Unlesson One: All salespeople are wall-eyed lying psychos.

Most people are very resistant to the idea of selling or sales.  No wonder.

The main thing that most people have in mind when they think about salespeople, or more importantly the process of selling, is that all salesmen that they have met and identified as such are either little dweebs that work in the local branch of an electrical retailer, and are totally unable to explain the workings of the PC/Iron/Video that you are looking at, and if you are dumb enough to believe their advice, leads to you buying something really daft or useless.  This leaves the customer feeling aggravated at best, and feeling that all sales people are idiots.

Or, if you have watched “Glengarry, Glenross”, or read “Death of a Salesman”, you are of the opinion that all salesmen are sad delusional wall-eyed psychos whom you detest.  There are people like this who carry the title of sales person, and they are a weird bunch.  Often they have mastered the effort of lying to themselves, so that they can lie better to you.  They are good in the “once-only-get-em-while-they’re-going” sales like life insurance and double glazing, but they do not hack it in long term relationships, as their psychic smell of internal turmoil puts people off. Problem is, sales is a bit like any other form of seduction, if you notice it happening, chances are it won’t, unless you wanted to do it anyway.  And if you wanted to, then you hardly needed to pay someone talk you into it.

Another factor is that many organisations that undertake complex sales like to have a layer of abrasive tissue between the real sales team and the real client that they can rub off once they have used them to do the occasional unpleasant task that would spoil the real relationship.  These people do have the name of salespeople, but given their incentives to keep short term revenue flowing, and given their lack of knowledge about what they are actually doing we need a new name for them.  Let’s call them QuarterHacks.  Once a quarter they are sent to ask for money from various clients, and this can be done, rude as it is, often, without tarnishing the reputation of the main people in the selling organisation.

“I’m sorry, did my quarterhack bite you.  Bad boy!  Back in the box.”  Plausible deniability, or at least a polite pretence of commercial non-interest is much easier to maintain if you have this safety valve.

Take home lesson: no-one you ever met, with very few (important) exceptions, who is good at complex sales, is called a sales person, or acts like the stereotype of one.  And this is for very important reasons, as I will discuss.