Everybody is a Salesperson!

 

Everyone is into sales!

 

By Anubhav Srivastava

 

How many of you are into sales?

If you are a business owner or have a sales job, you will probably raise your hand.

If you are not an owner but an executive, you may raise your hand.

If you do not belong to any of the above categories, you may not raise your hand at all.

However, the truth is everybody is into sales!

 

When you apply for a job interview, you are selling yourself! Thus  you are the salesman and the product!

When you propose marriage, you are selling yourself!

In an arranged marriage, your parents are a part of your sales team!

When your dog or children whine when they don’t get what they want, they are selling too! Emotional Blackmailing is also selling!

When a politician makes promises, he is selling, now matter how preposterous the promises maybe!

A politician who aspired to become a chief minister was once invited to watch a football game. After the game ended, he was invited to present an award to the winning team. Before he gave the award, he spoke, “Our state is so poor, 22 players have to play with only one ball! Please make me your chief minister in the upcoming elections, I am gonna make sure that every player gets a ball!”

Needless to say that no matter what you do, you are selling. If you are not in sales, that means you are either a statue or you are dead. Some people continue to sell even after they are dead. Nope, not as a ghost salesperson but as a brand name!

But unfortunately selling is considered such a dirty word that it has been replaced with words such as “influencing” in everyday language. In the business world, sales basically represents the money you  make, but it is considered such a dirty word that it has been replaced with better sounding words like turnover!

Unfortunately, the reason why sales has a bad reputation is primarily because the general public thinks it represents lies and  unfulfilled promises. The fact of the matter is that some salesmen have in fact given it a bad reputation because of the same reasons.

A salesman died and was stopped at the gates of heaven and hell. The angel invited him to come to heaven and the devil invited him to come to hell. Finally the devil said, why don’t you get a sneak preview of both the places? The salesman agreed. The first thing he saw was heaven where he saw people meditating and sitting peacefully. It seemed nice but not nice enough. He then previewed hell, it was filled with nightclubs and partying and beautiful women. The salesman liked it. He chose hell.

Unfortunately when he went to hell he was immediately sent to a torture chamber and began screaming out of pain. He screamed out to the devil – “You promised me all those amazing things,  but you put me in this horrible chamber, you lied!” The devil replied, “Oh, that’s just the sales demo.”

No wonder, sales has a bad reputation!

But we need to understand, that it is not the car that causes the accident,mostly it is the driver. The same car can be used to make travel a lot easier as well when in safe hands.

Sales is the backbone of almost everything we do in the world, whether it is monetary or not and when done ethically it is the single biggest factor for any kind of success. If you know you can provide value to someone or solve a big problem of theirs, it is your duty to sell it to them and it is your right to be rewarded fairly for it.

We all need to embrace the idea that every single one of us is a sales person. Some of us are good and some of us are terrible, but we are all into sales. Many people believe selling is beneath them, but the same people will resort to begging whether it is in terms of looking for benefits from the government or their relatives. Most people look for freebies everywhere and yet consider selling to be below their level of dignity. Really?

A salesman quit a job he took up after a few days as he felt it was insulting to him. The employer who was a seasoned salesperson himself and a multi-millionaire told him ” I have been in this business for 25 years. During this time, I have had people hang up on me, shut the door on my face, yell profanities at me and once I was even kicked down the door steps. Yet during, all this while, I never felt insulted, how do you feel insulted in two days?”

How quickly you feel insulted depends a lot on your self worth. The higher your self worth is, the less others’ views negativity will have any effect on you. The people who get insulted the quickest are ironically the ones who care the most about what the society thinks of them and always live their life on other people’s terms.  No one can make anyone else feel inferior without your consent, it is your own self worth that makes you pay heed to or ignore others’ negativity.

So while people may think of sales as a dirty word or may even be scared of the humiliation and rejection, the fact of the matter is that embracing and getting great at selling is the number one thing that determines how successful you at get in life, in almost all fields.  Success always lies beyond one’s comfort zone and unless they learn to push past it and do what is necessary, they will never realize their true potential. The quicker you embrace, learn and begin to love sales, the quicker you will achieve every goal of yours.  The ones that don’t embrace it go out of business in every aspect of their life sooner or later.

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To invite Anubhav Srivastava to speak at your organization, send an email to anubhav101@gmail.com. Read more about him at http://anubhavsrivastava.com/about-anubhav/