What makes salespeople special

Many of the nicest people on the planet are from sales and marketing. It’s because they are the most exposed profession being at the forefront to the products and services that are sold. The profession demands them to have the listening and communication skills aside from expertise in the products that they carry. And because they deal with people most of the time, they behave like chameleons – fine-tuning their way to different client behavior or situations. They are the kind of people who are well-adjusted and patient.

I wrote many columns ago why the selling profession is one of the noblest is because they are the face of the company and the product. Sales and marketing is that part of the company that feeds the whole organization. Without them – the business dies. The biggest companies in the world have been put up by good marketing people. Real estate, insurance, pharmaceuticals telecommunications, energy and consumer goods are some of the few industries that rely heavily on sales people.

But what’s so special about them? What makes them so different from the other professions? I have culled some of the attributes that make their profession unique but also in the way they carry out their goals for the company they serve. 

I like the way Entrepreneur.com describes them.  “Exceptional salespeople don’t get flustered. They have a Zen-like ability to focus on the specific task at hand while exuding an aura of calm confidence. In the early 1980s, the Macintosh development team used the term “reality distortion field” to describe Steve Jobs’ charisma. Winning salespeople typically have a flavor of this condition that makes them unflappable in the face of challenges.” In other words, they can change the way people think.

Entrepreneur.com goes on to say that salespeople are “paranoid”. They have to survive the emotional rollercoaster of winning and losing deals. “But that optimism is often balanced by a healthy dose of paranoia. The best salespeople constantly ask themselves how could this go wrong?

In one column, they will write down all of the ways in which they could lose the sale. And then in another column they write down what they are going to do to reduce the risk of that happening. Thus, salespeople have very strong mental and emotional capacities to withstand pressure and failure.

On another article written by Harvard Business Review, the “Ability to feel” makes a salesperson worthy of praise. “Empathy, the important central ability to feel as the other fellow does in order to be able to sell him a product or service, must be possessed in large measure. Having empathy does not necessarily mean being sympathetic. One can know what the other fellow feels without agreeing with that feeling. But a salesman simply cannot sell well without the invaluable and irreplaceable ability to get a powerful feedback from the client through empathy.”

In the same article, salesmen are self-motivated. They have “a need to conquer.”  The second of the basic qualities of good salesman is a particular kind of ego drive that makes him want and need to make the sale in a personal or ego way, not merely for the money to be gained. His feeling must be that he has to make the sale; the customer is there to help him fulfill his personal need. In effect, to the top salesman, the sale—the conquest—provides a powerful means of enhancing his ego. His self-picture improves dramatically by virtue of conquest and diminishes with failure.”

If you need to think you have what it takes to become a good salesman, send me a message for our free seminar to 09065170202.