[E81] Q&A Week: How do you become successful in sales without feeling slimy?

Welcome to another week where I take a sales related question and answer it the best I can.

In this episode, I answer the question “How do you become successful in sales without feeling slimy?”

No one likes that type of salesperson, yet it continues to happen, and has been affecting prospects since the beginning of time.

What can you do about it if you are in sales?

Check out this episode.

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Episode 81 – Transcript

Hi and welcome to the sales experience podcast. So glad that you’re here. So glad you’re listening.

I appreciate everybody who at least downloads one episode or subscribes, leaves a rating, leaves a review, shares this with other people no matter what, whether it’s one episode or all of them. I appreciate the fact that you’re looking at how to improve the sales experience.

That’s really my mission and my focus when it comes down to everything that I do on the consulting side, online, talking to people, doing training. It’s really just to help salespeople improve their performance and the experience that they’re feeling from their side and doing sales in a way that makes sense for them.

That feels right and that’s doing the right thing for other people. And then obviously it’s about the sales experience and what the customer, that prospect moving to a client feels on their side and that’s huge.

That’s important. So I’m so glad you’re here. I am going to start off another series of episodes where I am going to take some questions that have either received in person, seen online, seen in chat groups, whatever that might be. And do my best to answer it.

I am going to take one question per episode and let’s dive into the first one. So for today’s episode 81 the question is how do you become successful in sales without feeling slimy? I hear this one a lot, especially online people who are thinking about getting in sales, but they’ve seen movies like wolf of Wall Street or boiler room or they’ve experienced salespeople.

Maybe they’ve gone to a car lot and bought a car or seen someone buy a car or heard the stories of what that’s like, whether its car sales, could be insurance, could be real estate, and could be literally anything.

So how do you become successful in sales without feeling slimy? The basic answer to this is to be authentic, to be honest, and to be transparent. Focus on those three things and it won’t feel slimy. The real indicator for yourself in how you feel about it is how much do you believe in what you’re selling.

If you don’t believe in what you’re selling, then either do more research, which is what I’ve said in the past so that you can understand and believe the value of what you’re selling, that product or service and what it brings to the potential customer or stop selling it, stopped working for that company and go pick something else that you want to sell that you can honestly believe in.

There’s a lot of people who get into sales because they’re chasing that Almighty dollar. They’re going for the money, they’re trying to make money as much as possible, and I see these groups, I see them go from industry to industry.

Whenever there’s a new and shiny sales thing that pops up. I sought when mortgage and real estate was getting popular and then that started to go down and then people jumped into loss mitigation loan mod short stales.

Then that fell apart and then you know, usually the default is either timeshare or car sales and then they leave that and then they go into something regarding credit card debt. Then they leave that, then they go into student loans.

Then they leave that and they keep just chasing this around. And I’m not saying that everyone that goes into those industries are bad, but the ones who usually give the industry the bad name or get everybody in trouble are the ones who are going after it for the money.

So make sure that’s not you. If you seem to be in that crowd, most likely you’re not listening to the show, but you’re always going to have that slimy feeling.

You’re always going to have that looking over your shoulder, wondering, worrying, struggling to sleep at night because you know what you’re doing to people is not right. And so make sure that you believe fully in whatever it is that you’re selling, whatever it is that you’re offering people. And fundamentally the key is the best way to not feel slimy is to just be honest and authentic and transparent.

Like I said, tell people how it works. There’s always good in every product or service. There’s always bad, there’s always some negative things. There’s always a catch. Sometimes it’s big, sometimes it’s small. It could be. The catch is it’s a 12 month contract and that’s really the only thing.

But if somebody uses whatever it is you’re selling, then it’s going to be a home run. The catch could be, it’s going to hurt your credit, or the catch could be, you know that you can’t use such and such while you’re in this program.

There’s always going to be something negative. And if you can share that and you’re not afraid of that because you know that the positives outweigh the negatives, then there’s no reason you’ll ever feel slimy because then people will make the right decisions for themselves. And that’s really the key, is just be honest, authentic, transparent.

Like I keep saying, because it’s so important. I just want to keep hammering that home because not enough people in sales embrace those. They know that they should do that maybe in their normal life and their everyday life. They live that way. When it comes to sales, a lot of people seem to feel like they’ve got a turnoff. Those three things.

They’ve got to turn off being honest, authentic, and transparent, and then that’s the only way that they’re gonna make sales when in reality, the best way to be successful in sales is to embrace those three things and have a product or service that you fully believe in.

All right. I hope that helps. If you’re in sales and you’re struggling with how you feel about sales or you’re thinking about getting into sales and you’re not sure because the overall impression is bad, obviously that’s my whole focus.

I want to shift the way that sales salespeople, sales professionals and companies that have sales teams, how they’re viewed by prospects. I want to shift how we all are viewed as sales professionals from a negative, from that slimy feeling, which is relative to this question, to a positive, professional, supportive thing I want to do for sales. What other industries have liked the medical field where you go to a doctor?

That doctor is a professional. You know that a lot has gone into it. You know they have your best interests in mind, hopefully, theoretically, and you take what their prescription is for you as the best thing to do because they want to make sure that you get better.

I want to do the same thing for sales, so make sure you subscribe. Make sure you rate, rank this show if it’s possible, wherever you’re downloading, share it. If you want to see full transcripts of every show or find all the archives, you can go to cutter consulting group.com.

You can also go on there and send me a message. If you have questions, comments, thoughts, you want to talk about sales, let me know. And then you can also find me on LinkedIn. Just go on there, search for Jason Cutter and that you can find me. Send me a message. Let’s connect. That’s it.

Always remember that everything in life is sales and people remember the experience you gave them.