Here is a post from a course I teach to prospective salespeople. It never ceases to surprise me how little most people understand about the profession of selling. Properly grounding newbies in their purpose is part of starting them on the path to success. You may find parts of this introduction useful when you begin to train new salespeople.

Why Become a Salesperson – Part One

Selling, salesman, sales clerk, what do you think of when you hear those words? Do they conjure up images of fast-talking, polyester clad car salespeople with white shoes; or fine woolen suits, silk shirts and greed, Gordon Gecko style? Worse yet, do they bring to mind the sometimes ignorant and indifferent clerks in department stores? Those words immediately bring these stereotypes to mind for the vast majority of Americans. Very few really understand or appreciate the sales process or the selling profession, or want to have anything to do with it. This creates a tremendous opportunity for you, if you are open to acquiring selling skills.

Selling is all around you, and you must do it, whether we want to or not. You might as well be good at it. When you try to make a good first impression, or go out on a date, you are selling. When you take an interview for a new job, you are selling. When you compete for a promotion, you are selling. Acquiring the understanding and skills that will set you apart in all of these endeavors and more is the essence of this book.

Go online to your nearest University and try to find a course in sales. You might find courses in advertising or marketing which are certainly forms of sales. Pure sales, an understanding of the process, skills, techniques and profession of sales, will probably not be there. Only recently have a very few community colleges realized that the vast majority of professions require selling skills and begun to offer courses in selling. Opportunities to acquire selling skills are not generally available anywhere, except through on-the-job training. Acquiring selling skills provides the non-college graduate with big advantages, advantages even many college graduates do not possess.

You can achieve financial security by mastering the attitudes and skills of a salesperson. Even if you are not currently involved in a sales profession, acquiring selling skills will make you more successful. Power and choice are the results. You will acquire the power to make things happen, not wait or hope for things happen, and you will immeasurably broaden the choices you have in life.

In the United States, approximately sixty million new and used vehicles change hands every year. The aggregate value of these transactions approaches one trillion dollars. In good times and bad, anyone who acquires real skill as a salesperson is immediately employable in any city, town or hamlet in America. Even in these hard times, there are an estimated 109,000 unfilled job openings just in automobile dealerships across America, and the majority of these are for salespeople. Even this opportunity pales by comparison with general sales positions available. In fact, the majority of jobs openings in America today are in sales positions. Whether you want to sell cars, clothes at Nordstoms, computer equipment, boats or advertising, selling skills, plus and your own imagination and drive, will virtually assure you of employability at executive compensation levels.

I spent over 30 years in the auto industry, as a factory representative, as a corporate controller, as a general manager, and eventually as an owner of two dealerships and a credit company. I loved helping customers acquire cars, but even more than that, I loved helping men and women discover and hone selling skills that made them successful salespeople, and provided prosperity and security for themselves and their families. I say: “discover” because most people already have what it takes to become good salespeople inside them. They simply need to recognize and learn how to use traits like empathy, inquisitiveness, sociability, persistence, imagination and ego in a structured and constructive way to make them money.

I have trained hundreds of salespeople. Some of the men and women I trained used their time as salespeople to grow onto larger stages and pursue opportunities that were even more lucrative. Some are sales managers and finance managers in dealerships. One went on to become an executive with the World Bank. They all tell me they still use their selling skills every day. One, who later became a Russian Scholar, told me a story about a transaction he brokered between a businessman and members of the Russian mob in Moscow. He commented that if he could ignore the fact that he was in a noisy nightclub drinking vodka, and that he was dealing with men who all had bulging shoulder holsters, what he was doing boiled down to a “car deal.”

However, the greatest beauty of being a salesperson is that you need not move on to “bigger things,” or take on more risk, or assume more responsibility, to continually grow your business, and earn more and more each year – far more than the average American.

The selling skills you acquire will help you to understand the business of selling and to determine whether the auto business is for you. You will learn how to evaluate the relative income opportunities available for you. You will acquire a deep understanding of the specific skills you need to succeed. You will learn the “secret” differences between salespeople who merely make a good living and salespeople who earn six figure incomes. Finally, you will acquire the knowledge you need to acquire the job of your choice.

To get the most out of this course carefully, imagine yourself in each of the situations it presents and ask yourself, “How would I handle that?” Replay the scenarios you imagine in your mind’s eye several times. Set your notes aside until you are one month into your career in sales. Then come back and read them again several more times over the course of your first year. In your second and subsequent readings, you will discover concepts and suggestions you missed at first, because you were not yet ready to understand them.

So, why should you become involved in sales? Do it for the money, for financial security, to free yourself from the tyranny of an hourly wage. Do it to work in comfortable surroundings and clothes, to work with your mind and mouth instead of your muscles or hands, for the opportunity to build your own business with little overhead or risk. Do it to acquire skills that are ultimately portable and virtually guarantee you lifetime employment. All these and more are reasons people choose to enter sales.

Why do salespeople exist and what is their function?

If we lived in a totalitarian economy that provided one and only one choice of anything, salespeople would not exist. However, our rich capitalistic society creates a virtual cornucopia of product choices for the consumer. A designer gown on Broadway is priced tens or even hundreds of times higher than an off the rack dress at Target. A professional’s chromium steel tools with a lifetime guarantee cost five times more than Chinese-made off-the-shelf tools from Walmart. Along a full spectrum of choices based on price, quality, function, durability, guarantees, status etc. how does a prospective customer know what to choose? To understand what salespeople do and why they are so important, one must first look at potential transactions from several points of view.

Customers always go through a psychological process when making a purchase decision. The larger the perceived importance of the purchase, the more important this psychological process becomes. Understanding that this is true, understanding the process and helping a customer through it are the most important functions a salesperson performs. Properly done the salesperson creates a bond with a customer that keeps the customer coming back for a lifetime. Improperly done salesperson loses a potential sale, or causes extreme “buyer’s remorse” and will never get the customer back.

Manufacturers and retailers need to survive and prosper. It is critical for them to cause their product to be the product of choice among a whole spectrum of choices. The salesperson is key to making this to happen. Sometimes a living breathing salesperson is not part of the connection between retailer and customer. When this is true, packaging and advertising try to make up for that lack. However, most retailers of middle to high-end products realize the value of a skilled salesperson and set aside a considerable portion of each potential transaction to fund sales activities. Stores, products, brands, even entire industries rely upon salespeople to successfully advocate for them. It is easy to recall failures in salesmanship. Every day hundreds of businesses across America fail. Sometimes they fail because they of poor capitalization and bad management. More often, however, they fail because of poor salesmanship. Occasionally, big businesses fail because of poor salesmanship as well. Most recently, a failure in salesmanship played a role in the demise of Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Mercury as auto brands.

I will include more from this course in future posts – Cheers, Pete Grimm.