5 ms·
This is based on a faulty understanding of what sales is supposed to be (and what it is, when it is done well) - at any level, sales is primarily a discovery ex
by seem_2211 7y ago
This is based on a faulty understanding of what sales is supposed to be (and what it is, when it is done well) - at any level, sales is primarily a discovery exercise (what does the customer want?) and working out if you can mostly fulfill those needs. This is hampered by a few things namely 1: commission structures, 2: customers not knowing what they want (regardless of what they might tell you) and 3: customers not wanting to admit what they want.
While there are some egregious examples, the rate at which a sales interaction is based on outright fraud is thankfully very small.
As for focusing on customer solution generation, I would highly recommend you spend more time working with customers before setting others up for that sort of torture.
- mrunkel 7y agoIs this your first year? Because this is completely contrary to my experience. Salespeople are some very driven folks but honesty and a desire to help customers solve needs is not a common trait.
- seem_2211 7y agoNo, but I should disclose that I am a recruiter (salesperson alert!) who works to help salespeople get jobs. Not to say I've met some terrors in my time, but I think the vast majority of salespeople are good people (just like the vast majority of devs/engineers are also well intentioned people).
- benj111 7y agoFraud wasn't mentioned. Take for example the Pepsi challenge, in a blind test people reliably choose Pepsi, but knowing brands, they choose coke. Coke are successfully increasing sales for something people arguably don't want. Except they do because they feel coke says something about them? They're told coke says something about them? What's the morality implications there? Anyway, whatever your opinion that isn't about finding a customer solution, customers clearly want Pepsi, perhaps with coke branding, marketing is working against that in this case.