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- Why sales?
From our earliest years we have been selling. A crying baby does it instinctively, demanding something that it needs, such as a bottle or a change, and it won’t stop until it has convinced you to fulfil its need. As it grows up, it works out ways to convince its parents that it needs a new bicycle or a playstation, and learns to discuss the benefits its parents will enjoy if they agree to buy one.
And yet, a ‘sales instinct’ isn’t something that many of us recognise within ourselves. When we were asked towards the end of high school what we intended to pursue as a career, nobody – literally NOBODY – ever put their hand up and declared their intention to go into sales. Spend time with the top men and women in South Africa’s leading businesses – people who earn seven figures annually – and you will discover the same story.
Like the rest of us, they were encouraged to keep studying at university or to get into a trade which would give them an income such as plumbing or being an electrician.
And once again, no career-guidance counsellor tried to convince them to get into sales.The perception challenge
To many on the outside – and unfortunately, too many on the inside – sales is seen as a job for smooth-talking people, whose role it is to convince customers to buy things they don’t necessarily need. People use the term ‘used car salesman’ as an epithet to describe behaviour that is intrusive and dishonest.
And yet, the funny thing about those perceptions is that the salespeople that exhibit the traits suggested above are usually the ones that are struggling to make money, to build relaitonships, and to develop a successful and lucrative career.
The perception that ‘salespeople’ are like that is wrong. Those people are not professional salespeople…Article courtesy of SALEGURU Publishing
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