You Cannot Ignore The Present. It's Where Your Sales Are

By Jeffrey Gitomer

My sales perspective flies in the face of traditional selling. And it’s not just a disruption; it’s the new way of sales. What’s your perspective?

Here are seven realities to get your thinking started:
FIRST REALITY: Traditional selling is aggressive – telling, pitching, manipulating and closing. This old-world approach to sales is over and has been for more than a decade.
SECOND REALITY: The first sale that’s made is the salesperson. If the prospective customer does not buy you, he’s not buying anything.
THIRD REALITY: The customer is as smart as or smarter than you are. The Internet has provided her with competitive savvy, and social media provides proof.
FOURTH REALITY: Your customers and prospects are busy with their stuff and may have little or no time to be bothered by you and your stuff. It’s so much more powerful when they find you in time of need.
FIFTH REALITY: Customers and prospects want intellectual engagement about how they win, not a sales pitch! They do not care about your urgency to make quota. They care only about their urgency to make profit.
SIXTH REALITY: The prospective customer must perceive value in your sales offering, trust you as a person and as a company, perceive that he wins as a result of purchase, and be able to visualize outcome after purchase (maybe with the help of your video testimonials).

SEVENTH REALITY: You’d better have a social presence and a social reputation that proves your worth to others and provides peace of mind to the prospect.

Look at the following list – carefully – and see whether what you do, the actions you take or any of the strategies about how you sell are contained here. If they are, you will consistently lose to the “new way.”

-Cold calling. If selling has a dark side, it’s the cold call. Total interruption of others (the prospects) and predominantly a waste of salespeople’s time. Higher than 90% rejection rate and the major cause of sales failure.
-Hunting and farming salespeople. This is basically a sales specialist making a sale and then running away. Leaving behind the service department, or inside sales, or the delivery guy, and leaving the customer to feel deserted. Hunting and farming is the worst case for relationship building ever created.
-Find the pain. Perhaps the rudest of all sales processes, it’s “probing” to make prospects feel uncomfortable. This is an old-world tactic in which the salesperson miraculously proposes a solution to an issue that the prospect has. The solution is not the issue. The issue is that finding the pain is the focal point of the sale. No value, no engagement, no connection – simply manipulation. The only thing more idiotic (and more rude) than “finding the pain” is cold calling.
-Pitch the product. Telling your prospective customer stuff about your product that he could’ve found online in three seconds or that you could’ve emailed him in advance of your meeting. Customers do not care what you’re selling unless you’re showing them how they win as a result of purchase – such as how they will produce more and how they will profit more. Start there.
-Overcome objections. “Your price is too high.” Really? You still dealing with that? Where’s the value? Where’s the testimonial? Where’s the relationship? Where’s the trust? Where’s the social proof?
-Close the sale. Manipulative closing is a thing of the past. The sale is made emotionally, not manipulatively.
-Proposals and bidding. This part of selling will never go away but can be significantly reduced with loyal relationships and proven quality.
-Insincere follow-up. Call looking for money.
-Customer satisfaction. J.D. Power and Associates gives “customer satisfaction” awards to airlines. Do I need to say anything more about how ridiculous customer satisfaction is?
-Ask for (beg for) referrals. If you ask for a referral once and the customer does not give you one and you call again to remind the customer that she promised to give you a referral and the customer still does not give you one, she will never take your call again. Instead of asking for referrals, why don’t you give one?

-Low or no social media presence. Failure to understand the fact that social media is a combination of attraction, proof that you are what you say you are and a sales tool.

Me? I prefer to be assertive. Assertive salespeople ask. Aggressive salespeople tell. Assertive salespeople go for the customer. Aggressive salespeople go for the sale. Which one are you? It’s the difference between the old way and the new way.

Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of 12 best-selling books, including The Sales Bible and The Little Red Book of Selling. His best-selling 21.5 Unbreakable Laws of Selling is now available as a book and an online course at www.gitomerVT.com. For public event dates and information about training and seminars, visit www.gitomer.com or email Gitomer personally at salesman@gitomer.com.