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Anybody can become a good salesperson

Written by: Richard Mulvey

Article Overview: How did you get into sales? My guess is that it wasn't the career your parents had picked out for you. Usually parents want their children to be accountants or lawyers or go into the family business. Selling is not usually top of the list.

Anybody can become a good salesperson

Anybody can become a good salesperson

When I left school I didn’t want to be a salesman. Few teenagers leave school with the idea of going into sales, they want go into teaching or catering; they want to become attorneys or engineers.

Selling is rarely considered to be a career, and when I was young very few parents would have encourage their children to become salespeople. Very little has changed in this regard.

I followed my basic education with two years at Hotel School where I was taught how to be a waiter, a chef and a hotel manager. I learnt how to make beds and why you can always get instant hot water in a hotel bedroom even though the water heater is as much as 100 meters away.

In the first long holiday while I was at hotel school, I got a job as a waiter at the Garners Steak House in London. I wasn’t allowed to serve in the restaurant until I had undergone a full day’s training but I wasn’t trained how to be a waiter. They just presumed that I knew that the food was served from the left and cleared from the right, that I knew how to fold napkins and “Crumb Down”.
The training course focused entirely on selling skills.

The customer walking into a restaurant is a “prospect”. You know he has a need (he is hungry) but we have yet to discover how we are going to satisfy that need. In many cases that ‘need’ would be satisfied with a bowl of soup and a slice of bread so it is the waiter’s job to create a ‘desire’ for something much more exciting (and more expensive of course).

During the training I was shown how to encourage the customer to buy two bottles of wine instead of just one; why the waiter must never just offer sweet, but suggest that the lady in the group may enjoy a crème caramel or fresh strawberries flown in from Israel. I also learnt not just to offer the most expensive items on the menu first, but the ones with the highest profit margin. I discovered that customers come into a restaurant not just to eat but for the ambiance, the fun, the friendly service and the good company. Customers don’t mind paying more if all these are in place.
The restaurant certainly knew how to do these things and was always full, mostly with regular customers.

My money at the end of the week was dependant on my ability as a sales person to satisfy the customers, rather than as a caterer and I enjoyed being well paid for the first time in my life.

So I started in catering before I became a salesperson, you may have been a teacher or an engineer.
Selling does not have the charisma of many careers but it is a noble task none the less. Industries would collapse without us. Customers would not know what is available or what is possible if sales people were not there to help. Selling helps make the world go round and good salespeople are hard to find.

Good sales people are made not born. This is the whole Nurture vs. Nature issue and in the case of sales people I am very clear on the result. In fact, the stereotypical sales person who look and act like the ones you see on the television and think they are born to it are not the best of the sales people out there.

I was asked, by the senior partner in a firm of attorneys in Durban, to train his team to become sales people. “We have very good attorneys, but they are not good at getting new business or closing the sale, can you help?”
“Of course” I said.

I prepared a proposal for the customer based on training 25 attorneys the finer arts of selling. I proposed a series of sessions with assignments in between that would at least give them the basics, and presented that to the customer.

“Oh no” he said, “We just need a day. Just come in for a day and tell us what it takes to be good in sales.”

ONE DAY! It takes seven years to be qualified as an attorney and they want to become salespeople in just one day.

To become a good sales person, like many other tasks, takes skills and practice. Anybody can be good in sales if they are prepared to put in the time and study the skills, then practice what they have learnt until they get it right.

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  Survival of the Fittest on the Sales Force
  The Prospect Isn't Talking With Any Other Salespeople
  The death of the sales call?
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