5

The Problem of Selling

Most people, I believe, are born salesmen. At school, we sell our peers on accepting us and our teachers on giving us good grades. We try to sell our parents on letting us stay out at night or on using the car or on buying a new stereo.

Unconsciously, we are already employing many of the aspects of selling: powers of persuasion; the art of negotiation; and the ultimate teenager’s tactic – ‘Never take “no” for an answer.’

By the time we get to the outside world we have learned how to position ourselves to get what we want, how to market our abilities and how to sell ourselves on job interviews.

Then something happens. We forget how to sell. We question our own sales aptitude. Suddenly the techniques we’ve used all our lives become foreign and mysterious, as though we now had to go out and learn them for the first time.

And yet the art of selling is the conscious practice of a lot of things we already know unconsciously – and have probably spent the better part of our lives doing.

The problem is that once we enter the real world of business a new factor emerges. For the first time our powers of persuasion, our sales abilities, are being judged. This can be intimidating, and so we respond by convincing ourselves that we can’t sell, we don’t know how to sell, or we don’t want to sell. We then use these mental roadblocks to justify our lack of sales aptitude.

But the real problems of selling have little to do with aptitude and almost everything to do with how we perceive the process of selling itself. Some people find it beneath them, others find it intrusive. And almost all of us fear the rejection.

Selling Doesn’t Seem Important Enough

One of the biggest problems that people have with selling is that it seems less important than it did twenty years ago. Historically, the quickest way to the top was through sales. These days selling is perceived as one of the lesser business skills, conjuring up images of Willie Loam and the Fuller Brush man. People are more likely to believe that the quickest way to the top is through management training. There is some truth to this, but to presume that management skills obviate the need for sales skills is a dangerous form of self-deception. I have yet to meet a chairman or a CEO of a major corporation who didn’t pride himself on his powers of persuasion – or, in other words, his salesmanship.

Selling is what they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School. Business schools admit that their purpose is to train managers, thereby almost totally overlooking the fact that if there are no sales there is nothing to manage. This escapes a lot of newly minted MBAs, who in their desire to run a company may find sales, the techniques involved, the art of selling, beneath them.

We have had many MBAs work for our company, and I have found their lack of sales skills to be the biggest gap in their business knowledge. Fortunately, most of them learned to sell through on-the-job experience. But I have seen many MBAs at other companies who haven’t, who persist in believing that an understanding of selling is not really a fundamental requisite of management-level personnel. This is sometimes called ‘lacking the common touch’. I think it’s more aptly described as lacking common sense.

I was amused recently by an article in the New York Times on Morgan Stanley & Company, the aristocratic investment banking firm which hires only the top MBAs. Morgan Stanley had beaten out twelve other firms in vying for the right to manage the Teamsters Union’s $4.7 billion pension fund. Here’s what the Times had to say.

‘At one of their meetings with a committee of Teamsters trustees – union men and trucking executives – part of the session was devoted to the Morgan officers’ individual backgrounds, with the emphasis on humble origins.

‘One executive said that a scholarship put him through college. Another pointed out that he had joined the Marine Corps directly after school. And a third told the trustees sitting across the table that he had grown up in a modest household, the son of a railroad engineer. So it went as each of a dozen or more Morgan officials took his turn.

‘It was is if they said, “I know we have this portrait of J. P. Morgan up on the wall, but we’re really regular guys,” said one participant, who asked not to be named.’

Anyone who can convince the Teamsters that J. P. Morgan was, at heart, a union man, understands the importance of selling.

Selling Is An Intrusion

People hate to impose, to make waves. Have you ever found yourself nodding in agreement to something with which you totally disagree? Have you ever thought about sending back an overdone steak, then changed your mind?

A feeling that selling is intrusive is not a problem. It is an asset. The best salesmen all seem to have a sixth sense about this. They can tell by the tone in someone’s voice or the atmosphere in the room when the mood or timing is wrong. And either because they don’t want to impose, or because they know that it is not in their own best interests to do so, they will not antagonize their customer by attempting to make a sale.

The old foot-in-the-door school of high-pressure, super-assertive techniques has gone the way of the dinosaur. These were never very effective techniques to begin with, but perhaps they were necessary fifty years ago when a salesman was not likely to see or speak to a customer for another six months. Today in the age of modern communication and transportation, if you are being intrusive and have enough people-awareness to sense this, there is no excuse for your not picking a better time and coming back. You do, of course, have to be willing to come back again.

Effective selling is directly tied to timing, patience and persistence – and to sensitivity to the situation and the person with whom you are dealing. An awareness of when you are imposing can be the most important personal asset a salesman can have.

It also helps to believe in your product. When I feel that what I am selling is really right for someone, that it simply makes sense for this particular customer, I never feel I am imposing. I feel that I am doing him a favour.

Fear

Fear is the single biggest problem people have with selling: fear of rejection, fear of failure.

So much of selling a product, a service, anything, is selling yourself, putting your own ego on the line. And what are the odds? If you’re pretty good, you’re probably going to fail half the time. Rejection, as they say, comes with the territory.

Rejection in selling is rarely personal, but simply knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to take. I have always found that it helps not to be too ‘adult’ about it. Learning to accept rejection doesn’t mean having to like it. Acknowledge your real feelings and if those real feelings are irritation, frustration or anger, admit to them instead of pretending they don’t exist.

I’ve been rejected hundreds of times. Yet tomorrow, if I’ve put in the effort, and if what I’m selling makes sense and if I get turned down, I’m going to be frustrated or angry all over again. Realizing that it isn’t personal doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take it personally. If you don’t, in fact, it may mean that you haven’t put enough of yourself into the effort.

Fear of failure is another problem that people have with selling. Sales results are so tangible, so measurable in black and white, there is no place to run or hide.

But what many people don’t appreciate is that fear of failure is one of the greatest positive motivators in business. If you aren’t afraid to fail, then you probably don’t care enough about success.

Björn Borg had a reputation for being an iceman on the court. But he once told me that on key points he was always terrified, that sometimes it would take all the courage he could muster just to put the ball in play.

This was true as well of Arnold Palmer, and I believe this very human quality had more to do with his enormous popularity than all the tournaments he won. His fear of failure was so strong because his desire for success was so great. And when he failed, when he missed a shot, you could see the pain etched on his face, and you knew he cared.