Sales Tools

Modern sales initiatives are often run like war-game exercises. Team leaders develop complex statistical charts, acronyms, and lead generation techniques. Sales agents, for their part, focus on isolating customer niches, targeting specific demographic groups, and watching and analyzing how competitors work. There's a common industry perception that sales is quickly becoming a soft science.

Of course, despite the fact that literally thousands of intellectual and technological sales tools now litter the corporate landscape, many supposedly sophisticated outfits still make very basic mistakes. That's because sales ultimately comes down to psychology. When you’re selling some product or service, you’re not just selling people that product or service--you're selling them you.

Improving Sales Turnover by Removing Prejudice against Buyers

Sure, if you have a great product to market, that can help. Yet brilliant salesman after brilliant salesman describes good techniques as intuitive. The best marketers attend to the needs of their clients, listen to their stories, and then adjust their strategies in light of that new information. In other words, they don't prejudge what their clients want, even if they have a hankering.

This technique seems to fly in the face of what we intuit that a good salesperson does. We expect that the smartest and savviest people-readers immediately assess and judge what a customer wants. However, the testimonies of expert salespeople point to just the opposite phenomenon. The best in the business go into each customer interaction as it were a new and wholly unique social situation.