Why “Sales” is the most difficult skill to learn?
“Sales is the final aim of every business but not everyone can do it”
A business has different departments like HR, Finance, IT, Admin, Operations, Marketing etc, and sales is one of them. Sales numbers define the growth of the company, all the other departments serve as a support function to generate sales and achieve defined targets. Although there is no fixed rule on how to do sales but there are a few rules on how not to do sales.
Sales is something which no one can teach you and I really don’t understand it when companies hire sales trainers for nothing, sales trainer is the most useless and meaningless thing I have ever heard in my life and the second most useless thing in sales is the sales pitch / script because it limits your thinking ability.
Sales is not about script, its about people! Based on my experience, I have listed a few things which we feel are super important in making a successful sale.
Steps involved in sales
- Product knowledge
- Ability to listen
- Clarity of thought
- Ability to communicate the thought
- Follow Up
- and that’s it.
This is the sales script and if someone tries to handover a script to you, this means you are uttering their thoughts and not yours.
Let us understand these steps in detail:
- Product knowledge: This is a no brainer, everyone working for a certain product must understand it completely but this is where sales teams lack big time (at least for initial pitches). I have met a lot of sales people who are really confident that they can sell anything but they lack the knowledge of the product which makes me think, why? I am listening means I am interested, the least you can do is learn what you are selling. This is where most sales people lack at first but improve on it later after a few embarrassing situations and can easily be avoided.
- Ability to Listen: This is the most important thing which can be developed with a mature mindset and sadly 90%+ sales guys lack here. Most of the sales people I meet just like to pitch and don’t really want to listen to the other person talk. Listening enables understanding the prospect better and mold the pitch based on the personality. Understand their business, evaluate their needs and that comes when you listen. This ability unlocks further aspects.
- Clarity of Thought: When we talk with someone, there are a lot of thoughts that go around in our head and sometimes it becomes difficult to filter and align those thoughts to make our pitch less confusing. This can be achieved through experience but it’s still important to not oversell your product just because you thought of 10 more advantages for the same. If I can be convinced by just one feature then other 9 becomes irrelevant and irritating to listen, this is where ability to listen comes in.
- Ability to communicate the thought: This is the sum up of what has been discussed so far, there are a lot of people who possess much more knowledge and are way more intelligent than us but the problem with them is they cannot properly portray their intelligence or their knowledge into words and that’s where a good sales person excels.
- Follow Up: Now, we have already made our initial pitch that was good enough for the prospect. Unless you are not selling a FMCG product there are high chances that follow up would be needed and for that one must know when and how much to do it. This is where most sales people suck and mess up a really good lead, I still remember one sales person who got to such an extent that he threatened me for now buying which was actually funny because he might have targets to achieve.
Why sales are not valued or appreciated in India?
- Companies don’t know how to use sales people: Giving sales targets ruin their business and the career of the sales person. With targets on your head all the time, you make all the mistakes mentioned above and will become another sales person who nobody wants to buy stuff from.
- Everybody thinks they can sell: This is the biggest problem. A person who can develop an amazing product think if he can develop it, he can also sell it because they can talk.
- Money over career: Very early on in their career all sales people hear this. We are told that sales earn you great amount of money and no one tells you to make a career out of it hence money takes over the skills.
- Not upskilling: Sales as a skill need an upgrade every now and then. How? By reading, curiosity and, learning new aspects associated with it. All of this brings more clarity, knowledge, logic and the brain that speaks and thinks at once.
Can you learn sales?
Of course, but on your own!