Amateurs Tell, Professionals Sell

The only reason a professional makes a sales call or presentation is to be of genuine service to the customer or prospect. Professionals understand that customers buy for their reasons not our reasons.  This fundamental truth can give you a whole new perspective on what it means to be a professional sales person and the rights and responsibilities that go along with being a pro.

We define selling in two ways:

1. Selling is good well managed, customer focused communication. 
2. Selling is helping people make a decision that is good for them.

Professionals take the time in the early stages of a customer meeting to ask good questions and find out what the customer’s real need it.  Quite often even the customer doesn’t fully understand their own need until a professional shows up and gets them thinking through a few though provoking questions.  By our definitions, it’s clear that the only goal of a professional salesperson is to remain customer focused, to find a need and then provide true service to address it.

Occaisionally during the exploration or qualification stage of a meeting it is discovers that the customer really needs something you or your company can’t provide. Professionals understand that helping a customer make a decision that is good for them sometimes also means telling the customer that they can’t help them.  If your prospect has no need for your product or service, can’t use it, or can’t afford it you have absolutely no right to try to convince him or her to buy. 

Amateurs by contrast are extremely product focused and try to convince someone to buy in every single situation.  They don’t ask questions, they don’t understand their customers and they endlessly tell all the reasons they beleive a customer should purchase their product or service. 

As a professional you must never in clear conscience persuade your prospect to buy something they don’t want, don’t need, or can’t afford.  However, when you do find a need  that you can genuinely address, which is more often than not if you’ll just thake the time to sell and not tell, you have every right and responsibility to sell it well.

It’s OK to tell a customer that you can’t help them.  This simple code of conduct will reap huge dividends in increased sales; even from customers to whom you admitted you couldn’t help.  By being completely honest and transparent, you establish deep levels of trust;  that trust often results future business and referrals you were never expecting.

At High Output Training Systems we teach a precise step by step procedure that helps professionals through the entire sales process so that they can be of genuine service, painlessly close and sell more … more often.

What’s your reason for making a sales call?

Last 5 posts by Howard Olsen

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• Prospecting - How Much is Enough? - February 27th, 2007