As I said before, this is something I learned from Tom Hopkins, who urged prospective salesmen and women to select an avenue of selling based on integrity, not on profit. Specifically, he said, "Find something to sell that you believe in so much that if the prospect says 'no', they've lost more than you!" I haven't put much thought into exactly what that would be for me, but I know I want to follow that counsel. Here's why:
- Sales is, in many ways, counter to my nature. It involves necessary elements of pressure and impulse that I am far from accustomed to imposing on other people. All but the most skilled salesmen must rely on at least a small amount of pushing, of urgency, of "now", to get the prospect to buy. This habit is something I can practice temporarily and live with, but it's too uncomfortable to get used to, at least for the wrong reasons. If I decided to sell for profit alone, I am certain that it would only be a matter of time before I couldn't take it anymore and backed out. The only way I could make this permanent is if I found a product or service that would enable me to prioritize the customer's benefit above my benefit to motivate myself.
- I need to find a product or service that I would use myself if I was the customer. With sales jobs I've had in the past, I knew I wasn't ripping the prospect off with what I was offering. But if they were to turn around and ask me if I would make the same decision in their place, I couldn't honestly say yes on every occasion (although, strangely enough, no prospect has ever asked me that). Choosing a product that I believe in would not only give me integrity and justification in selling, but it would remove a large part of the discomfort of persuasion. I would be able to push because I would be, as Tom Hopkins said, "blending [my] sincere desire to serve in helping a person make a decision that's truly good for them".
Requirement 3: I must find something to sell that I can get excited about.
Anyone who knows me well knows that I am not an emotionally excitable person. I don't know if I ever will be, and I'm okay with that. But sales get so much easier if you have excitement and enthusiasm about your product or service. And I can't fake that. I can get along without it, because there's plenty of things that other people are happy buying, even if I as the salesman couldn't care less. But the sales process becomes truly powerful when the salesman and the prospect can bounce their enthusiasm off of each other; building the excitement until a buying decision is made. It can't be one-sided.
I'm going to go ahead and admit that it will be difficult to find a sales job that fulfills even one of these requirements to my satisfaction (assuming I go into sales, that is). It may be nigh impossible to find one that fulfills all three, especially if I'm just starting out. But I feel that these components are necessary for me to be truly successful in this field. I can't do this alone, I need to have integrity, and I want to love what I do. And if sales is what the Lord truly wants me to do, He'll help me find something that meets my needs.
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