Therefore, accepting that we are all salespeople, it’s critical we understand sales and how we can master it.Michael believes it’s extremely important to redefine sales as the art of selling has transitioned significantly in the recent past.Historically, sales and selling have always had a terrible reputation due to your stereotypical used car salesman. This has, unfortunately, resulted in people being wary of selling or even accused of selling as it’s now been equated with something unpleasant.
However, Michael shares that the simple truth is that we are selling every day regardless of our role. Although it may not be as obvious as selling a product, we’re constantly negotiating, influencing and persuading with our family, children, friends, colleagues etc.
You could be a marketing manager trying to secure a budget for an upcoming initiative, an engineering leader influencing your engineers to build in a certain way or style, or just about anything else. If you can't sell, you won't be effective in a business setting.
In fact, Michael shares that in a study of 9,057 non-sales employees; the results found that these people spent 24 minutes of every working hour on sales-based activities in the form of negotiation, persuasion or influence.
Michael shares that salespeople have transitioned from being the holders of knowledge who could push all the relevant information to clients in a bid to convince them to buy, to now being in a position where they must build a genuine relationship and create mutual wins for them and their counterparts.
Nowadays, people who try to portray themselves as the person with all the answers will often get caught out.
An effective salesperson doesn’t push their product to their counterpart but instead asks penetrating questions to further understand and help develop the thinking of their client/stakeholder in a bid to identify whether their product/service/idea would be of benefit to them, and make the sale of it a win-win.
If through this investigation the salesperson identifies it is not a good fit, they will shake hands and walk away.
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