Sellenthal: Don’t Become Part of the Forgotten Tribe

Correct me if I’m wrong, but we salespeople are supposed to be sellers, not tellers. We’re supposed to get objections on the table so we can discuss and try to overcome them.

Instead, salespeople concern themselves with making inconclusive presentations — anything to avert rejection and keep the sales process alive. By and large, salespeople, and their presentations, are all too often forgotten before the office door closes behind them.

I hate to say it, but most salespeople don’t play to win; they play not to lose.

A lot of salespeople can make decent presentations. Big deal. That’s only one part of our job, and certainly not the biggest.

So, what exactly is our job?

Selling is our job. And selling is about identifying needs — our prospect’s, not ours — and trying to fill those needs with creative solutions.

By the way, that’s as good a definition of selling as you’re going to get, here or anywhere else.

Along the same lines, let’s go a step further. I’ve been saying the following for so long that I’ve convinced myself I coined it: Our job as a seller is to be a solution in search of a problem. Read it again!

We identify a prospect’s problems and, with our product or service in mind, we come up with suggested solutions.

The only way to get the prospect to identify his problems and objectives is by asking good questions to elicit information that will help us to help him.

I’m not saying that simply making a presentation can’t work. It can, but it’s like throwing a barrel of you-know-what against the wall and hoping that some of it sticks. It’s tantamount to closing your eyes, swinging a bat and hoping the ball hits it.

I don’t like the odds one darn bit.

“Sellenthal” is a monthly column by Ira Ellenthal, author of The Last Book About Selling That You’ll Ever Need (Amazon, $16.95).