I got a sales job offer on the spot by first highlighting the limited use of a single pen and without extra’s on hand its negative business impacts. Then stated I had tons of pens available in my car and positioned selling them at least 100, but recommended they acquire 1000+ as this prevents potential issues plus gets them a better deal. Pretty solid approach in my experience.
Selling is an art… and this is why I’m not in sales. I have absolutely no interest in trying to convince somebody to buy something.
True sales is just filling a need, sometimes the customer knows they need it but others are unaware of it. Good sales reps will not sell something unless it makes sense for everyone involved.
Yea, I was never exactly in sales (Geek Squad in store employee is the closest I ever came) but I remember thinking everyone who was like lets get rid of commission in retail sales were very mislead. I still remember the difference in Sears employees in the 90s when I first got a PC and the salesman actually knew to look at the box of the game I was trying to buy and make sure it’d run on my PC before selling it to me. I also remember them knowing about the stuff they sold. This is because with commission, even in small towns you could make a career of it and you’d have actual experienced staff in the stores. As far as I could ever tell, the good salespeople wanted you to trust them, and not to just make a one time huge sale - they wanted you to come back again and again.
Once they all went to non-commission, I recall that being a “selling point” of the stores, but now all you had was a rotating cast of highschool and college summer workers who cared exactly as much as minimum wage paid them to care… i.e. not at all. And they occasionally became unable to even read the boxes they were “selling”. It turned them into less efficient cash register attendants.
Sales has fuck-all to do with filling a need. Sales is the invention of problems for which the only solution is the liberal application of money.
Engineering is filling a need.
Isn’t the whole idea of the pen sale pitch that you basically have to ignore the pen?
“Okay, so let’s say you hire me as a senior engineer. I put in a request for a gross of these pens for my office; price 50¢ apiece; total seventy-two bucks plus shipping and tax. Do you sign off on it?”
Bullshit that only true bullshitters can spew.
