Is Sales Really Just a Used Car Salesman?

Sales is more than the age-old adage of the sleazy used car salesman would suggest. It’s not all cold calls and cold emails. Instead, sales is more concerned with solving problems. Being able to articulate your words, use good judgment, active listening, and the ability to learn software tools are key factors to being a successful sales representative.

Regarding Used Car Salesmen

Salespeople can often get a bad rap. The stereotype of a sleazy used car salesman is what might come to mind when you think about sales, but that’s not really what sales is like.

Used car salesmen get a bad rap because they’re just trying to sell as many cars at the highest price possible. This could lead to things like lying about a car’s service history or doing a backyard repair job on an important piece of the car. So because the salesman has lied to you about one or both of these things, you drive off the lot in your new seemingly perfect running and driving car. Even though in reality, it has some major issues that you couldn’t find in a short test drive.

This is not what good sales looks like. Eventually, word will get around that that car lot is lying to people, and sooner or later they’ll just go out of business. If the salesman had just been honest, they wouldn’t have gone out of business.

What about Cold Calls?

Cold calls also seem to be brought up in every conversation about sales. But as Jared Fuller said in a workshop he had with Praxis: “Cold calls? The game has changed a lot in the last decade. That’s not what it’s all about anymore.” So if you think sales is all about cold calls, or cold emails, don’t fret. This isn’t to say that they’re not a part of sales at all though. They just aren’t the whole job.

Social media has partially taken the place of cold calls. If you can get responses to posts on social media, that’s your in to sales leads. This would be called warm calling. You’re not calling someone completely out of the blue because they’ve already interacted with you on social media. This is harder when you’re a startup with a small social media following, but that’s when cold calls are still helpful in today’s sales world.

Being Honest, and Other Good Traits

Honesty is always the best policy, as the late great Benjamin Franklin put it. And the more I go through life, the more I find this to be true. Clearly, this is a key part of sales — just be honest with the customer.

But honesty isn’t the only important quality in sales. I’ve compiled a list of good traits for a sales rep in any company.

• Active listening.

If you’re not listening to the customer and what they want, why even bother being in sales? You need to know what the customer’s needs are so you can help them find the right product and what to do with said product.

• Ability to handle rejection and stress

If you can’t handle rejection or stress, you probably won’t make it as a sales rep, plain and simple. You will have customers every day saying they don’t want or like your product. That’s just how it is. But a good sales rep can pick themselves back up and continue like that never happened.

This happened to me when I was 14 or 15. I had mowed one lawn in my neighborhood the previous year, so I decided to make a few business cards and hand them out to my neighbors. I went door to door all around the neighborhood and didn’t get a single job out of it. I felt a little discouraged by this, but I kept mowing the one lawn, and the next year when we moved to a bigger neighborhood I was able to add a few more. I also learned that door to door sales wasn’t as effective as using websites like Nextdoor and Facebook. I gained almost every single job through those two sites. All because I didn’t give up after my initial failures to gain jobs, and in the end, I had about 10 regular customers last summer.

• Ability to speak to a complete stranger.

This is fairly self-explanatory. You need to be comfortable talking with someone you’ve never met. Being able to articulate yourself well is important to be able to sell something. When I went door to door selling my lawn care services I had to be comfortable with talking to a complete stranger.

• Coachability

You need to be able to learn from your peers and higher-ups. This goes for any position in a business really. Being able to take constructive criticism about how to do your job will only help you grow as an employee.

• Good judgment

This is a good trait to have because, without it, you might not say the right thing, or you might not draw a line when you think about twisting the facts about your product. This could also be thought about in the same way as having a filter.

These are clearly not every trait of a good salesman, nor is every salesman going to have all these traits. But these are good starting points.

Good Sales is Solving a Customer’s Problem

I think Ash Ambirge puts it well in her book, You Don’t Need A Job, You Need Guts, when she said,

“Sales is about a mutual exchange of pleasure. The first keyword is mutual, and the second pleasure. When a transaction between a seller and buyer takes place, it isn’t because the seller is greedy and the buyer is stupid. Buyers are not stupid; they know exactly what they’re doing. And what they’re doing is giving you something you want (money) in exchange for something they want (what you sell).”

Sales isn’t supposed to be one-sided. It’s supposed to benefit both parties who are a part of the transaction. You’re trying to help the customer solve their problem with your product.

When I was about 13 I noticed one day that my new neighbor’s lawn was getting really tall. This was her problem, she didn’t have a lawnmower and no one had offered to mow her lawn yet. I’d already been thinking about starting a lawn care business so the next day I offered to mow her lawn for free. She immediately accepted my proposal with the small caveat that she would pay me $80. Even with my limited knowledge of mowing lawns at the time, I knew that her lawn wasn’t an $80 lawn. And I let her know this too; this goes back to the honesty thing I mentioned earlier. She refused my quote of $45 and said she would pay me $80 the first time, but in the end, she paid me $45 every time after.

For the next 2 years, I mowed her lawn every week and the money I saved up from this went towards buying my first car. All because I had a solution to her problem.

In Closing…

Sales is not a used car salesman. It’s not all cold calls either, but you do need a few traits to be a good salesperson. Honesty, active listening, good judgment, and the ability to handle rejection and stress are all keys to a successful career in sales. And if you can harness the power of the internet, you’re well on your way to the c-suite.