We learn the basic rules of life in childhood, including one of the most important ones: a promise made is a debt unpaid. It can turn into a silly saying in our heads, however, when our life with a capital L starts, we face it as a fundamental requirement. Nevertheless, many people do not comply with it in their private lives; there are deficiencies in this field in business as well. Salespeople have to hold on in this situation. If we try to sell something, we obviously try to describe it in a positive way, however, we need to find the golden mean, where sentences encouraging sales do not turn into empty promises.
Fibbing and lying
Anybody who has ever worked as a salesperson knows that there are several different attitudes in this field. However, we can state for sure that a salesperson’s task is to introduce the best side of a given product, service, or company to the market. We know that some salespeople tend to go too far and touch upon the product information or add extra pieces of information to it which are not necessarily true. They present them with the help of very nice and intense communication to the potential customers. There are salespeople who are reluctant to share anything more than pure facts, however, they do it in a perfectly structured way. Actually, they present the “naked” offer, and they think that if people like it, they will buy it anyway. In most cases, businesspeople do not consider the second type of attitude as sales, because it does not have much to do with the traditional image of sales. That is why, during recruitment, they pay attention to how well salespeople can sell themselves as products because if they are not capable of doing so, then what can we expect in the case of a product? Another interesting way of thinking has to do with how the because of salespeople who exaggerate, we do not really believe what they tell us. They will embellish things and present a more positive picture to be able to sell the product, even if its quality is dubious. We prepare ourselves to “read between the lines” of what salespeople say. We keep telling ourselves that it is fine and that is just what the market is like. Of course, it compels salespeople to move even further away from pure facts. What is more, we motivate them to “fib”. First, just a smaller fib and then, if other salespeople can see it work, they can do so too. If people “read between these lines” as well, they simply have to lie so that people pay attention to them, and the sensible content remains after reducing what salespeople said. In a general market situation, business decision-makers shape the sales environment in a way that those people who cannot fib or lie cannot really sell things.
The problem is now
Enter the COVID crisis. There is a profession we do not particularly trust, and now business decision-makers need new solutions and ideas to avoid bankruptcy, pull themselves out of a death spiral, and set off on the way of development. But who wants to head in a direction where help is offered by a field that is not trusted at all? We could say that there are “good sales channels”, but the situation is that the image of sales is not very promising. It would be so good if we only had to sit in front of the computer at home — now we cannot really do anything else because lockdown is still present — and collect the incoming sales messages. We would check the new solutions they offer and use them as sources of inspiration. The reality is that we usually automatically delete sales emails and do not answer calls when we feel that somebody wants to sell something to us. The crisis will change a lot of things, and many people believe that the field of sales culture will be one of them. The era of fibbing and lying is over, and trust connected to sales has to appear in business. We are definitely in a new phase of sales. Both the provider and the receiver side have to change significantly. This process will take place, that is not a question. The question is how we can keep up with the new trends.