Q. What is the worst single piece of advice to a salesperson you have ever heard?
A. Wow. I love this question. I don’t think I have ever been asked it before.
I can’t identify one single piece of advice. I’ll have to opt for two. I’m going to identify them, and then explain why I think they are so damaging. Here they are:
- Be yourself.
- Learn on your own by trial and error.
- Be yourself.
I just read, on one of the LinkedIn groups of which I am a member, a newly self-appointed sales trainer advising salespeople to “just be yourself.” That is good advice if you are naturally self motivated, goal-driven, highly organized; if you are intelligent, personable, empathetic and sensitive; if you have great listening skills, the ability to connect with anyone, a keen ability to paint word pictures and tell enthralling stories, and the natural ability to ask for action.
If that’s not you, then being yourself isn’t quite good enough, and you’ll have to work on some things if you want to become better. Almost every salesperson I have ever met, myself included, has some rough spots that should be smoothed out.
As a professional salesperson, you are never finished with your life-long task of making yourself better. The ultimate challenge for professionals is the constant need to change themselves in order to become better. It takes drive, discipline, and energy, continually applied and rightly focused, to improve.
“You’re okay the way you are” may be an idea instilled in you by your mother in order to make you feel good about yourself, but in the real world of commerce and sales, it is a bromide that takes the energy out of the process of improving yourself, and provides an easy hiding place for those who are not motivated to excel.
The truth is, you are not good enough! Not yet.
If you are a professional, you get that. You understand that you can, and should, continually improve and make yourself better.
Green Bay Packer football coach Vince Lombardi said this:
We will constantly strive for perfection, knowing full well that we will never attain it, because no one is perfect. But we will strive for perfection, for in the process we will catch excellence.
Which would you rather be a part of?
A sales force of people who think they just need to “be themselves” to do well.
Or, a group who think they can always become better, that there standards for how you do sales well, and that they need to work hard and consistently to enhance their skills, improve their practices and develop their competencies — a group who strives for perfection?
Silly question.
If a sales trainer tells you that you just need to “be yourself,” run from them.
2. Learn on your own, by trial and error.
Certainly learning by trial and error is possible, and we all do it. It just isn’t very efficient, nor very effective.
When I say it isn’t very efficient, I mean that there are quicker, easier ways to learn and improve than to rely exclusively on trial and error. Look, other people have gone before you, and figured out this thing called “sales.” There is a body of knowledge about how you do sales well. You can spend five years trying to figure it out on your own, or you can buy a book by someone who is an expert in it, and learn far more in five hours. Which makes more sense?
For the life of me, I cannot understand the prevailing idea among employers that their salespeople will just learn on their own, by trial and error. From my personal experience, I believe that only about 5 percent of employers actually invest in the growth and development of their salespeople.
Nor do I understand the 95 percent of salespeople who have not spent $20 on their own improvement in the last 12 months.
I am amazed that so many people think they have the time to learn exclusively by trial and error. I don’t. When I first began my consulting practice, I went out and got all the books on how you build a consulting practice. When I first starting speaking and presenting, I hired a coach to help me develop quickly. When I wrote my first book, I read all the books on how you do it before I began to write it. I couldn’t afford to waste time and money making stupid mistakes.
When I say it isn’t very effective, I mean that most people, most of the time, get it wrong! Most of us, myself included, have distorted views of how we appear to other people. We have distorted views of how our actions impact people, how the customers really felt, and why we didn’t get the order. If we base our decisions about what’s effective on the basis of our perceptions of what we did well and poorly, we will be wrong much of the time.
As evidence of this, I’ll appeal to your own experience. Sales managers and sales trainers, how many times have you made a call with a salesperson, debriefed afterward and discovered that the salesperson didn’t have a clue as to what really happened in the sales call? In my experience, it is most of the time. I’m not picking on salespeople. It is human nature. We all see reality through our unique perspectives, we all put our personal spin on things.
A study was done a few years ago in an attempt to see if salespeople could identify their most effective practices. Two hundred good salespeople were interviewed, and they indicated the practices they thought brought them the results. Guess what happened when the researchers accompanied them into the field to verify their ideas? There was “no relationship” between what they said they did and what they actually did!
Now, don’t misinterpret what I am saying. We should all learn by trial and error. Analyzing our failures and changing our behavior to avoid them in the future is a classic approach to personal growth, and a discipline to which we should all adhere. My problem is with those who promote it as the exclusive way to learn to sell well.
It is neither efficient nor effective.
The advice to “be yourself” and “learn exclusively by trial and error” are two of the most pernicious ideas in the world of sales. Don’t let them misguide you!
