There are good and bad sales experiences, and most of the time it comes down to the approach of the seller.

A good sales person is a good sales person whether they’re selling a pair of trousers or a complex marketing service. A good sales person takes the time to dig into their customer’s needs and focus on the features of what they’re selling that meet those needs. Because a good sales person sells what the customer wants, they get better results, and oftentimes, happier clients too.

There’s more to it of course. If the process of sales was purely about listing a subset of features and framing them in a light that demonstrates their utility to a particular customer, sales people would be redundant and replaced by algorithms.

Right now, there’s something that AI doesn’t do well, and that’s rapport. Beyond seeing a list of features and their benefits to you, you also want to have some trust between buyer and seller. Liking each other is pretty helpful too.

We’ve all bought something from someone we didn’t like, but in most cases it’s because we didn’t have a choice and were forced to grudgingly put aside our feelings and hand over our money to someone who wouldn’t have got anything if we had an alternative.

Rapport takes time to build, and comes from being able to respond to subtle visual and verbal cues to shape a conversation. Rapport is an individual thing and comes from being made to feel at least a little bit special – as though your half of the conversation matters. One of the reasons cold call telemarketing is such a viscerally unpleasant experience is that it usually follows a catch all script delivered without enthusiasm.

Over the past three years, we’ve become increasingly distant from each other thanks to various lockdowns, increased remote working and in some cases, a fear of being too close to another person. That’s not been healthy, and our interpersonal skills have definitely suffered as a result.

We’ve become somewhat conditioned to stand further apart, and treat people with suspicion, and that has undoubtedly robbed us of the ability to connect and ultimately to sell effectively.

This erosion of connections affects our ability to express ourselves effectively, we’ve forgotten that done well, sales should be a gentle and enjoyable experience for both parties.

Investing the time in rapport has a longer term pay off, but because we’ve become afraid to open up, we’ve become averse to building a relationship which means that sales becomes harder and less enjoyable.

There’s a mantra that’s been doing the rounds for the past couple of years “build back better”. Ignoring the Orwellian associations that crop up in the weirder parts of the internet, it’s a beautiful sentiment, that we can come back from a couple of years of forced isolation happier and more effective.

Getting back in front of people, having a conversation, listening to what they want and discovering how you can get a mutually beneficial outcome might seem a bit flowery in a world where the media would have us believe that people can come to blows about which way is up, but it’s surprisingly easy to do, and if human’s weren’t so adept at selling themselves, we’d have gone extinct a long time ago.

Do You Need a Coach?

Are you struggling to get back in the groove when it comes to making sales work? Could you benefit from some coaching to ship away at the rust of your sales process? Why not get in touch and let’s see how we can get you back to your peak?