Think of Sales as Helping people

Salespeople have always received such a bad wrap even dating back to the NCR days.  Yes NCR.  Remember, National Cash Register.  But those sales people were using slates and rocks to write purchase orders and using smoke signals to communicate.  LOL.  Just kidding.  But there were no phones, computers, beepers, etc.  Maybe the fax machine and they still sold a boat load of gear.  I am going off on a tangent sorry.  I will leave this topic for another blog post.  Sooooo, back to what I was originally writing this blog about.  We need to picture ourselves as HELPERS and not as Salespeople.  What we do for a living is we position our products and services to form a solution to HELP a customer solve a problem, business initiative and or technical initiative.  What we DO NOT DO is sell people stuff.  The telemarketer calling homes on Saturday morning to sell you a coffee maker that you DO NOT NEED with is SELLING.  Not bashing telemarketers cause we all started out as them as some point or another in our careers.  So no offense to the telemarketers.  I am just making a point.  ;)  The modern Salesperson helps.  In fact if you think about it, not only do you need to HELP your customer solve initiatives you also need to help him or her SELL the solution to his or her boss who writes the check.  Once you think of yourself as a helper and refrain from using the words SELL or SOLD or BUY psychologically you will come across to your customer as genuine and a value add.  Try this.  The next time you are talking to a customer / prospect say something like, Mr. Jones we released a new version of our Software Code that we believe based on prior customer experiences will HELP you reduce your administrative time by 50% while helping combat 25% more denial of service attacks on your web application infrastructure.  Don't say we have a new code set that we could sell you for 500 dollars and if you buy it you will reap the rewards.  Or something like that.  Think in terms of Helping!!

Shawn

PS:  Remember in a prior blog post I talked about the Secretary or Assistant looking to HELP people.  ;)