Selling and teaching are dating each other … not exclusively, but they’re getting more and more serious all the time.
Within the next few years, the two will be hard to tell apart … except the salespeople who teach will be getting paid WAY MORE than the teachers who sell.
I recently read of a salesman who passed on to the next life. He wasn’t famous in this world and he’d only been moderately successful in his career. But when I start to dissect his life, looking for clues that will help me use the good parts of his existence and avoid the less than stellar parts, I see that he might have been one of the most successful people I’ve ever read about.
You may think I’m contradicting myself, because I said he’d only been moderately successful in his career, yet I also said he may have been one of the most successful people I’ve ever read about. Let me explain.
You see, interms of sales dollars, sales records, income and honors, he wasn’t the best salesman in the world. yet, in terms of getting the most out of his life and the lives of others, he was a giant of a man.
How’d he do that? He simply looked at his job in a way that brought him happiness, satisfaction and real, enduring success.
The people who knew him said he spoke most often about the satisfaction that a salesman’s life brings.
I’ll try to paraphrase what he’d have said, had blogging been in vogue during his heyday.
Any salesperson is a failure if they look upon their job as that of a peddler, trading things for dollars.
A salesperson has a higher destiny. They are teachers and there’s no profession more honorable than teaching.
Every day a salesperson has the chance to teach something useful to someone who needs to know that very fact, trick, tip or technique.
A salesperson is the greatest distributor of useful knowledge in the world.
He/she starts teaching when they present the product/service to a prospect. Then he/she shows the prospect what it will do for them, which is all they care about anyway.
The world would still be in the dark ages, if not for salespeople. So I’m proud to have spent my adult life in such a useful calling.
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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Mike,
Sales people ARE teachers–at least in the new economy. Customers don’t have the time to learn everything about every product/service, so who better than educate than a sale person, who should make it his business to study the product.
But more than that, a salesperson should be a market expert as well. That might even be more important–so they can advise their prospect in a broader context.
So in order for sales people to educate, they must be learners themselves. Unfortunately, my experience tells me only a small percentage are.
You’re absolutely right, Bill.
If more sales organizations would take advantage of sales training, like the services your team offers, they’d be WAY AHEAD of the game.
Thanks for stopping by and leaving some nuggets of sales wisdom
I think teaching is honorable (I’m a former teacher, and am currently a sales trainer and consultant, which is another form of teaching). But I also think that the teaching mindset is more than just sharing information. Teachers do more than that. They inspire, they lead, they understand their students as individuals and customize their approach to each one, they provoke, they challenge, they discipline, etc. All this is important stuff in teaching, and it can be important in selling, too.
Additionally, I believe sellers can leverage this “teaching mentality” into sales results. Teaching and selling don’t have to be mutually exclusive!
Well said, Skip.
Thanks for adding to the conversation.
I think you should do a whole series on this topic
Teaching is fun. There is a great joy at seeing someone being successful at what you are trying to help them accomplish. If you give them great value and I mean real value that they can implement in their business today and they didn’t have to pay anything for it the minute you ask them to purchase something they will be likely to pay as the free information helped them so they can only imagine what the paid version must do for them.
Thanks for adding to the conversation, Joseph.
I appreciate you taking time to comment and look forward to you sticking around and adding more value to other posts !
Mike,
Great subject. I beleive we as sales people must test to find out what clients know first and then teach them what they DON’T know about what we sell. My thoiughts are…
Be a STUDENT of your customer – Learn…
- Why they need your service or products?
– What they have tried before that failed and worked?
- How it would change things in their lives?
- What is the one word that best describes this person?
- What words will appeal to this buyer?
- How they normally purchase things?
- When and who will decide to make these changes?
- Why they chose to buy from you and why that option?
Once you have these answers, selling is like taking an open book test. It’s easy and we should ace it everytime!
With warm regards,
Joe Crisara
The Sales Whisperer
You’ve got a great start on a full-blown article there, Joe.
Feel free to expand on it a bit and I’ll be glad to have it as a guest port !
Thanks for stopping by and taking time to comment.
I was a Substitute Teacher for four years, and then worked a retail McJob for nearly five years, before returning to teaching. Sorry, I just don’t see it. To me, teaching and sales are completely different.
As a teacher, I encountered the same students (even as a substitute teacher), over and over again. I knew enough about the students to be able to assess their learning styles, their attention span, and the way to make whatever the subject matter was interesting to them. As a salesperson, I mostly encountered random people, who I never saw again. Working with these people was mostly a guess, as I had no way to assess how to approach them, where their level of interest was at, or even their mood. As a teacher, I am certain that I conveyed information to most of my students. As a retail clerk, I doubt much information at all got through to the customers, as I would get asked the same questions over and over again. As a teacher, the focus was on knowledge and learning, whereas in sales, no matter what mask you put on it, it’s all about how much money I could get people to spend in my store.
Maybe there are similarities between teaching and doing a sales seminar, or something like that, I don’t know. All I can say is my experience in retail hell did not at all resemble anything I did, or do, as a teacher.
Hey Jen,
Stick with teaching.
You’re so far off the radar here that we’d have to send Marine Recon to look for you.
I couldn’t agree with this post more. I find that when I take the time to teach my prospective client what it is they will be getting, or we’ll be doing for them, they value it so much more. They also start to trust you and feel more comfortable with the recommendations you are making.
Great post, looking forward to a great year of TEACHING!
Thanks IM ! I hope I actually teach you something in ’09 !
I promise to try.
Having been a salesperson for virtually all of my life, I am, at the ripe age of 56, back in school taking my B.Ed degree, and getting ready to become a high school science teacher. I have taken many, many sales courses and can see with a great degree of certainty that there are many teachers who already employ a certain amount of the “sales process” within their classroom. As an example, one of the first thing a salesperson does is to “qualify” their customer. They need to discern how much the customer already knows about the product, how interested they are in learning more, how ready they are to buy and how they plan to use the product. The teacher uses informal assessment techniques to determine the level of students’ knowledge, understanding and readiness to learn more. The good salesperson regularly uses minor closes (“Does this make sense”, or “Can you see how this would take care of your need?”) in order to make sure (s)he isn’t getting ahead of the customer, and is well positioned when it comes time for the final close. The teacher does this as well, and knows that without testing for agreement, will be faced with a half room full of “deer in the headlights” looks upon finishing the lesson. The list of similarities goes on, and ultimately, looking back at my previous life and forward into my new career, I can say with absolute certainty that teachers could vastly improve their effectiveness if they were to take a few sales courses and employ time-tested techniques in motivating their students to learn.
Now there’s a teacher that understands selling…or a sales person who understands teaching !
Rick, my new friend, you nailed it.
Thanks for dropping by and double thanks for adding to our conversation with your comment that was better than my original post !
Come back soon and keep those comments coming.