Thousands of years ago a primitive clan hunted a mammoth larger than they could eat before it rotted down, so they decided to propose to another clan to trade the excess meat for fruit or flint axes. In that very moment, trade was born. If the others did not accept immediately making it necessary to persuade, negotiate and reduce the tension, the first salesperson appeared. That makes selling one of the oldest professions in the world, right after the hunter-gatherer’s one.
It is surprising that an ancient activity with a huge impact on the history of culture is still so little known and understood. People who observe the activity from the outside often think that a good seller is necessarily an outgoing person, with few scruples and a lot of smooth talk. It’s not like that.
Selling is hard work. It requires method, self-discipline, long hours, and an artistic combination of technical and interpersonal skills. This is the only way to manage pricing, features, information, and logistics while developing and nurturing a human relationship. Extroverts do easily the part of the work which involves opening doors, starting conversations, and building connection, but they have to put more effort into analyzing and following processes. Introverts will feel at ease in process management but will need more conscious attention to relationship building and persuasion, where they need to develop their own style. Both profiles can be excellent salespeople, but never without effort. So in front of the myth of the natural gift, the reality is hard work.
If there is a really vital asset for the seller, it is their credibility, which allows them to build relationships of trust with their clients. No seller wants to risk their trust capital. We can ask a salesperson to give up some of their free time or to deal with not-perfect tools… but don’t ask them to sacrifice their credibility. The reaction would be frontal. Personal credibility is their most important possession. Opposite to the myth of the unethical seller, it is all about trustworthiness.
Then there’s the idea of the gift of the gab. Good sellers talks would a lot and in a charming way in order to prevent a buyer from thinking, so they end up buying something they don’t really need. A funny but totally erroneous belief. A good salesperson needs to be above all a good listener. Listening involves asking questions, paying attention to the answers, and being able to understand the clues about motivations or deep concerns that are sometimes given implicitly. By actively listening, the good seller explores the unknown territory of the client’s mind, with respect and curiosity, until he finds a need that he believes he can solve. Only then do they make a proposal. Listening is a skill that can be learned, but it only works if the seller is genuinely interested in what the buyer is saying. So, instead of the myth of smooth talking, it’s all about empathy.
It was this process of listening and discovery that Neil Rackham studied and articulated in his famous SPIN sales model back in 1988, undoubtedly the most widely taught method since then. Most of the subsequent ones are nothing more than expanded or reviewed versions of SPIN.
These models are necessary to structure the effort. It has been said that selling is an art because it works with complex situations, with many unpredictable variables, and requires the creative combination of multiple skills to develop a personal style. But the artistic approach does not imply a lack of method. Good salespeople follow and practice well-defined methods.
Another very influential model in business-to-business selling is the so-called consultative selling, proposed by Mark Hanan. In this approach, the salesperson does not try to offer a product but rather to work with the customer on a customized solution for their specific needs.
In professional B2B sales, the conversations can become highly technical and the solutions very complex. This makes it necessary for buyer and seller to understand each other in a common technical language. To commercialize drugs based on mRNA, a pharmaceutical company will prefer to employ PhDs in Biology. To commercialize chiral auxiliaries for chemical synthesis they will seek to have chemists. This is because these professionals speak the language of their clients. Only by using this common language can we get the customer’s cooperation to understand their specific needs and find or design a solution, which is the philosophy of consultative selling.
But this specialized knowledge, while necessary, is not enough. To develop solutions, a good understanding of the situation is necessary. This where the already mentioned empathy, credibility and hard work come into play. The purely technical sale, based solely on a rational analysis of features and prices, is another myth. As long as the decision is made by a human being, there will be a significant emotional component. While this is firmly established by neuroscience, is often controversial when stated in sales training, and can make technically oriented salespeople slightly uncomfortable. But this needs to be well understood: we are not saying that buyer is not professional and “gets carried away” by his emotions instead of doing a good job. Rather it is that even the most technical decision-maker must have some personal motivation to do a good job. The salesperson needs to understand that motivation, discover how a job well done is going to bring them a share of happiness. Only by understanding this, can we gain the necessary complicity to explore whether we are ready to offer a solution that paves the way to their next breakthrough.
Many of us have experienced transitioning from technical or scientific careers to commercial roles. This can be motivated by attractions within the business world or by a desire to escape aspects of the technical real which ended up being less attractive than expected. Such a move can be daunting due to the unknown territory and to the perception on the other shore that we are joining a less respectable club. I sometimes have the opportunity to interview or mentor young professionals looking at this Robicon and hesitating whether to cross it. In such cases I don’t attempt to prescribe the better decision since there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. Instead, I aim to dispel misconceptions and present a realistic view of sales.
Consultative selling of technical solutions offers us good career opportunities and very rewarding personal interactions with interesting people in our field. It also allows us to keep up to date on technological trends. It is intellectually challenging and socially interesting. But it is sales. We look for a decision that resides in the mind and heart of our client. Any commercial specialist who isn’t comfortable calling him or herself a salesperson hasn’t made the necessary transition yet.
Everything said so far is very intrinsic to the sales profession and probably has not changed much over time. But other things do change. Digitization has revolutionized the way we interact, including the way we buy and sell. But are we facing the end of sales as we know it?
The first voices announcing the end of people buying from people predate digitization – they began in the 20th century. They were dazzled by the marketing boom. The thesis was that, in a world dominated by the media, where buyers are highly informed, it is no longer about selling, but about customers buying, and they do so based on the power of the brand. According to this theory, the customer explores, chooses one of the options because of its brand name or other purely emotional implications, and then buys. In this process there seems to be no place for the seller. Copywriters, creatives and marketers would have filled all the positions. Is this vision realistic?
Brands have the potential to be associated in the collective imagination with emotions that make them objects of desire. But not everything that is bought and sold is under the influence of a strong brand. And even when it is, the decision about if, when and where the customer will buy it is greatly influenced by the trust the seller creates.
People buy from people, based on mutual trust.
I always say that to gain people’s trust the first step is to deserve it. Again, credibility. But once that base is covered, you also have to work on it. You need to develop and exercise planning, prospecting, opening, questioning, presentation, negotiation and service skills. No, it is not enough to have a good brand: we must learn to sell and optimize our sales process.
Digitalization has revitalized that idea (that dream of sales managers) of “we don’t sell, they buy from us”. At the end of the day the customer’s possibilities to get informed and seduced without personal interaction grow exponentially with the boom of social networks.
If we take seriously the countless publications on Linkedin that want to teach us copywriting, social selling, storytelling and other gerunds, we could conclude that anyone who does not become a billionaire in a year without effort is a failure. The current sale would be as easy as publishing daily content with headlines of high emotional impact, telling our proposal in narrative form, and showing the world that we are capable of solving their problem.
Real life is not so easy. The problem of each of our potential clients is unique and personal. A problem for us is any discrepancy between the real and the desired situation. To solve it, it is not enough to guess it based on a superficial study of trends. Behind every linkedin profile (or tik tok, or twitter, or instragram) there is a person. The history, emotions and aspirations of that person, which will determine his decisions, are unique. It is necessary to understand the personal implications and what creates the desire to solve that individual problem. Faced with the new myth that we no longer sell, they buy from us, in reality the seller -the person who listens on the other side of the digital channel- still has a big job to do.
Digitalization is changing the way we sell, but it is not about replacing the person-to-person relationship with some automated process. It is about changing the way that relationship develops.
Information is no longer a scarce commodity; time is. Clients have become more autonomous, better informed, and more powerful when it comes time to negotiating and demanding. The seller has to find a new way to add value in this context. This will be not so much by providing information, but rather by helping to select, interpret and prioritize the information, and accompanying -no longer directing- the purchase process.
Relational preferences have changed in business, just as they have in every other facet of human connection. People prefer brief interactions and remote work for simple discussions, leaving the face-to-face conversation for more select, more special moments. The new salesperson needs to learn to move comfortably in both scenarios. We have already reflected on this in another point of this forum.
In the 21st century as in its beginnings, selling is the art of earning and creating trust. Something as noble as that.