Salespeople need to smile more, and not forced smiles like Arthur Miller envisioned in Death of a Salesman: He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.
It takes much more than a smile and a shoeshine to succeed in sales today. Still, they are a good place to start.
I sell speeches. A few years ago, I participated in a speakers' showcase held by a speakers' bureau. I paid the bureau a fee, and they invited meeting planners to see speakers, including me, deliver speeches. We each got 15 to 20 minutes to perform some material in front of this live audience of buyers. It's like a battle of the bands. Each speaker tries to wow the audience to win business. When it was my turn, I did my 20 minutes and then yielded the stage to the next speaker.
Out in the hotel hallway, I ran into another speaker. "Wow, you really looked like you were having fun out there," he said.
"If I'm going to pay my own money to speak, I'm going to enjoy myself," I replied.
"I'm too nervous in front of an audience to have fun," he told me. He was a college professor who felt comfortable facing his students but not in front of the corporate market. "I wish I felt the same way about speaking that you do.
Your Sales Vibes
Here's the point: People can tell when you're enjoying what you do, and they can tell when you're not into your job. How does your customer experience you?
These are the three vibes you must give off when with a prospect or customer:
- I'm glad to be here.
- I know what I'm talking about.
- I love what I'm doing.
Work is not a punishment for not being born rich. It is critical you find joy in your sales job. The great author Elbert Hubbard put it this way: "Get happiness out of your work, or you may never know what happiness is."
Not only that, if you don't have passion for what you're selling, the prospect won't either. So working on your belief and attitude is critical for sales success.
What Do You Love About Your Sales Job?
The following exercise will help you identify what you love about your sales job. Once you have discovered what you love, share it with your customers.
For example, you could say, "One of the things I love about my job is to see customers get the outcomes they want from the products and services I sell. It's even more fun when I get a letter from a happy customer who was skeptical at first."
It is energizing to focus on the good things about your job, and when you share your enthusiasm, you may find the meeting has a different dynamic. When you're glad to be there, your customer may be glad you're there too.
Completing these five sentences will get you started:
- One of the most exciting things we're doing at our company today is…
- I get a great deal of job satisfaction when…
- The best thing a customer ever told me about our company is…
- I took this job because…
- The reason I'm doing this -- besides the money -- is that it offers me the opportunity to…
As you complete those sentences, you develop your own sense of what is important about your job, and you discover some things to share with your customers. Whether you make the sale or not, one of the impressions you want to leave with a person is: That salesperson really loves what he is doing.
When you're at your very best in sales, you are happy. You feel important. You get great satisfaction. If you're not getting great satisfaction from your work, customers will know. It's the vibe. They will wonder why you're not enjoying your job -- maybe your product is inferior or your company is undergoing a tremendous upheaval. They will wonder if they'd be better off with your competitor's product.
So start smiling.