Since I started my sales careers almost 40 years ago, I have met thousands and thousands of salespeople and sales leaders and I can tell you many stories about these encounters, but what I want to focus on today is what I believe to be the motivation driving the vast majority of these sales and service people and sales leaders: their desire to help people, their clients, be successful and do the right thing by them.
Very few salespeople that I have met want take undue advantage of others, even when pressed to meet targets and hit budgets. Most salespeople are motivated by the desire to help others. Many enjoy identifying and fixing problems, helping people out of a tight fix, co-creating, and discovering new opportunities. It is a thrill for many of us in sales when a client tells us how grateful they are for our help in sorting out an issue for them.
Sometimes we can overshoot the runway and try to help others when we were not welcome to do so; however, our intentions to help are usually honourable.
So are we biologically driven to help others? Is it in our genes to be helpful, to be kind?
There are some interesting findings from a Psypress (UK) Social Psychology program:
Helping behavior in humans is a result of a naturally selected predisposition that is activated and influenced by cognitive and social processes. There are two motives for helping: our desires for mastery and concrete rewards, and connectedness with others.
This makes a lot of sense when applied to sales and service roles.
Evolutionary principles suggest that some forms of helping, such as reciprocal helping or helping kin, have been naturally selected because they increase survival. In humans, however, cognitive and social processes mediate such biologically driven helping.
Help may be motivated by perceived rewards for the helper, or deterred by perceived costs or risks. These rewards and risks can be emotional: People sometimes help to alleviate their own distress at the victim’s suffering, reflecting egoism. People are often motivated by a feeling of empathy to relieve another’s suffering, reflecting altruism, because it is not motivated by even indirect or emotional rewards for the helper. In a social dilemma, rewards for each individual are in direct conflict with what is best for the group. However, people can be motivated by feelings of group connectedness to act for the good of the group. When group identification increases commitment to shared goals and norms, social dilemmas can be successfully resolved.
This is very interesting as we increasingly see a transition from transactional selling and ego-driven, self-serving financial reward systems to a complex solutions sales environment with lead team sales approaches and group rewards.
The emotional rewards of helping
As we know helping others gives us a good feeling. As salespeople we know the wonderful feeling of winning a new sale or client and the satisfaction of receiving wonderful feedback from clients. Helping others helps us to get and keep our good mood and can also allow us to escape from a bad mood. Helping allows those being helped to succeed, be more effective, etc. and build a sense of connectedness and trust with the helper.
Therefore, what I can conclude is that it is in our intentions then that Selling can either be an act of Kindness or not.
Remember, everybody lives by selling something.
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