropriately mimic customers, and become\neffective salesmen and saleswomen. Just as importantly, I hope we learn to help\nour coworkers properly attune to their customers when they don\u2019t recognize\ntheir lack of social awareness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" During my sales internship at an online education company, I met Gary, a sales rep who had almost zero social awareness. Dan Pink explains that, by becoming a keen observer of behaviors and environments, a salesman can attune himself to his customers and win more business. Gary did the complete opposite. His lack of attunement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":187,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/187"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5128"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5384,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5128\/revisions\/5384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gccwebsites.com\/startupsales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}