I grew up in sales.
Long before my successful sales career I was selling candy, mangoes, pizza, burgers, Indian food, landscaping, computer parts, cars, alarm systems door to door and so many other things.
Always sales. A little over 30 years later, and I’m still selling, but I find myself in a position of mentorship and training more and more often.
In light of that, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to quantify exactly what it is that I’m looking for in potential business partners and employees, and I’ve realized a very specific common strain runs through most of my favorite candidates: Experience in sales.
When you work in sales, whether it’s door to door, services B2C, B2B, working the floor at a convenience store or a big box store, working the register at a family business, or taking orders at a fast food restaurant (I know that’s more service-oriented, but it’s still the same set of skills I’m talking about), you start gaining the one thing that I think is really important for everybody to understand: The ability to read the customer.
If you’re unable to read the customer, to adjust to a customer’s response in real-time, directly in front of your face, I think you’re missing out on something that makes every great businessperson truly exceptional.
We’re living in a faster world, and if you can’t reverse-engineer your customer’s finish line in order to make him/her happy, you’re going to have a very hard time breaking through the scale and the speed that we’re now dealing with thanks to the streaming economy.
As somebody who likes to rant– and let’s be honest, I love to rant. I love to talk.
I love to hear myself talking. I love to be heard– It’s shocking to me how much I like to listen.
To be honest, I used to struggle with it.
“Why the heck do I like to listen so much?”
And then it dawned on me (which probably prompted me to write this article): “Oh… I’m a sales person.”
I had no choice.
Customer walks in and I had to listen.
Long before I could spout about what Keypad would go best with that system, I had to hear what system they were going to install.
Long before I could go on about what system they should buy for their vacation , I had to know how many windows were there and, more importantly, what their preferences and lifestyle were.
And so, my friends, I implore you to recognize the world we’re living in; to recognize that the consumer will always be right forever.
I implore you, if you’ve never worked sales, to try and find a situation that allows you to do that.
I implore my sons and all college students to highly consider taking a summer job stocking shelves or working a register.
The soft skills (which are, in my opinion, hard skills) that you will learn in that job will be transferable to everything you do for the rest of your life.
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This piece was originally posted on my website. Head over to LinkedIn, I’ve got over 30 features over there. Take a look.
ZARIR 🚀 MERWANJI 