Are All Salespeople Liars?
Introduction
The stereotype of salespeople and marketers is often negative, owing to the misguided practices of their predecessors going back to the 1970s. Those practices accumulated to form a poor stereotype about them and about their dress (the formal suit) — an image tied to deception, distrust, and corruption. So is it really true that all salespeople are liars? And what is the salesperson’s impact on customer experience?
Whenever I talk about salespeople, I’m reminded of the story of the goose that laid golden eggs.
The Story in Brief
It’s said that a farmer who worked on a farm suffered from extreme poverty. One day, he found in his farm a goose that laid a golden egg every morning instead of ordinary eggs. The farmer felt he was about to become one of the richest people in his village. Eager to get all the golden eggs quickly without waiting days, he killed the goose to reach the chain of eggs inside it — but he found none.
Capitalism in Its Ugliest Form
All the negative behaviors that emerged — and continue to emerge — from salespeople have their root cause not in the people themselves, but in their employers, who chase money by any means available, throwing every value, principle, and norm out the window, placing salespeople under exhausting operational pressures and annual targets that border on the impossible. Companies whose work revolves entirely around generating profit rather than around customers use base methods and tactics to achieve their aims. They’re ready to offer kickbacks in kind or in cash or in other forms, and they call them by other names (some companies call a bribe “lubrication cost,” meaning lubricating the relationship with the brand to make it sticky and smooth). A salesperson who doesn’t fall into this swamp doesn’t succeed at performing their job in the required manner and is dispensed with.
Who Is the Successful Salesperson in the Eyes of Companies?
In the eyes of profit-centric companies, the most successful salesperson is the one who delivers the largest amount of sales for the company, regardless of the methods used and regardless of whether the customers who bought the product/service actually needed it. To his company, he is just a number. If this poor soul doesn’t hit the number that rises year after year, his company will deny his ten years of service and claim poor performance.
Who Is the Successful Salesperson in the Eyes of Customers?
In the eyes of customers, the successful salesperson is the one who listens to them to the last moment and only recommends the product/service they actually need — even at the cost of not closing a sale with them — in order to build a relationship founded on trust. He is the person who might direct a customer to a competitor because he knows the need will be met there. He is the person who, if he offers you a product/service and senses you’re not interested, doesn’t insist or pressure or try to convince you through direct and indirect methods, but instead apologizes and moves on. He is the person who, if he finds you using a product/service from a competitor, won’t unleash the ugliest accusations against them but will instead wish you both all the best.
What Does That Have to Do With Customer Experience?
Some organizations change job titles for some of their employees in keeping with trend and fashion, renaming the account manager to “customer experience manager” or “customer happiness officer” — titles only, without exerting any effort to change minds and cultures and without providing any training that prepares these employees to truly be responsible for improving customer experience. This tactic won’t be of any use; on the contrary, it may bring the company greater negatives.
By contrast, there’s a trend among customer-centric companies of changing the performance targets for their salespeople to be customer-centric — focused on the level of listening to customers, customer satisfaction, the degree to which their needs are met, and proper expectation management — instead of focusing on sales and only sales. This method is very effective and leads to a major shift in salesperson behavior, with the important caveat that it should be backed by professional training to help them achieve these targets.
A company whose salespeople lie will not retain its customers and will lose them one by one over time. Because the moment a customer discovers lying or misleading by one of these salespeople, trust collapses immediately and they’ll bring nothing but losses to your company through their revenge of sharing their experience with friends, colleagues, and relatives.
In Closing
There is a vast difference between the salesperson focused on what’s in your pocket and the one who wants to build a long-term relationship with you. There’s a world of difference between the one who gets to know you by starting with questions about where you work and your position to figure out whether he can benefit from you, and the one who gets to know you and asks several general questions to know you as a human being — as a person he can build a human relationship with. There’s a world of difference between the one who killed the goose out of greed and the one who took care of it so it would lay a golden egg every day.
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