Is sales hard? Sales positions have been around for thousands of years, but that doesn’t mean they have stayed the same. So yes, sales is hard. Retail positions, sales, and marketing jobs have continually become more complex and fast-paced as technology and society have continued to change and diversify.
Sales is complex as it requires employees to remain consistently up-to-date with sales trends, marketing techniques, technological innovations, and social changes. But some sales positions are more complex than others. We are all selling something, but some must sell a lot more… here is how I got better at it. Lots of people shy away from sales, mainly because, it is target driven, pressure entrenched and the MPR sessions may sometimes send you home in tears!
Working as a salesperson for more than a decade, I only just realised how much I loved to sell when I stopped active selling. Yes, sales is difficult, but selling service in a highly competitive market, is much, much more difficult. However, it is possible to enjoy doing it and excel with the right mindset, skills and plan. As a salesperson, I discovered very early in the game that, there were no set rules on how to succeed and no amount of theories could prepare me for the harsh realities of dealing with rejection, negotiation, competing for a bigger wallet share and pulling all stops to make the impossible happen. These are a few tips I picked on the way.
Plan
The truth be told, this is not easy to plan and follow through the whole month or week. However, to succeed as a salesperson, planning is key. Your planning starts from your targets- You must have a clear understanding of your targets and have a practical plan on how you would achieve them. The first step is to break down your full-year target into quarterly, monthly and weekly targets. You need to analyse your portfolio over periods and plan based on the data. To stay ahead of my targets, I’d identify periods that had higher sales returns and increase my weekly and monthly targets for those periods to help direct my activities and focus.
Planning– depending on the overall team objectives, I would plan my monthly and weekly client engagements clearly outlining the objective for each client call and visit to ensure we had direction during every engagement. Sending an agenda ahead of meeting with my clients ensured both the client and I were aware of the purpose of the meeting and helped with the use of time.
Flexibility– Though the planning bits outlined above are very important, it is also more important to be very flexible as a salesperson. This is because, clients in a fast-moving world would require financial support on unplanned deals, some of which are game-changers in their respective industries. Some of these requests may derail you from your set plans. In such instances, stakeholder management becomes very important as you may have to reschedule appointments and put your engagement plans on hold.
Always remember, your goal is to support your client to grow, and all other things shall be added unto you. Difficulty, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. What may be challenging to you could be a piece of cake for someone else! As such, sales may be one of the hardest careers to pursue for those that don’t enjoy social interactions, persuasive conversations, or cannot handle the constant rejection that naturally comes with sales. However, sales jobs could be a dream come true for individuals that are naturally gregarious, competitive, and like to challenge themselves daily.
