Make the Most of Your Interactions With Salespeople

I am not unique in my past opinions of salespeople. For many years, I believed that salespeople were a painful part of being in business. Many would randomly drop by on occasion or on a weekly basis. Never when it was convenient for me or my company. Many times, I believed they were there to fill in their day and in some cases waste my day.

Now don’t get me wrong, there were some really good, informative salespeople in the industry that I respected and spoke with often, but others I ignored. This was for many reasons. Many were the polished sales types that came across so smooth. They reminded me of the typical car salespeople that have been portrayed in many a movie. Others came across as being very awkward. It seemed they had been thrown into the field untrained and therefore, we questioned their knowledge. Either way, I tended to avoid them. I simply felt that I didn’t have — or didn’t want — to give them the time to have a conversation.

With the coronavirus keeping salespeople away, I believed I could do my own research in peace. Unfortunately — or fortunately — this feeling did not last long. The internet is a very useful tool, but it does not connect to our human need to communicate one on one, and it was very cumbersome at answering questions quickly. In a normal conversation, we can get more information faster when a technical salesperson knows their subject. I started to miss the close contact or face-to-face conversations with salespeople. I also began to rethink my attitude toward them.

What I began to realize is that I was actually missing out on products and knowledge that could help our company. As I opened up to listening to what some salespeople had to say, I started to discover many more products that could be of assistance to our company. Many of these products could seriously increase our productivity.

I started to listen to salespeople much more intently and without prejudice, a stark contrast to the way I tried to shut down conversations with them in the past! I started to assume that they had something useful to present to me as opposed to something useless. What a difference that made.

Our company began to adopt new ideas and products that have helped to deliver faster to our customers. This was amazing and I regret that we had not done this earlier.

It is not that we invited every salesperson in for a conversation, but we began to evaluate them by asking some simple questions:

• Can the type of product or service they are presenting actually be used in our shop?
• Is this product a radical change from how we are doing things now? Is it implementable?
• How quickly could we get a return on investment if we were to use it?
• How available is the product or service to us? Does it have good support?

There were many more questions that could be asked, but these were a good start. I am sure that you could come up with many of your own. These questions also lead to us evaluating what was important to our organization. It is kind of ironic that the very salespeople that we were avoiding in the past were actually helping to shape our organization.

This is not to say that every salesperson is going to be useful to your organization, but if you do not seriously begin to carefully evaluate what products and services they represent, you may be missing out on many gems that could radically change your company for the better. Yes, there will always the polished and awkward salespeople that will cause those old feelings of apprehension to come up, but put those feelings aside and listen. I have discovered that it has benefited our company, and it may improve yours.