Primary Sales Wound #3: The Selling Wound™ | Intuitive Business Woman

The Selling Wound™ is arguably the the most significant of all the Sales Wounds™, because it’s what drives virtually all of the pushy, obnoxious and rude sales behavior in the world – the behavior that I’ve dubbed Sleazy Salesmanship.

When you’re suffering from The Selling Wound™ you’re operating under the core self-limiting belief,

“I have to approach sales the same way that everyone else says to do it – even when their approach feels forceful, rude or even deceitful to me.

After all, everyone says that’s the way to be successful at sales, so who am I to question that or do it differently?”

Click here to read an overview of all the Sales Wounds™.

there are several big problems with this:

While traditional sales approaches aren’t wrong, they are often misunderstood.

For example, a common piece of advice from traditional salesmanship is, “Set a goal to hear 100 no’s.” If all you hear is that statement (or that idea), you might think it means you’re supposed to go out and pitch your crap at anybody you can get to stand still for 30 seconds, even though you know they’re certainly going to say no. Worse, you believe that forcing yourself to do that to 100 different people will eventually get you a yes.

 

It operates on a continuum with The Anti-Selling Wound

 

The Selling Wound™ is what we’re suffering from when we believe that our job as salespeople is to get people to buy.

“But wait,” you might be thinking, “getting someone to buy IS the job of a salesperson. Isn’t it??”  

I say that it’s not – or at least, it shouldn’t be.

It implies that the salesperson’s job is to get the person to buy no matter what.

Rather, I assert that the salesperson’s job is to discover IF this person should buy.

[Tweet “The job of the salesperson isn’t to sell; it’s to find it out if the person should even be buying in the first place.”]

Let me first acknowledge that my philosophy only applies when the thing you’re selling is good and worthwhile. If it’s not - if the thing you’re selling is a rip-off, if it’s defective, if it does more harm than good - well then first of all shame on you. But second of all, you’ll get no benefit whatsoever from the rest of this article. In fact, you’ll get no benefit from anything I write, so go darken someone else’s virtual doorstep.

Now that we’re clear on that, let’s get REALLY clear on it: the thing you’re selling is good and worthwhile!!! Someone, somewhere, needs your product or service. It solves their problems. It’s the answer to their prayers. They will happily pay you for it, and even more happily tell your friends about it.

Why this is a problem

The person in the salesperson role has this almost unconscious belief that they’re doing something wrong. That they’re taking advantage of the other pson

Almost no one feels comfortable

Benefits to this approach  

This comes from …

Instead we should …

What did you think?