A rant about usual "Sales" Teaching

[Vinz]

RIGHT!? He's so good! Super short. To the point. Zero fluff. I love it.

Didn't listen it when your first linked, I was trying to learn spin selling more, will look into it

Geez Louise and child please.

A hammer is a terrible interesting way to get a screw into wood. And if I see a bunch of somebodys hammering screws into wood, I'm not going to sit here and say that hammers don't work or that screws always tear up wood.

My point is, sales tactics are just tools. Use the right tools for the job.

I'm a big fan of spin selling. Socratic selling. Asking a lot of questions and making the sales. Built my entire sales career around it. Built two businesses around it. Have taught it to dozens of people. Huge fan.

But all these people in this thread saying that aggressive sales tactics don't work are just fooling themselves.

Aggressive sales tactics exist because aggressive sales tactics work.

And for certain types of products marketed to certain types of people through certain types of mediums, they work better than question-based selling.

If you don't want to be aggressive salesperson, cool. That's respectable. I'm not here to say you have to be anything.

Saying that aggressive sales tactics don't work is out of touch with reality.

Where did it originate? I don't know, I'm guessing hawkers in open air markets in the middle east or Africa circa 5,000 years ago. I'm sure history is full of examples of successful aggressive sales tactics.

Aggressive sales tactics is how a man named Crassus became the richest man in Rome. History of firefighting - Wikipedia

And aggressive sales tactics is how many internet sales happen. Don't believe me? How many sales pages do you know that don't put an artificial time limit on their offering to induce higher sales volume?

My partner and I closed our purchase of an existing e-commerce store on the 31st. January is historically one of our two slowest months of the year. Two weeks ago I told my partner we might have to put a little extra money into the business to tide over cash flow. Be ready.

Well, our biggest supplier is upping prices tomorrow. We leveraged the crap out of that in our sales calls this month.

Don't forget, prices go up on the 15th get your order in before then.

Today was the 6th best all time sales day. We're on pace for a record month. If the current sales trend hold, will be 30% higher than our previous best January ever.

Even if the trend won't hold, we're already 80% to our projected sales figure for the month. And I was worried... Haha.

Amazon has "Prime Day". Does Amazon really need Prime Day? In addition to Black Friday?

Side note, what better example is there of high pressure sales being effective than people literally sleeping overnight in front of your store? The open air hawker of yesteryear would be so jealous of Walmart today.

I digress. Funny thing is, I was looking at some of the prices on Prime Day but didn't buy, and I was able to get those prices at other times.

So that's just high pressure sales tactics at work.

Get it today or prices go up. That's essentially no different than what me and my partner did. Every additional prime member is just part of their numbers game.

Pump up the drama, add a deadline, and print money. It's all psychological pressure of one form or another.

Before Amazon, there was the blue light special.

Infomercials have time limits on their sales.

Elon Musk wants you to buy electric cars and go solar before it's too late to save the planet. What's more high pressure than save the Earth? He sold the government on funding for it. I'm convinced part of his mission to Mars thing is just to keep alive the thought that we can't save the earth fast enough.

Not everybody needs these tactics. That's true. There's plenty of ways to close a sale.

Still, these tactics worked before Crassus and will work long after Bezos. If humans are on Mars, they'll work on Mars.

Tools are just tools. Human nature is human nature.

And sales professionals know when to use the right tools in the right circumstances.

Well time has passed since I had posted this initially. I continued in my sales job and I now have a slightly better knowledge of it
"Ultra-friendly" sales work in the sense that the clients needs to know he's talking to an Human being, needs to trust the seller enough to believe what he says. But that seems to stop there

"Pushy" sales tactics, like you said, have a place and time. Certain industries are based entirely on it ( which are industries I'd rather avoid ) but they can be used in every sales process. It seems that in the right situations, putting some pressure can help close the sale. They are situations you learn to recognize with experience.
To me I certainly can't and won't base my entire system on it.

Ultimately caring to deliver a good solution to the buyer is the best method, that's also ethical and honestly easier to bear, that still gets me good results. If someone comes back to me for assistance after buying the product I will make sure to solve their problem.

This is just my theory.

Most "natural born salesmen", ie, the type of people that could sell ice to eskimos, and can manipulate most anyone with ease, do it through extremely subtle and dialed in body language and verbal queues, vis a vis NLP (actual CIA/KGB level NLP, that a normal person would have to go through years of intensive one-on-one training to develop). In my experience, most of them are not even fully conscious of the things they are doing, because they are either genetic or learned from parents at an extremely early age. They genuinely don't know the reason for their sales success, so they base it on the behaviors that they ARE conscious of, which more often than not is very low-inhib, aggressive, etc. So when these guys create sales courses or write books, that is what they put in them. But these are not the traits that actually make them good at sales. Most of these salesmen are actually abysmal at "logical sales", like spin selling, and so stay in B2C sales their whole lives

Yeah those are usually really talkative people who base their entire work on that.
They certainly want to condition the buyer throught words (I do that too honestly) but I doubt they are at High NLP level skills.
It's probably a combination of personal bonding, pressure, pushiness and other little sales tactics

 

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