Be Different or be dead

August 12, 2019

Why the sales flogger is disgusting and creates pain for people

Source: Unsplash

Why the sales flogger is disgusting and creates pain for people.

Sales product pushers torture customers when they try to force the customer to buy what they’re flogging.

Here’s the profile of the sales pushing technique that inflicts pain on people and diminishes the credibility of the profession.

1. One way conversation — Throughout the engagement process little interest is shown by the salesperson in discovering the customer’s needs, wants and desires. Their primary focus is on driving the product down the customer’s throat with no attempt to identify solutions that might address burning customer problems.

There is way too much fast talk. It’s a sales monologue about the features and benefits of the product. It’s not a conversation with the customer. If the sales person takes a breath during their speech it’s a miracle. It’s full-out transmitting with no listening.

2. Products and prices — The features of the product are highlighted. What the product does takes precedence over the benefits and value it creates. It’s a gee-whiz expose on the cool things the technology can do whether it resonates with what the customer wants or not.
And it’s a pricing pitch with the emphasis being on what the product costs and how it’s cheaper than the competition.

The sales monologue is dominated by a complex technology narrative which typically leaves the customer in a daze with little or no understanding of what the salesperson is talking about.

The flogger is infatuated with their technical knowledge and they beat the customer over the head with it.

3. Twenty-Four hour attention span — The sales engagement has a here and now short term focus; what can they extract from the customer today, right now in the moment?

There is little interest in searching for and presenting any long term benefits; the sales pusher doesn’t really care if the customer returns to buy again.
What’s important for them is to consummate the sale and move on to another potential sale with their sights on making quota.

4. Unrelenting pressure — The pressure on the customer to buy is immense. And in the face of the sales barrage, all the sales target wants to do is to get it over with and escape the pain.
There are no easy flight defences for the customer who sits perspiring, looking to leave the intolerable scene. The flogger is relentless. The customer cannot escape.

All through the process there is implied criticism on the customer if they don’t buy. The unsaid conclusion from the salesperson lurks: ‘Don’t you understand the great deal you’re getting (you must be stupid if you don’t)?’ and the customer feels it.

Actually this picture of the sales push process is really not the salesperson’s fault. They behave this way because it’s what their leadership wants.

Salespeople are compensated by how much product they sell in the short term, with little emphasis on bonding with people.

It’s this fuzzy stuff that these leaders find difficult to quantify in terms of benefits to the organization and therefore they tend to exclude it from the evaluation of sales effectiveness. And they certainly avoid putting relationship building in the annual sales compensation plan.

Sales performed in this way does not paint a pretty picture. Customers hate it and it doesn’t maximize long term value for the organization.

And, ironically, it doesn’t allow the salesperson to realize the full potential of their compensation.

Cheers,
Roy
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• Posted 8.12.19 at 04:00 am by Roy Osing
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