You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. It is a saying that means being kind and positive will often be more effective than being hard-nosed and inflexible. While it is not applicable to every situation, for a lot of informal and professional encounters, it is an adage one should keep in mind, especially in sales.
The point of selling is to convince someone to invest in your product or service and being too negative or aggressive can often chase them away. Therefore, it is important for a salesperson to be positive in their approach, while also not being a pushover.
This is where the power of positive persistent sales conversations really shines. Learning how to be both positive and persistent when engaging in sales can make your sales career far more lucrative. It can allow you to not only attract and discuss sales with new clients more easily, but to also convince them to invest and hold on to them as a long-term client. Read on to learn what the power of positive persistent sales conversations truly entails and how to wield it.
The Power of Positivity
While it may sound like obvious advice that just being nice will give you more results, there are a lot of salespeople who will disagree, proposing more aggressive tactics. There are plenty of salespeople who like to play hardball, which means doing whatever it takes to get what they want, including acting aggressive and ruthless towards their competitors and sometimes their clients.
They will try a lot of aggressive tactics that will make it difficult to opt out of a sale. This includes pressuring a person into investing through guilt or fear of missing out, overselling their services, acting misleading and duplicitous, and overall being a persistent annoyance that will not leave you alone until you cave or have to tell them to stop bothering you and having to deal with them getting indignant.
Having this kind of attitude as a salesperson is the number one way you can get a client to hate your guts. But the reason so many salespeople act this way is because they have a negative mindset and believe they need to act in an aggressive/negative fashion in order to get what they want. While business and sales can be an incredibly cutthroat business, at times, that should not affect the way you treat others, especially your clients.
As a salesperson, positivity has a lot of power behind it. Being positive means that you will be able to tackle the day a lot more easily. The fear of failure is something that drives a lot of people, but it can be something that consumes them and makes them do anything to succeed.
But those with a more positive mindset can see that despite their setbacks, they are still succeeding and growing in some way and are willing to take their next shot despite their last one missing. While it is not easy to be this positive, it will make it easier to face whatever challenge you may face, because you will see what lies behind.
As said by Brian Tracy, a Canadian American motivational speaker: “Keep yourself positive, cheerful and goal oriented. Sales success is 80% attitude and 20% aptitude.” Being positive not only makes tackling the day easier, but it will make you a more pleasant person for a client to talk to.
This will make it easier for a client to talk to you and come back to you, since they know it will be a positive experience. It eventually will develop into a relationship between you and your client, which will cement their loyalty towards you. It will also make it easier for you to solve the problem, as you are more willing to look for a solution and will not be as defeatist.
However, being positive is easier said than done, as our minds have a strong negativity bias. Thankfully, there are many ways that make it easier to be positive, such as looking for the silver lining of a negative situation. Instead of focusing on what went wrong, you can focus on how you can do better next time for instance.
Additionally, focus on what the future may hold if you overcome these hardships as opposed to the hardships themselves. This positivity will translate into the way you treat your clients. You will be more patient and willing to help, be more open to their thoughts and feedback, and you will be a lot more approachable. While this may be difficult, focusing on the good things you have going will keep you from developing a lot of the nasty tactics many misguided salespeople use.
The Power of Persistence
Learning how to be persistent without coming across as annoying or aggressive can be incredibly difficult. However, learning to be persistent, while still holding onto a positive mindset, can turn you into a great salesperson. It not only allows you to make sales deals by being persistent and convincing them of investing, but it will also tell them what to return as you will be more approachable and trustworthy. While there is a line between being persistent and pestering, there are many techniques you can use to walk that line.
First of all, respect your client’s wishes. If they give you a definitive “No, I am not interested” then you must respect it. You are not going to convince them, you are mostly going to annoy them, and it will give you a bad reputation, even if you do get them to cave.
It will also save you from wasting both of your time and may make it, so they will keep you in mind if they are interested later. Being persistent does not mean trying to pester those who are not interested, rather it means trying to convince potential clients you are worthy of their time, specifically towards people who are looking for your services.
This can include being the one to make the first move, sending an email or calling a potential client to see if they are interested. If those are not viable options, they look for alternative ways to reach out to them, such as through a referral. If they do not answer you right away or they do answer but want to discuss it later or think it over, then be willing to follow up with them.
It is best to wait at least a couple of days before you follow them up and not bombard them with constant messages. After a while, maybe three or four emails, it is best to call it quits and move on to the next client, though it can be another prospect in the same company if you want to keep trying at it.
Once you actually get into a conversation with an interested client, remember what you learned about being positive for one, but also know that you may still need to be persistent. They may be unsure of investing in your service and want to see how you defend it, thus it is your job at this point to be persistent and try to convince them why your service is valuable.
This means listening to their problems and showing how your service can help them, discussing the benefits of your service and how it stands out from the competition, and working with them in order to get what you both want out of the deal.
