THE DIARY OF A PROTEAN SALESMAN

With

Rasheed Adewusi

(Rasheed is a Sales Manager in one the telecommunication companies operating in Nigeria. He also runs the personal blog, Wise, Wide and Wild)

This is where the Salesperson has to hone all their skills together to aggregate the benefits of all the other fundamentals to close the sales. This involves deploying a range of skills from analytical, problem-solving, and inter-personal to achieve the aim. Persuasion as a Sales Fundamental is the tipping point of closing the sale. It is at this point that the salesperson calls on all the abilities residing within them to close the sale and set the groundwork for repeat purchase. Persuasion is the sum-total of every knowledge, skill, training, and experience a salesperson has garnered over time to close a sale.

Having said all that, it has to be stressed that it is very difficult to exhibit traits that one has not discovered and developed. Thus, it is imperative for all salespersons to accord the fundamental called “Persuasion” the necessary seriousness it deserves. Though “you cannot give what you do not have” sounds like a cliché, for a salesperson aspiring to evolve from “good” to “great”, it is never less true today as it was the day it was first uttered. A salesperson has to make conscious efforts to take note of the norms, whims, caprices, nuances, idiosyncrasies, and whatnots of their clients/customers; also make conscious efforts to stay abreast of trends; and be able to marry the two in relating with their clients/customers to close sales.

In reality, customers/clients cannot be shoehorned into one box – some are purely analytical, depending only on physical analysis to make decisions; some are rational, relying on logic most of the time; while some are emotional, taking decisions as the spirit leads. The analytical customers/clients will want to see the margins in black and white before making a decision, they will want to know what the profit is on each unit, they might equally want to know what the rate of sales is if it is a new product and they will need cold and hard facts to believe what you say.

The salesperson has to always be prepared to answer every question satisfactorily and if need be use a calculator, a pen, a notepad, and whatever it takes to satisfactorily convince the client/customer. The rational clients are mostly logical, using inductive and deductive reasoning to make decisions. If they had purchased a new product before and it did not sell fast, they will always bring that experience into the fray when they are being prospected for the first time.

Most of the pushback from these type of customers are fallacious, therefore the onus solely lies on the salesperson to refute the fallacies by superior logical analogies, a bit of analytical reasoning to show profit margin will also help. For the emotional clients/customers, the key is to find the soft spot and continue to hit the nail through that spot. For these kind of people, the most mundane thing like completing their looks might be the sales determinant, thus it should be the first thing that a salesperson must do once they come in contact with the customers/clients. For others it might be about supporting the same sport club, enjoying the same genre of music, or even being sympathetic to the same political party. These nexus must always be accentuated at every opportunity to close sales with these kind of customers/clients.

Paramountly, Persuasion espouses the Boy Scout mantra of “Be Prepared”. But the Preparation must be aligned with Pragmatism. Pragmatism is the ability to use only the necessary amount of ammunition from your overflowing arsenal to win over a potential buyer; if you can spend ten minutes to close a sale, why spend one hour? In essence, “Knowledge” and “Understanding” are very important, but the perfect deployment of the two in different scenarios takes “Wisdom” and that actually is the most important.