The Truth About Sales
Sales positions are a greatly misunderstood role within a business and don’t get the credit it deserves.
Being in a sales role isn’t what most people make it out to be. Sales is an undeniably valuable part of business, which requires skills that are in high demand.
The Most Common Misconception
You have to be a lying, manipulative and immoral person to succeed in Sales
This is a faulty perception. In reality, sales involves helping people solve their problems. If your product is going to save the customer money over the competition then you’re doing them a favor.
In reality, the quality of a person determines the results the person will have in the sales world. If someone is a bottom feeder who uses low tactics to exploit other then they probably won’t make it very far. There’s something interesting about the world nowadays, and it’s that people can usually tell the difference between someone who genuinely wants to help you can someone that is inauthentic and lying and not really into what they’re selling.
Sales in today's economy has evolved past these strategies and into more developed and higher-level functions. Sales involves providing information based on research and showing a customer exactly how a product will benefit them in the long term of another alternative. And if it doesn’t benefit someone then it's not always going to be valuable to the salesperson to try to follow through with what they’re trying to sell even if it doesn’t help the customer. There’s no longer this incentive to close a deal at any cost.
Sales in today’s economy is more about listening and catering to the needs of the customer than it has been in the past. No longer are customers as willing to buy based on pure logic and rationality. It’s more about catering to the emotional needs of the customer and to resolve the dissonance they have within their own business.
Skills that are learned in Sales
Unlike common perception, being in sales isn’t only about being a charismatic extrovert who can talk fast and effectively. Even an introvert can thrive in this role and introverts do thrive. Whats more important are other personality traits like persistence, empathy, and compassion for the person on the other side of the phone.
And because a sales position involves building soft skills, this subsequently creates job security. If you can show a future employer that you have built communication, creativity, and charisma in a way that empowers you to be effective and make money for their company then this is much more enticing and valuable than the opposite approach.
It also builds up resilience because no one is ever going to close 100% of deals, not even close to that. This leads to the obvious rejection, and when you learn to not take that rejection personally you’ve subsequently built up another skill that can help you in future endeavors.
How a sales team fits into an overall Business
The sales team is integral to the business as a whole because it’s the final step after marketing has done its work to get you leads. Your job is to turn those leads into actual paying customers. Without a sales team, there would be no money flowing into the business and thus the business would collapse in on itself. Thus it’s one of the most foundational roles of any business.
Where marketing focuses on big-picture goals such as customer demographics and interests, as well as gaining leads. Sales, on the other hand, focuses on specific goals and metrics pertaining to how many of those leads we can turn into paying customers (aka a quota).
This role is rewarding because if done right and quotas are hit then it involves extremely flexible work opportunities, and lucrative bonuses and commission checks coming in.
