Episode #166: Keep Your Shtick To Yourself Buddy

Smoothly memorised shtick, elaborate glossy materials, sharp suits, large expensive watches, bleached teeth, the perfect coiffure are not important in sales. Yet, this is the image of the pro-salesperson. Most of us never meet many pro-salespeople, because the vast majority we run into are hopeless. We meet the great unwashed and untrained, the part-time and partially interested, usually in a local retail format. The slick sales dude is what we see in movies or is a received image from urban myths. Hollywood pumps out Wall Street, Glengarry Glen Ross, Boiler Room, The Wolf of Wall Street and we get sold an image of what high pressure salespeople look like.

Japan is fascinating, in that it throws up some doozies. Rotting blackened stumps for teeth, disheveled clothing, scuffed worn shoes, ancient food stains on ties – you encounter this low level of personal presentation here with salespeople. It is almost the opposite extreme of the American movie image.

Rat with a gold tooth or rat with a rotting tooth – neither appeal very much. What we buyers really want is someone on our side. We want help to solve issues slowing us down, holding us back or preventing us from growing as we would wish. There are 6 steps on the client journey with salespeople: know you, like you, trust you, buy from you, repeat buy from you and refer you because we are a believer. This sounds simple, but salespeople get confused about who they are working for. They think they are there to work for themselves and get their commission or bonus or promotion and the client is just a tool in that process. This is stupid.

Dumb Things Said

I coach salespeople but am amazed at the dumb things they say and do. Some want to jam the square peg in the round hole and then argue with the client about why it will fit when it clearly doesn’t. When they get pushback from the client they then try to overwhelm the objection by will or force of personality. This is stupid too.

The salesperson jumps into the slide presentation on the laptop from the get go. Or they are pulling out their shiny flyers or expensive brochures or whatever and are launching forth with their memorised shtick. My first sales job was early evening door to door Britannica encyclopedia sales in a poor working class suburb in Brisbane. Before we were unleashed on an unsuspecting semi-literate public, we had to memorise, word for word, the entire twenty-five minute presentation. It wasn’t great then, but it is unacceptable now. Some people are still back in the 1970s with their sales efforts. I get calls even today telling me “so and so” is in my area etc. I can hear the cadence of them reading it off a script!

No More Show & Tell

When I am coaching aspirant professional salespeople, I ask them how do they know which slides to show or which flyer they should offer to the client? This is usually greeted with a “Huh?” response. We all did “show and tell” in elementary school but some have not travelled very far since then and think this is how you do sales. When I arrived at the Shinsei Retail Bank the financial product sales team would whip out a flyer of one product and if the wealthy client didn’t go for it, then they would just whip out the next one. This went on until the client either got tired of it or bought something.

As salespeople, we don’t know what to show the client and we shouldn’t show the client anything, until we know what they want. So keep the laptop closed, the flyers in the briefcase, the widget under the table and ask questions instead. By the way, get permission to ask questions first, especially in Japan. Here the status of the buyer is sky high and it is a total impertinence for a lowly sales pond scum to be asking God questions about anything.

Get Permission

Nevertheless, get permission and ask. Find out if there is a match. Mentally scour the walls of your gigantic solutions library, floor to ceiling packed with possible antidotes to their business ailments and select the best one for the client. If there is no solution in your library, then don’t try and force the square peg into the round hole. Just thank them for their time and go and find someone you can help.

If your solution doesn’t fit, then don’t waste the client’s time - keep your shtick to yourself.