The 20^th century approach of one-upmanship, although still encouraged by many traditional sales managers, seems to be slowly retreating into the shadows of the past as crude and old-fashioned. Polar opposite to the latter, but just as unproductive, are the approaches of:

• A whining puppy (pleading for a sale trying to make customers feel sorry for you).
• A chameleon (always bending and twisting yourself to fit any situation, often losing yourself in the process).
• A parrot (not adapting your approach enough to suit the style if the client).

These approaches often annoy customers and elicit pity rather than trust.

Too many sales people (in particular those new to sales) feel they need to pretend to be someone else or be something they are not. We find many sales people still stick to a “one size fits all” repertoire and find it difficult to adapt their style to different client situations and styles, often finding themselves hiding behind the veneer of brand or concepts (think “walking talking brochure”).

Or worse, others twist themselves into all sorts of shapes just to please the client. The biggest trap I see many sales people falling into is the trap of trying to be liked – at any cost. They end up doing anything to be liked including giving away product or margins which costs them and the business money. Clients (consciously or not) can see through the pretense and never feel quite able to trust you because the “real” you did not show up or stand up for who you are and what you represent.

These aspects featured in my research project Sell Like a Woman. Here is what some of the women had to say:

• “As a sales person you learn to reflect each of your clients, but at one stage in my sales career I felt as if I was loosing my identity, from constantly twisting myself out of shape to fit other people’s ideals. I then started to bring more of me into my interactions with clients, rather than changing myself to suit them. I have found that clients respond well to the more genuine me and I now feel more sure of who I am in the situation and therefore more capable of establishing boundaries and orchestrating the transaction.”

• “I struggle to work with people who I clash with either ethically and from a values perspective. I realised this a long time ago and do not enter into these types of relationships personally or professionally.”

• “{Effective sales people] posses a good deal of honesty and approach me like an intelligent person. Those sales people who ‘talk down’ or treat me like a ‘woman’ (e.g. buying a new car) rarely get a sale. Even if I know which car I want to buy, I may go back to the dealership but ask for a new salesperson.”

Our sales research is showing that you need a variety of repertoires you can use with different clients – that is, be more professional and business like with some; more friendly and relaxed with others or more quiet and reserved with yet other, however it is evident that clients still want to deal with the real you. Knowing how to modulate and adapt your approach is vital in any sales situation but knowing how to still remain as “you” is equally as important.

One way I have found very useful in ensuring I am operating authentically for my client and myself is using the skill of verifying. It is very useful when trying to understand another person’s situation or point of view. Verifying your customer’s needs requires the combination of three key communication skills; listening, paraphrasing and clarifying.

Verifying can be a useful technique to ensure the message has been received and understood by both the sender and receiver. Verifying involves paraphrasing or summing up in your own words what you think the person has communicated.

People with good verifying skills:

• Paraphrase (sum up or rephrase) what is being said.
• Use questions – to sum up or clarify.
• Empathise with the other person.
• Encourage the speaker to continue – nod, murmur brief words of encouragement.
• Concentrate on what is being said.
• Really take in what is being said, not making judgements as they speak; pay attention with their whole manner – body, eyes, facial expression.

We all need to have skills and boundaries to guide us in our endeavours and preserve our integrity and the integrity of others. Verifying is one very useful skill to have in your repertoire.

NOTE: Recognise that you will not get along with everyone you come across. There will be times when you (unintentionally) elicit unpleasant feelings in others. Not because of what you said or did, just because you may remind him or her of someone they knew whom they did not have a good experience with for instance.

Don’t take it personally. It can happen to us all, however, if you try to twist yourself into a shape that doesn’t suit you then just to please them or get them to like you then you both suffer. Remember to remain true to yourself and be respectful of yourself and others. There are plenty more fish in the sea.

• Need you daily fix of self-help tapes/CDs or guru books to get you pepped up to sell.
• Have a fragile positivism about sales, which bursts at the slightest criticism.
• Can’t wait to get out of sales to get a “real” job.
• Secretly ashamed of being in a sales career – this isn’t what I should be doing, my mother wants me to be a dentist.
• Fear the loss of approval of your friends, family or peers because you think they will think less of you if you are in sales.
• Don’t like being called a sales person – prefer titles like marketing consultant or pre-need counsellor (yes, this one is for real).
• Other departments, friends or family deride your career choice in sales.

Sound familiar?

Over the years I have met many sales people who are really good at selling, have all the ingredients, write great sales results and are highly valued by their companies, yet they never feel satisfied in their sales career. The afflicted sales person just feels a sense of unease and guilt about being in sales, a disquiet that never seems to get resolved.

Imagine waking up everyday feeling ashamed about what you do and carrying that unresolved guilt with you wherever you go. It’s exhausting. Often times it sits beneath the level of conscious awareness, silently gnawing away at your confidence, your feeling of worthiness, until one day you can’t take it anymore.

Always looking for greener pastures as a way to resolve this feeling, sales people afflicted with this issue often quit highly successful sales careers to go into management roles or something else that doesn’t require selling. And no one even questions why.

Many settle for something beneath their abilities and some go into management or worse still – sales management or sales training. What hasn’t changed is that they still carry this unresolved issue with them.

Then they often unwittingly pass it on to their unsuspecting peers with comments and negative attitudes towards sales. If in sales management or sales training, their sales team cop comments like “Oh we don’t call ourselves sales people here”, or “We don’t have to sell – we consult”, as well as “The product sells itself”, “All sales people are pushy and rude and we aren’t like that here, are we?”, etc.

This then perpetuates the whole cycle again by instilling mistaken beliefs about selling and creating doubt and shame about sales in a whole new group of people. And still no-one questions why? Just go into some professional services firms or non-sales departments of business and listen to how they deride sales and sales people.

What are their criticisms based on? Why do many people still hold a negative view of selling? Do they know what good selling actually is? Are they basing their view of selling on bad business practices? How did people develop poor and misinformed views of selling?

Maybe one reason is that in the 1970s, 1980s and early to mid 1990s, many sales teams were trained to be either:

• Aggressive and adversarial in their negotiations with clients leaving people feeling battered and worn-out in the process to get product or service.
• Very product focused – “show up and throw up” sales approach.
• Soft and insipid, basing their sales efforts on mateship or special deals (often bribery) which usually resulted in a loss for the business they represented.

Or another reason may be the persistent myths about the tricks and secrets to sales success touted by so called “sales gurus” who teach people how to get sales at your client’s expense.

No wonder many people shy away from selling as a career. Whether they are conscious of it or not, they don’t like how selling has been “sold” to them. I don’t blame them.

I have spent much of my professional career helping people rearrange their thinking and understanding about what good selling actually is. Techniques of manipulation and intimidation, stimulus response selling and rapport alone do not work and never have for long-term sustainable client relationships.

Relationships do not work or last if they are forced or coerced.

I think “selling” needs a PR makeover. Old selling mythology needs to be superseded by a more accurate view of what good selling actually is. Check the view of selling as defined below and see how it sits with your belief system and values. How does it resonate with you?

View of selling

You have a view of selling that is positive because selling helps sales people and companies understand and identify what their customers’ needs are, then helps them fill their needs in an ethical and professional manner and allows for profitable ongoing business relationships.

Whether you have the skills or not to sell, you shouldn’t be afraid or ashamed of what good selling actually is. Remember: Everyone lives by selling something.

Done well, sales is an honourable career we can’t do without.

We all know people want to buy from people they trust! They always have and they always will, if they can. In fact, top performing sales people have always sold based on trust, transparency and doing what they said they would do. And their view of selling was always positive and honourable, despite the prevailing paradigms mentioned above.

If you’re still not sure, check the following implication – to make more money, you have to like sales people, and that sales people are morally and ethically inclined!

It has often been said that very strong negotiation skills are critical to being a high performing sales person. However, findings from our “sales force fitness” profiling work, where we profile critical qualities for successful sales performance in many businesses, large and small, is telling a very different story.

Before you invest your training dollars into negotiating skills training for your sales team, you might like to think about investing it into influencing skills training instead.

Why? The ability to positively influence prospects or clients towards your brand and product offering – more so than negotiation – is what is needed in today’s market.

Products/solutions are often quite clearly defined and a salesperson’s ability to negotiate price and value-added services is limited in today’s market.

We are now finding some companies are setting prices for their sales teams with no room for negotiation, thus eliminating price negotiations altogether.

(Not always a bad thing if you ask me, given all the pricing discounts I have seen sales people giving away unnecessarily over the years.)

So what is a sales person to do now?

We are consistently hearing in interviews with high performing sales managers and sales people that the ability to positively influence the client is a more critical competency than the skill of negotiating. This has direct relevance to the emotional intelligence (EI) area of managing others emotions.

The emotional management of others is the skill of influencing the moods and emotions of others. A sales person’s ability to:

• Influence a prospective customer to say ‘yes’.
• Overcome a customer’s reservation towards a new product.
• Help a client feel enthusiastic about a product they recently purchased.
• Plan with a client how to best engage their ‘economic buyer’.

These are critical to success in business today.

In addition, we are finding that:

• Accurately reading the client, gauging their reactions and then adjusting your own style is also being highlighted as a key competency of high performing sales people. This is relevant to the EI competency of recognising emotions of others, emotional reasoning and managing others emotions.
• Building relationships and trust is also critical. For the past three of our major corporate projects in assessing “sales force fitness”, it has been cited as a key point of competitive difference. The ability to build trust-based relationships is influenced by a number of EI competencies – emotional self awareness, emotional awareness of others, ability to influence others’ emotions and emotional control.

Ask yourself: “How effectively are my sales people perceiving, understanding, reasoning with and manage their own and others’ feelings.” These skills are cornerstones to successful selling, as emotions are an inherent part of why people buy and why they do not.

The “gender” discussion highlighted by my Sell like a Woman project, articles and other research leads people to believe that women are doing things men cannot because of gender. And this is causing sighing and forelock tugging in some male circles. “Not another feminist on her soap box” or “all men are useless” I hear some say.

As stated previously, my approach is not to denigrate men or idolise women, but to bring you information and findings that give you food for thought to help you make decisions so that you can be more successful at what you choose to do (as long as you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else in the process, as my mother would say).

So let’s put this gender issue into perspective. We all would be mistaken to assume gender is the single distinguishing factor in anything except pregnancy and childbirth. What we are finding is the research is highlighting that women are bringing certain qualities and skills they use in other aspects of their lives to the world of business and, in particular, sales.

And what we are finding is whatever they are doing is working better than previous initiatives, especially now the landscape of sales is changing so markedly. The qualities these women exhibit are not the exclusive domain of women; they can be and are modeled by men as well. It’s just that this has been done at an unconscious level to date, with little if any recognition by management.

What these women and others like them are showing is that they are using higher levels of “emotional Intelligence” (EI).

Research into competencies of highly effective salespeople have generally identified three or four broad categories; Selling skills, General management or Business skills, Technical skills and Interpersonal skills, and more recently, EI.

Interpersonal skills were historically identified as an important category of competencies needed by highly effective salespeople. Their importance reflects the significant contribution of the salesperson’s ability to form and develop a relationship with their client to creating a profitable and productive relationship for both parties. Emotional intelligence is a psychologically more complex process than Interpersonal skills, involving a deeper process of analysing, reasoning and responding.

Our own research, involving over 300 interviews coupled with research findings from Australia and overseas, has found that superior performing salespeople and managers demonstrate greater use of competencies related to the use of EI. They display well developed self-awareness, self regulation, motivation, empathy and social skills.

A recent Australian study conducted by Genos also found that sales performance and EI are positively related. What was even more exciting was that they showed that EI can be learned and developed in people. (An 18% increase in EI for the managers and sales representatives that participated in the learning and development program).

And furthermore, developing the EI of sales professionals and managers results in greater sales returns. The Australian pharmaceutical company who put their sales managers and sales representatives through an EI sales development program found that the program has so far returned $6 for every $1 invested over a six month period.

These EI qualities are being used by high performers despite current management practices in most cases, however if raised to a conscious level and recognised for the value they bring to people, business, customers etc, then they can be selected in and/or trained and developed in people (men and women alike) to use effectively and purposefully in the workplace (and beyond).

If you are still not convinced consider this:

• “Buyers do not buy products, services, or ideas; they buy states. Buyers buy emotion.” – George Ludwig, former National Sales Director for Johnson & Johnson (USA)
• “Emotions are part of the total communications experience, and they must be acknowledged.” – Janelle Barlow & Dianna Maul, Emotional Value: Creating strong bonds with your customers
• “Partnerships will never work if they are forced. It is important to provide ‘friendly’ service; however, organisations pull the legs out from under ‘friendliness’ by too tightly scripting the experience.” - Janelle Barlow & Dianna Maul, Emotional Value: Creating strong bonds with your customers

If you want further information on EI and sales let me know.

Sales is not for the faint hearted, nor is running your own business. For those of us who run our own businesses and/or have careers in sales or sales management, we find we are often faced with stressful situations such as:

• Budgets to achieve in tougher markets.
• Challenging clients, staff, peers, bosses or suppliers.
• Changes that effect your competitive edge with products and services.
• New market competitors, products, ideas and innovations.
• Dealing with unethical people or business tactics.
• New system upgrades or old systems that don’t work well.
• Not to mention our personal lives and the many changes we face on a daily basis.

How do we manage ourselves in times of stress? If you are anything like me, you probably struggle from time to time trying to keep up with all these things and more. Many small business owners are often the main and possibly the best sales person in their business. They also often double as the general manager, HR manager and sales manager. How to fit it all in and keep sales coming in at what cost is the question.

While the topics of stress, depression and other health issues are getting more press today, these problems often remain hidden from view and never spoken about by top sales performers and business owners until it’s too late.

Why should good sales people burnout at all? It’s such as waste to have a sales superstar fall to a sales drop out.

What we know is that good consistent sales performers are usually resilient, focused and determined in nature and, in my experience, usually have a sense of ‘wellness’ about them. Their wellness shines through and is supported by good life habits such as:

1. Undertaking regular exercise.
2. Having a healthy diet.
3. Drinking alcohol in moderation or not at all.
4. Having a variety of other interests in their life.
5. Prioritising very well.
6. Not taking illicit drugs.
7. Continued self development.

However, even healthy sales people sometimes ‘hit the wall’ and ‘burn out’. An accumulation of things can happen and before you know it you’ve hit the wall. With too many things happening too quickly, you often do not stop to deal with them one by one.

If this accumulation of stressful events continues, then they simply roll you over and flatten you. Given a good sales person has the capacity to produce consistently well, we can often miss vital signs of our stressors.

For instance when sales are down, we can take on too much and over compensate for others’ lack of performance. If this happens over and over again it wears you down. I have experienced a major burnout on one occasion (more about that next week). It was not pleasant and very stressful. I am sure I am not alone when it comes to stress as a sales person or as a business owner

Now I am no expert on stress management, however I have been an avid user of many tried and true approaches to help me be at my best and ensure I am ‘sales fit’ and can still juggle my many duties.

Instead of resorting to alcohol, drugs or other harmful actions as others may do, I sort out my support network. That is why I thought it would be useful to provide a list of some of the services people can access before, during or after they find themselves dealing with stressful situations. Please find following a preliminary list of associations you may like to explore:

• Yoga classes and other natural therapies.
• Access to medical or psychological help with stress, depression or other mental health issues go to the government support network www.beyondblue.org.au or the Australian Psychological Society.
• Overcoming sleeping issues the drug free way.
• Qualified massage therapists go to Australian Association of Massage Therapists.
• Australian parenting website.
• For meditation, there are several different places to try.

Prevention in the best cure and hindsight is a wonderful teacher. Never forget nothing is impossible to fix and there is always an option out there to help you deal with any challenging situation. Don’t forget to ask for help there is always someone there.

I hope this helps.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Rona who took her own life recently. She was a beautiful, talented and accomplished mother, swimmer, academic, writer and friend. I will miss you.