Do You Always Tell The Truth When Selling?
Why do most sales people embellish the details or even exaggerate to seal the deal? Is honesty too detrimental to a potential sale? Can sales people actually sell anything without blatantly lying about the features or benefits?
We want to hear from anyone who has ever sold anything ranging from your personal second hand items, your car, your bike etc, to being a professional sales person who was hired to sell products, services, mortgages, loans, stocks or anything else of high value.
As a sales person, have you ever sold something to someone and made them agree to accept terms which they otherwise would not have accepted because you used jargon which was not expressly clear or you buried critical terms in the small print? If you did so at any point in the past, how did you feel after the customer agreed to the sale? Were any of your moral senses activated at the time of the sale or do you have an innate ability to suppress any inhibitors which may interfere with your commission?
These questions may feel like an interrogation, but this is exactly the point, very few sales people are ever held to account for misleading the customer and right now as you read this, thousands of “sales people” are knowingly exaggerating the benefits of their products or services just to make a sale. Maybe it’s a lack of training, maybe it’s how they see the role of a sales person or worse, maybe it’s under direct command from their superiors or sales manager to sell, sell, sell!!!! In the above photo of the City of London which is one of the largest financial districts on the planet, can you imagine how many sales transactions that take place every day and the pressure which sales men and women are under to perform and reach their targets? It must be immense. It’s just as challenging if you run a small business and you’re off to a slow start for the month and need to increase your sales. However, there can be no excuse when a sales person knowingly and deliberately presents a deal to a customer and that customer enters into an agreement which has immediate and long term consequences which affects them or their family. Nowadays, there is a substantial amount of legislation in place to help customers AFTER the event, but the only real deterrent to protect the consumer is the sales person’s own moral sense of decency which is inherent in most people. It’s the firewall which is designed to intervene at the critical moment by making each person feel a quirky tension as the natural human algorithms distort your body language when sensing a desire to blatantly lie. Experts in body language claim that they can spot the signs in anyone, even the most highly skilled sales person. The average consumer is no expert in reading body language and the technology is not available on smartphones to assist the consumer, so we are totally dependent on that firewall doing it’s duty.
In our sector, customers are taken on a journey which all starts with quality images of something like houses in Holland Park, they then read the listing details and their excitement and desire increases as they arrive for a viewing. As London estate agents we also have a duty to explain any aspects of the property which the customer has a concern about, even if this risks losing the sale and this is the real stress test of salesmanship. Our company deals with this challenge by conducting a fairly thorough inspection before accepting the listing and declining any property which we feel would not meet our customer’s expectations. The other alternative would be to accept all properties regardless of their condition and having to offer long explanations each time a concern is flagged up. From experience, it is much easier to sell quality products rather than pretend that something is much better than it really is. People who choose to sell for a living just need to find the best quality items and let the products speak for themselves. There’s no better feeling than meeting a satisfied customer years after a transaction and they are excited to talk about the product or service.
