It has been more than a decade since I was branded as Sales Person .Frankly speaking it was not an easy journey for me to survive and excel in the midst of traditional format of sales crowd .I was one among very few or rather only sales person who believed that sales is all about giving and not grabbing or getting. The rest of the colleagues who I have experienced mostly spoke about customer value proposition for long run but looked at grabbing the immediate business for meeting up with targets / pressure. It was tough for me to compete with such a crowd and excel with the philosophy of giving .I always coach or mentor my team on “ Empathy” as the key characteristic of a Sales Person. Most of the time I ask my team who come to me for guidance on sales the following question.
“How do you /would you react to a situation when you see your closest friend slipping down in front of you and got injured”.
It’s the same way you have to see the customer’s pain .Seeing the customer’s pain requires a completely different mind-set .It requires a “giving” mind and not “grabbing /getting “mind. Most of the times sales is associated with aggressiveness which is misunderstood as get the business at any cost. My experience has been that’s not required to be winning sales personal. According to me Sales or Business acquisition is the natural by-product of that “empathy “which a Sales person displays and the client/customer experiences. This“empathy” can only be experienced by the customer/client when there is a resonance of body-mind-soul in the sales person to address the pain of the customer .If there is/was even an iota of “ getting /grabbing” mentality its less likely it’s going to be artificial in front of the customer .I always had this Irony in mind . All business philosophies talk about “ Value Proposition” ;”Solution based selling” and when the human mind as a sales person is trained for “ getting/grabbing” how can one give “ value proposition /solution “ which is on the giving side of psychology .Hence it’s very important to understand this irony and tune our mind to the “giving” side . In my experience I have closed reasonably significant deals but I can proudly & very honestly say “I never pushed a customer for my targets; I never spoke anything which is beyond reality for grabbing business; I was not concerned about my targets; but only thought about what justice I can do to the customers pain by “Empathizing” his/her pain points with the “giving” mind-set. The natural outcome was I was able to give right solution and business fell in place at premium rates most of the times and I was able to out beat the competition .Also its important to understand that when we go with the “giving” mind-set the questions and the statements that we make in front of the client and the choice of words ,will make the customer or client move towards us as a trusted partner .But in my experience I have rarely seen or only very few experienced sales people have this mind-set of “giving” and the rest has the general natural tendency is to project how good their product or service is without even taking a step to know the pain of the customer/client .Also its very important that the customer/client also knows that all the soft skills we have acquired is to impress him/her and everybody can be groomed on that . What he /she is waiting for is that “empathy” which can probably “give” the right solution to his/her pain.
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