A6. Are Selling Skills essential?

 Another concept that a lot of training institutions, motivational speakers and trainers emphasise on are Selling Skills.

 Are Selling Skills important?

What is your opinion?

Most will say that I think selling is essential and I have been made to believe so.

I think it is NOT essential.

Well, let us ask you a question: Have you received calls from various insurance people or telemarketers selling you a product or service on the phone? How do you respond to the call?

Fact is most of us try to hang it as soon as possible or tell them to call back later or some would even simply slam the phone down and ignore such calls.

Generally most of the people are not happy to take those calls and are fed up with such cold calling practices, even though the person calling may be the best of the best of the best telemarketers. But most people are not willing to listen.

Another way to illustrate our point is:

Suppose you want to buy a shirt. In one store, there a beautiful sales girl selling it for $50 and speaks to you courteously and with full sweetness in her voice and actions; going “Hello Sir, Hello Sir”, etc.

In the next store, there may be an older guy selling the same shirt and he is not good in his sales skills and does not even know how to greet you and treat you well. But if the same shirt in his shop costs only $40, now what will you do?

If the shirt brand and the packaging are same, being all things  equal, most people will buy it from the old man with no selling skills and no customer service skills.

So if the majority of the people will buy the cheaper one if the product is the same. So where do the selling skills matter?

Point to note is:

That despite that you are very good in your verbal, selling skills, some people may not want to listen to you

Secondly, even if you are a master of selling skills, you will not be able to sell the product at higher price.

So what is more important?

Many people aspire to have and end up paying a lot of money to do Diplomas and Degrees in marketing, but the important question to ask is how relevant are these skills and how useful are they in the real business world.

Maybe we should spend the same time in identifying the right customers. When do you normally listen to a sales person? When he is selling you a product that you do not want or when you really want that product and you go out and seek for it?

You only listen when you truly want a product. No matter how good a sales person he or she is, if you do not have a need for such a product or service, you will not bother listening too much to his sales pitch.

So what is more important is to nurture is the skill to find the right customers for your products, rather than these so called ‘Selling’ Skills.

From Fact file of Mr. Gupta:

I have been to China many times and as I cannot understand Chinese language, I cannot converse with them and they cannot speak in English and thus we cannot have much required conversation for business even.

So what we are generally talking is the ‘calculator’ language and has to rely a lot on sign language. Our focus is always on “How much is the product and how much is the price?”

If someone really wants to learn what selling or rather negotiation is, I feel they should go and work for at least a week in a shop in China. You will truly see the amount of effort the sales girls there put in trying to make you buy their products, even if you bargain with them in ridiculous terms.

For example, they may be offering their products at $100 and not understanding what shall be right price, I may offer to pay ridiculously only $10 instead; I realize even then they will not feel offended.

They will still keep on bargaining $95 and then drop to $90 …and we going up like $10, $15 or $20.. till they reach to a price that they cannot reduce further. Say they lowest it to $30 and they know that they cannot go down any further, but I am stuck at offering only $25, they will not lose the patience of talking to me and will still strive to make a deal, maybe by offering an alternative product of the similar nature, which is close to my offer price.

So what I liked and admire is that despite not able to understand the common language, they have a real hunger to close a deal and are extremely patient till customer buys something.

So, at the end of the day, it goes back to story of the cat and the rat. You will only truly understand if these skills are really important when you start your real business, because at that point, like the rat, you will be really doing it for survival for life, while the cat was only running for food.