Authenticity in Sales: Building Lasting Client Relationships

Ever felt uncomfortable dealing with a pushy salesperson? We get it. This episode is all about shattering that sleazy salesperson stereotype and showcasing how honesty and ethical behavior can elevate the sales profession. Hear a personal story about a colleague who was so turned off by the negative perception that he refused to have 'sales' on his business card. Learn why it's crucial for salespeople to view themselves as problem solvers providing valuable solutions, and how transparency can build trust and pride in your role.

Navigating technical and niche markets can be tricky, but we've got you covered. Discover practical strategies for collaborating with technical experts to ensure you’re providing accurate information to clients. By mastering the art of managing expectations and avoiding miscommunications, you'll see how ethical practices can lead to stronger, long-lasting relationships. And don't miss out on the eye-opening insights about how being straightforward can lead to unexpected referrals and new opportunities—proving that authenticity and a stellar reputation are your best sales tools. Tune in and transform the way you think about sales!

Chapters

• 0:00 Avoiding Sleazy Salesperson Stereotypes in Sales
• 9:20 Maximizing Sales Success Through Collaboration
• 20:04 Building Sales Through Honesty and Integrity

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Hello again. I was watching a TV show the other evening and it's one where these guys take somebody's car. So somebody who knows the person who owns the car basically writes to them and this person has had some sort of difficulties that prevent them from getting the car into a usable condition usable condition and basically these guys take it away, refurbish it we spray it, do all the things they have to do and then give it back to the owner as a surprise event. And on this particular show, what they were going to do was put this guy's car in a car showroom and he was invited to have a look around at whatever make these cars were, which I forget now. But the thing that struck me was that one of the presenters was dressed up as a salesman, so in a suit, and basically and frankly it's a kind of a bit of an in your face sort of a person anyway. But the whole thing made me cringe because this guy was definitely portraying, certainly, my idea of what a pushy, sleazy salesman is, and it made me think about that in the context of sales training and these podcasts, because I think for a lot of people going into sales for the first time, that's the image that they hold of salespeople, and certainly for a lot of people who aren't in sales, that's also the image they hold of salespeople that they're there for themselves, they're completely on the make and they're sort of in your face, very pushy people, and with that as a caricature of a salesperson as it is, as I've said, for many people, you can quite understand why a lot of people don't really want to either have much to do with those kind of sales people and neither do I, by the way and also, if you're in sales, why? Why you just don't want to end up being that kind of a person.

Speaker 1: 2:17

And I remember coming across this with people I was managing. It was one of the things that I remember one particular guy we actually spoke about this. He didn't want salesman or salesperson or sales anything actually on his business card. And I remember asking him why was that? Is he ashamed of what he does? And he said, well, no, but I don't want to be associated with that kind of a person. So this is where some re-education comes in, and obviously we can't educate everybody about what a good salesman is, what a bad salesman is. I think most of us will pick up on a bad salesman anyway pretty quickly. But I think more for us as salespeople, it's to be very aware of what it is we do. Are we doing something we should be proud of? Should you be proud to have sales on your business card as part of your title, wherever else that term might be used? And my argument to him was that you should be proud of it.

Speaker 1: 3:36

Because what salespeople do? The business that we're in? Obviously we're making sales. Hopefully we're making money. We're making sustainable revenue for the business that we're in, but for our clients, for our customers, we are providing solutions. That's what we do. We are, if you like, problem solvers, providing solutions. That's what we do. We are, if you like, problem solvers.

Speaker 1: 4:01

And somebody will approach us, or we'll approach a business because they have a problem that they hope we can solve, or we recognize that that kind of business is likely to have the sort of problems that we know we can solve. As salespeople, we know, with the products, the solutions whatever it might be, the services that we offer, that we can solve their problems for them. And you know, in a way, what better job could you have than solving people's problems for them so that they can get on and do whatever it is that they want to do. So they're in business for a reason. It isn't to talk to salespeople usually although strangely enough, my business is about speaking to salespeople but for most people that we come across when they're looking at buying something certainly from a business to business perspective and I'll look at it that way it can almost be an inconvenience. It's just that something has happened and they now need to get something else in or some sort of a solution in, and often it will be in an area where they have limited expertise. So they have to solve this problem. They don't know all the ins and outs necessarily of the technology that's being used or the kind of service. There might be legal aspects to it, there might be just how it's done, and none of us know the answer to everything.

Speaker 1: 5:30

So the chances are that when you speak to a client you know more about your solution than they do. Know more about your solution than they do. Now I say the chances are. There are certain people you'll come across who are extremely expert in their niche area and in those situations there's a very good chance they actually know more about what's going on than you do, because most salespeople I know we tend I'm kind of generalizing here but often we'll have kind of a headliner knowledge of what it is we're providing, particularly if we're across several types of solution. It might be technical, it might be software, whatever it is then we can go so far, but you may well then find that you need specialists to start really getting into the deep detail of whatever it is that comprises that solution. However, for most people, the knowledge that we have as salespeople is more than they will have. So we are there to guide them, and one of the things that I think is really important when it comes to getting rid of this I'll refer to it as the sleazy salesperson.

Speaker 1: 6:49

But getting rid of that sleazy salesperson image is to be ethical in what we do. And I have told several clients when I was selling that I didn't have a good solution for them. I might have a partial solution for them and I'd be upfront about what that was, but I've never tried. Basically, I've never lied about what a solution will do or important aspects of what it is we deliver, and a little bit tongue in cheek, I'll say that's unusual for a salesperson, but taking my tongue out of my cheek, for a lot of people. They do see salespeople as basically liars. They will say whatever it takes to get that deal across the line and then, once they've got the order, once they've got the money, they won't worry too much. And it pains me to say it, but I have worked in organizations that operate that way. So for me and this is a personal thing, so this needs to sit right with you I'm a very ethical person. I believe in doing the right thing and I will do that. I'll walk my talk. So again, coming back to that caricature, the sleazy salesperson won't. They'll just say whatever they think this potential client wants to hear and do whatever it takes to get that signature, to get that money transfer, to basically get that deal.

Speaker 1: 8:26

And to me, this is a big part of where salespeople with certain people have quite a bad reputation and unfortunately, in some cases it's well-deserved. So where does that leave you as somebody who's either in sales or you're thinking about going into sales and your concern is about being seen as this sleazy, pushy salesperson. Well, very simply, the answer is don't do it. I don't mean don't go into sales, but don't be that person. So in your exchanges with clients and potential clients, be straightforward, get as full an understanding as you can with them, so that you understand exactly what it is that they are trying to achieve.

Speaker 1: 9:20

Now I've worked in some very technical and very niche technical environments and I made no secret of the fact that I could go so far with a client. But beyond that I was out of my depth and essentially I'll be making stuff up because I didn't know and I don't want to make stuff up. That's not what I'm about. So I would often and I don't know, obviously, where you're working and your situation, but in those kind of companies quite often there would be a technical expert of some sort. He may be within the company where I've worked for manufacturers, but where I've worked for distributors overseas distributors often it's someone back at the manufacturer who might be in, let's say, the UK or the US or somewhere else. So I would go back to them. But I never had a problem with doing that and I was always upfront with my clients to say look, I can go this far, I know this, this, this will work.

Speaker 1: 10:16

But some of these questions you've asked me are much deeper than my knowledge extends. So what I'm going to do, first of all I'm going to write them out or, even better, ask them to write the question out to make sure it is very, very clear. And the reason for doing that is you don't want to get Chinese whispers where they are saying one thing to you, you misinterpret it slightly and the question you send back to whoever the technical expert is, the question you send back is not quite what the client wants to know. So this is where I use email a lot, because, particularly if I'm wording the question myself, I will send the question back to the technical expert. I will usually also send a copy to the client, although I won't share the emails of the technical expert, because I want to manage who has access to who directly access to who directly. And again, depending on your situation, it might be fine for clients to talk to the technical people directly, but in other companies they don't like to work that way, so you need to manage that as the client interface part of your role.

Speaker 1: 11:27

So that did two things. It obviously got the question back to the technical person, but it also was a double check to make sure I had not messed up the original question as far as the client was concerned. So they had opportunity to correct me and then you might want to delay. If you're using this technique, you might want to delay going back to technical expert just say, hey, could you quickly just confirm this is the question, this is correct technically, to make sure I haven't got anything wrong, and then you pass it back.

Speaker 1: 11:58

But this overcomes another issue that I think a lot of salespeople have, particularly salespeople who are quite new to sales and are in a strongly technical kind of environment, and that is simply that they think they need to have all the answers and that puts a huge amount of stress on you as a salesperson. And I can speak to that from experience because when I first got into sales I went into an area it was radio telecoms which I'd studied as an apprentice. I did a four-year apprenticeship and it was telecommunications and electronics was the apprenticeship that I did. But that is quite a broad range of technologies and of course technologies move on, as we know just with how mobile phones have changed over the last few years. So basically I was working in an environment where technically it was a moving target and also my expertise went so far and it was definitely not to the level of detail that some of my clients could go to.

Speaker 1: 13:07

So I always had this fear. Or when I started, when I went into a meeting, I could think of all these questions, potential questions this person could ask me that I just didn't have a clue about, and I was really worried that I would freeze up, I would mess up the meeting it might have been a demonstration and I'd completely blow it. So my advice to you, if this is something that you're experiencing right now, is to forget that. Step out of that, because you don't need to do it. Step into a place where you're empowered, and that place is where you recognize there are limits to your knowledge and you don't go beyond them. You simply explain to the client.

Speaker 1: 13:54

Look, what I like to do when I'm with a client is to write down a list of what they want. Now, I've got this from the qualification process usually, but I like to, at the beginning of a meeting, go through who's who and all that stuff. But then I'll go through and say look, I have an understanding of why we're here and what you're trying to achieve, but I would appreciate it if you could just recap for me so that I can make sure I've got everything right and that I haven't missed anything, because sometimes things come up between the initial conversation with a prospect and when you go to meet them. So something else might have come up that they hadn't thought about during that initial conversation. So you know, we're all human, we forget things.

Speaker 1: 14:36

So it's good to start off, I think, a meeting like that with just a double check just run through the list of things that need to be covered, and then that leads you into the discussion about exactly what they want to do, what the key things are, that they need the solution to deliver, and you can then start to work out how much of that you can do and what the implications are for the things you can't do. It might be some things are optional on whatever your solution is, or it may be they absolutely can't do them at all. So then you can have that sensible discussion with a client about whether or not it's worth going ahead. The reason for doing that? Because some salespeople will just plow on anyway and try and get a deal. But it comes back to what I was talking about earlier. It's about being ethical, it's about being honest, it's about doing the right thing.

Speaker 1: 15:29

I have had a client argue with me when I told him that in fact, I had a couple of solutions for him, but he particularly liked one of them and I told him it was over the top, it was just way more than he needed. There was another one that was quite a bit cheaper. That was perfectly adequate. We do everything he needed, you know no question about it, but he absolutely wanted this more expensive version. So you can get into these conversations where the client is almost selling to you why they should be buying a particular thing from you, and that's the client's choice in the end. In the end, it's their money, it's their choice.

Speaker 1: 16:07

What you do is you provide that assessment for them. You give them all the information they need to make a decision. You let them know how much you can do, how much you can deliver of what they need. But always be upfront. Now also, obviously, what may happen is you can't do everything and they decide that there's one critical part of the solution that you can't deliver that they need and therefore you're out of the running for that particular sale. So that's going to happen as well. And one of the things to bear in mind is that when you have a meeting for me it would be a meeting, possibly a product demonstration at the same time, or whether that was hardware or software.

Speaker 1: 16:51

But what was my conversion rate on those? Well, I can guarantee you it wasn't 100%. I was definitely losing some sales for whatever reason, and often, in fact usually they were technical reasons, because the solution I had just couldn't do it. We could get most of the way there, but it turned out that the bit that was missing was critical and we couldn't do it. Occasionally it would be price, but more often it was the not at that stage of the process that would be the reason for that sale not happening. So again, the thing to remember is you're not going to make every sale Now.

Speaker 1: 17:26

I don't know what your conversion rate is at that stage of the process when you're face-to-face with a client, if that is when you would normally expect the order to close. And again, there'll also be industry norms. Industries vary. Some of them it might be one in two, others it might be one in four, it might be one in 10, which is pretty awful, but it depends on the industry. All you can do is know your numbers and know what conversion rate you have, if you can and sometimes numbers are available, sometimes they're not but get an idea of what the kind of industry standard closing rate is.

Speaker 1: 18:00

If you're in an organization where you're part of a sales team, then get an idea of how other people are doing, because if you're doing well, well, okay, I mean, don't sit back, but at least you know that you're doing pretty much as well as your colleagues and maybe you can improve that. But obviously, if everybody else is closing at a better rate than you, their closing rate might be one in two and you're doing one in four, then clearly there's something missing in your approach and that's the time to practice through your sales manager. But maybe go out on a few calls with your colleague and just see what they're doing differently, because sales, in my opinion, is all about learning. I think we're constantly learning as salespeople because we'll come across different situations. Yeah, as you reach a certain level, a certain level of experience, you'll have done a certain number of client visits. It might be 10, it might be 50, it might be 200. I don't know what that number is for you, but you kind of plateau a little bit.

Speaker 1: 19:01

So you begin to recognize certain situations, certain scenarios that you know you've got a good fit and you know you've got very high probability of closing the sale, but always be aware of that. So I guess just to recap briefly on this one so if you're concerned about being the sleazy salesperson this sort of caricature that everybody hates pretty much the first thing is well, don't be that person. Be yourself, do work with honesty, do work with integrity, and in a lot of situations you may get the sale. In others you won't, but you know, do the right thing, keep learning. If you lose a sale, at least understand why you lost it. It may be something that was outside your control, but it may be that you need to just change your approach on certain things, and this is where going with a colleague who is doing well can be very, very helpful. And the final thing I want to just leave you with, which comes back to being honest and straightforward.

Speaker 1: 20:00

In my first sales job I did that a lot.

Speaker 1: 20:04

I did that all the time actually, and initially it worried me that I was losing sales. But what would then happen? And these were sales where, ultimately, the situation I could deliver was not right for the client. But what then came out of that was I started getting referrals, and what it was? It was these clients, and one in particular springs to to mind who I hadn't been able to make a sale to, and in fact there are others that I had made sales to, but they were telling other people about it, about me, and it was actually personal. They liked the way my approach, the way I was straightforward with them and I would just get these referrals popping out of nowhere, so, and then I would make sales.

Speaker 1: 20:44

So, although I'd lost that initial sale, I may well get and this would equally apply to you, you might get two, three, four other sales that you just didn't even know about as a result of being upfront. So don't be the sleazy sales salesperson and be yourself. Be honest, be straightforward with your clients, because you don't know where that's going to take you, and once you start building a good reputation within your industry, that will definitely pay dividends. So that's it for this podcast. Bye for now.