8 Ways to Become a Good Salesman
The mercantile class was once a discrete entity, acting as a medium between producer and consumer. However in this day and age, following the invention of the internet, each of us is, to some extent, a salesman; whether we are selling wares on eBay or ourselves on Tinder. As a result, there are more salesmen now than ever before.
If you wish to seduce the consumer amidst this glut of options, you will have to be skilled in the art of selling. Below are Eight ways to become a good salesman:
1. Empathise
A good salesman makes a connection with the customer. Try your best to establish a link; perhaps the customer will mention a child of theirs, and you also have a child, in which case you might talk about your children. Do your best to humanize yourself.
2. Don’t Let Your Foot off the Gas
If the customer shows signs of hesitancy, make sure to apply the pressure. Bring them to a decision. Most of the time the decision is already in them, and the salesman’s job is simply to bring it out.
3. Flatter
No one is immune to flattery. No matter how obvious, no matter how overtly instrumental, people like to believe you when you flatter them. A salesman must be amoral; must pander to the customer, even if the customer is morally objectionable. There is a reason the devil is regarded as the paragon of salesmanship: he is morally flexible.
The devil has no scruples about appealing to a child; or asking a child’s mother, for example, whether or not she ought to buy the product.
4. Use Simple Language
Unless you are selling to a member of the elite, you would do well to eschew all technical jargon; such language is lost on most of us. If you are selling a computer, for example, don’t talk about the system’s megabytes; rather, talk about its storage capacity.
5. Use Humour
Like flattery, humour is a means of softening a prospective buyer; though you ought, of course, to consider the tone of the brand; that is, humour might not be appropriate in certain branches of business: in the funeral business, for example, one ought not to overdo it on the humour front.
6. Look After Your Appearance
There is something called the ‘halo effect’. Put simply, the halo effect states that a person’s appearance has a huge influence on someone’s judgment of that person’s overall character; that is to say, the halo effect is a tendency of an impression made regarding one aspect of a person to have an impact on opinion regarding another aspect.
If you dress sharply and keep your weight down, then a prospective buyer is more likely to trust your appraisal of your product and more to buy.
7. Embellish the Truth
Though wild lies will come back to bite—though the customer will notice when they open the product, if it does not get rid of spots in less than a day, as you claimed, or remove the stain instantly—little lies are permissible. The successful salesman, I am afraid, is the one who comes closest to criminality yet gets away with it.
8. Be Confident
As aforesaid, the customer’s judgment of the seller has a large impact on their decision to buy or not. You must speak clearly and look the customer in the eye. Yet make sure not to come across as wooden and inhuman.
Well, there you go. Those are my nine tips to become a good salesman. I will leave you with this: selling is unavoidable in such a world as this. Each conversation is an exercise in salesmanship: we are forever selling ourselves. Thus, if you consider salesmanship a dirty craft, and have for it nothing but contempt, I ask you to consider the impossibility of authenticity. We are all liars, in varying degrees, and we are all salesmen of ourselves. This is simply how life works.
