ON SELLING || How the Action of One Salesperson can Cost Your Company its Reputation
Anyone can get the sale.
The art of selling is in how you get it. How is your selling style perceived by your clients?
Despite the theory that extroverts and networkers are those who always get the sale, introverts and every type of salespeople in between can get the sale, in their own way. If you are a business owner, you’re want to regularly check in with your clients to see if they are satisfied with their sales representative. You may uncover some surprising feedback. Are your clients being bullied into signing or renewing their contracts? This can’t be good for long-term relationships, and this is why even if the cash is flowing in, you’ll still want to get a sense of how the sales are being done.
Read on for some common selling styles and see if you can figure out what your or your salespeople’s selling style is.
Regardless of what you sell, your salesperson’s selling style can help to bring repeat business or ensure customers don’t come back. It can make or break your business.
A SPECTRUM OF SELLING STYLES
Are you…
The Yes Person?
Consultative?
Analytical?
Aggressive?
The Yes Person is self-explanatory. You’re waiting for the client to tell you what they want and what to do. Your support is more in the form of execution and simply taking down the order. There’s nothing wrong with this style, but you may be leaving opportunities on the table to upswell your clients or to provide them with more information to help them find a more tailored solution. Just because the client wants it, it’s not necessarily the best option, and it’s your job to help identify the gaps.
The Consultant. My understanding of the consultant is that they take a more consultative approach. The start of the sales process begins with active listening for this type. They arrive prepared; having done their research, they first ask questions to decipher the real client need. What problem is the client trying to solve? What is the client hoping to achieve? What is the target return on investment? What is the KPI that would indicate success for this project? These are just some starter questions the consultative sales person uses to begin the conversation. They craft a solution only after they’ve gathered all the information from the client.
The Analytical salesperson comes in with their research as well, but it would seem as if they come in assuming what they have is the best solution already. The presentation would show clear numbers, lots of data to back up their recommendations, as well as target KPIs if the client agreed to do it their way. If we had to point to a difference between the consultative versus analytical approach, it would be that the analytical approach leaves less room for the qualitative factors that would impact the strategy.
Last but not least, there’s the aggressive type. Whereas the consultative salesperson practices active listening, the analytical salesperson tries to win over the prospect with numbers and data, the aggressive salesperson gives off the feeling that they know best, and the client should therefore listen to them. True to their name, they use techniques like gaslighting and sometimes other antics bordering on mental abuse to make their clients sign a contract.
Needless to say, after looking at the 4 common sales styles above (and there may be many more in between, but these are common ones we’ve observed), you probably want to stay away from the far ends of the spectrum (the Yes person and the aggressive salesperson).
The full spectrum of salespeople exist in every industry. The restaurant version of a pushy/aggressive salesperson would be the one that checks in to see if you need more drinks every ten minutes.
CASE STUDY - HOW AGGRESSIVE SELLING CAN COST YOUR COMPANY ITS REPUTATION
We actually had an interesting case of an aggressive salesperson in recent weeks to share as a case study.
This salesperson is the Vice President of Sales of a relatively established company in the local region and the company is one of our suppliers. Our role in the supply chain is to manage the media but for our clients, and when we have approvals on advertising budgets, we would then distribute the advertising orders to our suppliers.
Nearing the end of the month, our agency was waiting on approval for the upcoming month’s advertising spend, and we started to receive emails from this sales rep. The emails would have no subject lines, but just be forwarded emails of his demand that we renew the monthly advertising plan before it expired at the end of the month. Given that we were still pending approval on the budget, we didn’t respond to these emails. Every day, a new forwarded would arrive in our inboxes (he would cc every contact he had at our agency), again with no subject line.
Finally, a week after this series of emails, we received a threatening email from this salesperson, demanding that we respond or otherwise he would go past our agency and reach out directly to the developer to “show them the number of leads they’ve been receiving from the platform” to convince the client to renew their contract. My project manager politely explained that this may not be the best course of action given the client has delegated for us to handle the full media buy efforts to maximized efficiency and reduce their own administrative and planning burden.
This is one of the few rare moments where I’ve truly questioned where these types of people come from. However, given that this individual made it into the management ranks at a company, it likely means there are other extremely aggressive salespeople out there using the same detestable methods to close a sale.
Let this case be a wake up call if you use this style of selling. Unless your company has a monopoly on the industry and the client has no other option, they will go elsewhere or at the very least request a different salesperson to assist them. Even if you do have a monopoly at the moment, if a competitor springs up, your actions will make it easy for them to make a switch to your competition.
Don’t be that person that costs your company its reputation.
