Authenticity and influence in sales
THE other day at a business gathering someone asked me, “Raju, what, according to you, has changed in sales and selling over the decades?” Slightly offended by the inclusion of the word decades in the question I quickly brushed it aside by saying “nothing has changed” and moved on. Late at night, I lay wondering and thinking about my experiments and experiences in selling.
At my first honorary job with my father, which was to run errands and try selling for his small school-bag making business, I’d sell nothing at every interaction. I’d walk into his customer’s shops and stand against the wall; tongue-tied praying the shopowner would leap out from behind his glass counter and beg me to send him school bags. That never happened. I sold zilch. Dad lost hair worrying about my future as a business person.
At my second job, after making it as an engineer, I was assigned to sales. Sales in the engineering company I worked for meant filling up a large wad of papers with numbers, descriptions and a covering letter called proposals. There were templates to follow, listed prices to tally up but there was barely any people to people interaction. The wheeling, dealing and the closing was done by those big-bellied guys called bosses.
At my third job selling futures in pork-bellies, orange juice, barley, copper and gold my then balikbayan boss Ricky Ho saw me suffer at selling and called me aside and said, “Hey Raju, recognize this, people sell for two reasons: one to get rid of something and two to make a profit. What do you want to do?” I owned nothing and thus nothing had to be gotten rid of, so I supposed I’d had to make a profit. After that epiphanous moment I learned to sell. The need to survive taught me how to make cold calls, how to qualify, analyze, integrate, pitch, offer, present, solve, offset objections, sooth, meander, negotiate, upsell, cross-sell, resell, negotiate, close, re-open, serve with maximum subtlety and suaveness.
Thus, decades ago, uh-oh, there is that word decades again. Decades ago, or before the turn of the century, selling meant, as Alec Baldwin screamed in the 1992 movie Glengarry Glen Ross (adapted from David Mamet’s Pulitzer drama), “Always Be Closing.” But as the previous century began to wind up entered the “internet of things,” and Alibaba, and explosions of access to all avenues of humongous information. The days of just selling to get rid of something or make a profit out of something began to slowly and steadily be replaced by terms like relationship selling, consultative selling, solution selling, ethical sales, selling to serve, selling to solve, selling to not just create value but to cocreate value. Sales and selling had merged into resolving needs and serving customer desires. No, it really had moved beyond finding solutions and serving needs. The seller and the buyer had to tear down walls of privacy and secrets between themselves. It wasn’t just one against another but both, together, towards a faster, better and a cheaper world.
Individuals and companies that did not adapt to this reset got covered in cobwebs and then in white sheets. Rest in peace names like Kodak, IBM, Mattel, Tower Records, Sears, etc.
Yet there was a certain element of truth to my response to the question, “Raju, what, according to you, has changed in sales and selling over the decades?”
Yes, the sales environment has changed. Yes, the rules of the
The prelude into earning trust is authenticity. Here, not just the salesperson but every person and every leader needs not just to have an attitude but believe and act out of a hutzpah made out of originality, honesty, openness, courage and vulnerability.
game in the marketplace are different. Yes, the tools of the trade are niftier and swifter. Yes, even the attitude has taken a turn and is still transforming for the better. What hasn’t changed is that every transaction whether it is to get rid of something, to make profit out of something or to serve a need and find mutually beneficial solutions, is that all of them require trust.
The oldest profession in the world requires a certain element of trust. The used car salesman, no matter how sleazy, requires to become worthy of trust. Ricky Ho, my former boss, needed to earn a lot of trust to sell bellies of pork upon which his big-time investor never laid eyes upon. The guy who sells Boeing airplanes to national airlines needs to acquire trust and so does every other sales and service professional who sits behind a monitor and hacks away at a keyboard to sell unseen products to unmet customers.
The why and the how of earning trust from one to another hasn’t changed and might never change till the end of time.
The prelude into earning trust is authenticity. Here, not just the salesperson but every person and every leader needs not just to have an attitude but believe and act out of a hutzpah made out of originality, honesty, openness, courage and vulnerability. A person with that kind of a hutzpah stands out because he stands up and steps in the right direction consistently. He now becomes trustworthy. To earn trust he needs to blend consistency with competence and compassion for the customer, for the stakeholders. Overtime such a leader becomes a champion at earning trust.
The obvious postlude to trust is that your people, your followers, your partners, customers gently and surely move in the right directions that you and they take together. That is influence.
In the coming decades and eons all that we see and hear as innovation may innovate further, but the backbone of all growth and positive change in sales or any service will always be authentic influence.