I Love Salespeople

The job of a seller is difficult: our jobs are to go to another person/group, discover their problems, and as a stranger to them, tell them we have the answer. Then we have to follow them around to prove to them that we can fix their problem – problems they probably don’t appreciate as well as we do – and convince them to give us money when they don’t even know the full value of what we are offering, even when they think they do.

Through stint of force, through lots of rejection, rebuffs, and disrespect, we prevail enough to get some folks to buy. But the fallout is great: we end up feeling that our jobs are a type of battle, that our prospects aren’t to be believed, and generally our daily activities are a push against forces trying to stop us from everything we think we need to do. Frustrating. Not to mention how many prospects really need our solution and don’t buy it, and the waste of the hours we’ve put in that end up going nowhere.

And what do we wait for? We wait for that time, that moment, when a prospect calls to say they’ll buy. Then we feel like we’ve succeeded, like a hero/heroine for helping a prospect be better, for earning our pay, for making our companies happy.

The sales model only handles needs analysis and solution placement, and doesn’t give us a full complement of tools for our jobs (see What is Buying Facilitation®). As a profession, we’ve spend decades, if not centuries, in daily battle as a result, earning far less than we deserve to earn, and helping far fewer buyers than need us.

Sales people are resilient, smart, committed, disciplined, creative, charming, and caring. I look forward to a time when the entire profession welcomes decision facilitation as an additional/front-end skill so most of the pain of the job is alleviated, they make more money, and more of their prospects get what they deserve.

I’ll do my job to keep training and offering learning materials (see my new Buying Facilitation® Modules); sellers will continue doing their job of showing up and wanting to take care of buyers. How honored I am to be part of an industry with so many conscientious, smart, committed people.

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