The sales paradigm has changed — selling is much more than pitching facts

We grew up with the image of a salesman as being someone who is bold and charismatic, and at the same time annoying, manipulative, and misleading. In our heads, a salesman is someone who’s trying to sell us what we don’t want.

We grew with the idea that sales is about selling to people something they don’t really need, that selling is about speaking about the product’s strengths while hiding its weaknesses, that selling is about being a smartass that just wants to take care of his interests — a win-lose relationship.

Otherwise, why would we frequently choose to not open the door or pick up his call?

We grew with that idea because that was the reality, and still is in various cases. But, while that approach gave salesman great results a few decades ago, that doesn’t work as well anymore.

A few decades ago we lived in an information asymetry era — the seller had much more knowledge about a product than the buyer. Thus, the buyer had to rely on the seller to decide the purchase — he had great influence over you, which resulted in abuse of power. In other words, sales built a bad reputation to itself.

Today we have much more access to information, which makes us aware of the facts, cons and pros of a certain product. And on top of that, for the reasons mentioned above, we tend to distrust salesman.

So what people are looking on salesman today, is for someone that they can trust to help them think and solve their problems. Not someone who just knows to recite facts.

Today, people are not so much interested in knowing the number of requests they can make to your API (they can see that on your website), but much more in knowing how is the best way to implement it on their current infrastructure. Today, people are not so much interested in knowing if you have the expertise to build bots, but how you believe it’s the best approach of a bot for their case. Today, people want you to tell them if you genuinely believe if and how your product is the best for them.

In other words, the great salesman of today are people that do much more than pitching — they are great problem solvers who have a genuine interest in helping you. Great salesman are people that you can trust, and feel you can trust. Those are the ones who, sooner or later, convert the most people into customers. Those are the salesman who will win the long-term race.

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In the next post I will be writing about how to apply this in practice. Follow our publication in case you would like to be notified.

Whitesmith is a web and mobile product development studio.
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