A Sales Director asked Father Christmas for the ability to really understand sales people. Having Santa as a strategic partner has allowed us a sneak preview of the Sales Director’s present.
[geoads2]
- All salespeople believe that when they succeed its all down to them, and when they fail it’s down to factors beyond their control.
- The best salespeople are secure enough to cope with rejection, but insecure enough to need the constant reassurance of success.
- Sale people have learnt it’s not how confident they feel that matters, but how confident they appear.
- Technicians/engineers who sell dislike salespeople or even being thought of as ‘in sales’.
- Sales people live, and are encouraged to think, in the world of the possible; so don’t be surprised (or too critical) when they apply the same thinking to their sales forecast.
- Sales people are hugely conflicted when they think of customers. They love them and hate them – at the same time.
- The worse a salesperson is doing the less they think about how to improve things. They often need to be pushed in front of difficult customers by someone else.
- Top performing, high earning salespeople are hated by the rest of the organisation.
- Salespeople love anything that signifies differentiated status.
- More salespeople than you might think don’t like other people very much.
- Because field based salespeople are dislocated from the physical organisation their rumour/gossip dial is turned to 11. If you want to find something out, ask a sales person.
- If you want to upset a sales person, change something. Regular changing of their incentive scheme is a guaranteed hostility generator.
- Sales people love a short training course where they learn something genuinely new and implementable. They hate training based on old ideas wrapped up in new language.
- Sales people aren’t negative about company policy, simply misunderstood.
- All sales people under the age of 30 believe they are immortal and can only fail if their employer gets in their way.
- All sales people over 50 have developed hugely finessed ways of working that they are reluctant to reveal to anyone else.
- A sales person will offer to mother/father your children if you deliver them a reliable, easy to use, sales generating, non-time consuming CRM system.
- Only being as successful as their last set of numbers eats into salespeople’ souls to varying degrees.
- Sales conferences are attended for the craic, the rest is management propaganda.
- Having to sometimes bend the truth, suspend disbelief, deal in misinformation or give the briefest of detail creates a kind of interpersonal hysteria, which can lead to odd behaviour.
- Leaving a customer with a big order/contract that smashes their target and wins their favourite incentive is the daydream of choice.
- Salespeople love a manager who knows when to get out the way and when to pile in and save them, and then pretends they didn’t (save them).
- The words role-play make sales people die a little.
- The best sales team contain both men and women.
- Sales peoples’ biggest fear is that they will be found out.
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It will be really interesting to see what this Sales Director does with this information.
