Default Setting

Sales is a default career for millions.

Often for the extrovert who never learned how to do anything that people would pay them for in an open market. College campuses are littered with young people- often there on their parent’s dime- who have little trouble making friends but will leave school with zero marketable skills. They will be contacting you soon at your place of business with some amazing offer. As the adage goes, I personally didn’t dream of one day being a salesman.

Which brings me to this. Almost everything ever written on Selling- ESPECIALLY on the ultra-sleazy subject of closing techniques- is horse poop. What they’re really attempting to teach is manipulation techniques. This is the primary reason so many people loathe the image that is the salesman. Or they simply break into a full sprint at sight or sound of live one.

There are hundreds of things that successful people do in sales that don’t involve manipulation- covert or otherwise. Most of it is just doing the work. But the articles and the books keep talking about how to close people. A headline in the current Boston Business Journal prompted this post.

For you Liberal Arts Majors who haven’t the faintest idea on how you’ll earn your daily bread post college, please read and heed the following:

1.)If you choose to intentionally manipulate (or worse), just know your comeuppance is inevitable. And the misery will be unimaginable. Your trail of quarry will one day be surpassed by coming face-to-face with what you are and the pointlessness of your life's "work". (Strong enough?..I’m dead serious). The annals of history are full of these guys, business or otherwise.

2.)If you chose to do it honestly, pick a product or service there is a real market for. At times, you will be required to ask people for their business, but only after it is abundantly clear it’s logical and beneficial for them to do so. The prospective buyer is often nervous and they’ve worked themselves into a lather to where they've concluded that making NO DECISION is the safe thing to do. If they’re still unable or unwilling to decide, just move on. You'll save them and yourself from a shi#load of unnecessary agitation.