You’re Always Selling: What Does a Job in Sales Teach You?
Sales and selling have a bit of a bad rep these days: the idea has become synonymous with manipulative and pressuring behaviour. However, selling skills are not just manipulation or the heavy-handed “used car salesman” stereotypes. Sales teaches you persistence, perseverance, discipline, punctuality, confidence, determination, persuasion, and negotiation.
Persistence & Perseverance
Salespeople and Athletes have a lot in common; an athlete does not start off at the Olympic level, it takes a lot of perseverance and hard work to get to the top. In the same vein, most prospects do not buy what you are selling immediately. Vince Lombardi, former Green Bay Packers Head Coach, said: “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.” Successful people do not give up, they get back up, brush off and keep on working towards their goal.
Discipline & Punctuality
All of the hard work and perseverance that the job mandates goes a lot more smoothly when you are self-disciplined. The easiest way to keep your customers and clients happy is being on time and preparation. Your customer’s time is valuable and being late to your meeting with them will create a hostile environment for negotiation. Discipline will keep a salesperson using a tried and true sales process despite receiving negative feedback.
Confidence & Determination
It is impossible to be 100% confident 24/7, however, a sales job will teach you how to project that confidence when everything is out of your control. A sales job is a crash course in thinking on your feet and being prepared to overcome objections or negativity. Determination, the focus on your purpose, comes from the persistence and perseverance, mixed with the confidence you gain from success after a mountain of failure.
Persuasion & Negotiation
It is easy to see how you learn to be persuasive in sales jobs, it is also easy to see how you learn to negotiate from a sales and the constant practice in these skills will make them some of the most valuable that you learn from a job selling a product. Effective negotiation and persuasion includes being confident in your product and not giving up the parts that are crucial to you, skills that you learn on the job.
The skills learned in a sales job are essential to communication outside of the business world. To be a successful seller you need to understand what you bring to the table, what you are willing to compromise on and when to walk away from the deal.
Bill Gosling Outsourcing (BGO) can help you to learn and grow these skills if you are ready to expand your skill set see our Careers page for opportunities available to you.
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