Is Everyone A Salesperson?

“Sales” A word that when told to most people they are not interested or are not happy about.

Salespeople have been considered to be annoying, cheats and talkative people. These notions have made most people feel uncomfortable and unwilling to take up sales jobs. What most employees and employers don’t know is that we are all salespeople. Yes, I said it, you are a salesperson. It’s more of reading emotions, quickly finding pain points and off the cuff think through the possible solutions that you can offer and finally compromises.
Seriously look at these different scenarios where we sell but don’t know that we are selling it called non-sales selling.
- A guy trying to convince his girlfriend to watch movie A instead of watching movie B.

2. You are trying to negotiate your fare down with a “Makanga” tout.
3. You are trying to convince your friend to take you somewhere that he/she does not want.
4. You are trying to convince your colleague to cover you while you go out for lunch
What most people don’t know is that we all are salespeople and salespeople always pitch. Be it a pitch to a client, investor, collaborator, spouse, relative or potential employee. This is so since salespeople are people who move people from one point of view or level of satisfaction to the level desired or described by the salesperson, in exchange of what they have i.e. moving product or service to a client in exchange for money. Funny!
So as a human being you are a mover and salespeople move people form one thought point to another.
As all the practices there are various recommended ways of execution. Since all business operates with customers and the salespeople are the ones in charge of bringing in business. There are some ways that I have learnt over my time as a salesperson. They might not be the only ways but they have worked for me so far (without being cocky)
In my time as a sales and marketing person, I learnt that there are super salespeople and normal salespeople (which every normal human being is). We, however, need to have a couple of attributes to be super salespeople.
Most of the salespeople try to think too much about the product fit and do not concentrate on the gap that the product or service is filling for the client and capitalize on that. This leads to emotional selling, where we convince the client that the product or the service is not a want but a need for them. This indicates that as a salesperson you need to articulate the value proposition very clearly and show them the urgency of having your product or service, if you can play the fear of missing out (FOMO), please do but not always do that.
Apart from the small gap highlighted above, there are some few attributes that you can cultivate to make a good salesperson
1. Persistence: there are various research indicating that salespeople who follow up almost 8 times always close the deals
2. Listening skills
3. Attunement
4. Ability to quickly and smoothly identify the gap that your product or service is filling ( opportunistic (I don’t know if that the right word, but you get what I mean)
5. Be fair and also at the same time try to get more from the client without exploiting. I know it’s tough to understand)

The other thing that most salespeople need to know as Daniel Pink indicated in his book “To Sell is Human” everyone has about 250 people that they are very close too. These are people that you can directly reach out to for a Harambee (crowdfunding), wedding invite or just a birthday celebration. So as you are selling something you should look at one client as 249 potential sells.
So referral is very important since it makes the clients be your salespeople.
Anyway, based on the ideas and engagement that I have given do you think we are all salespeople and you just need to add some attributes to be a super sales guy. If yes don’t ever say I don’t want a sales job since you always sell.
Goodbye and let’s chat about this more.
