Great Sales People Born or Bred Essay

Great Sales People: Born or Bred Introduction                   Having a well-oiled sales team that can sell a company’s services, reputation, and the brand is the desire of any employer. Asales team is a crucial element that determines customer loyalty to use a company’s product and services over and over. Sales team also plays a role deterring the customers’ choice of which firm to get their money in retune for a satisfying service. It would be erroneous to argue that you cannot improve the personality through training and also illogical to argue that knowledge and skills are inborn that no training or study can enhance it. The controversy on sales success is confined in the falsity that a greater personality can be nourished to make it even better (Forsyth, 2010). Similarly, employers encounter a tough experience training freshmen of the firm’s product and services, to increase their understanding. Such ability to learn about the product relates to the capacity to analyze and learn the minds of clients and improve the power to capture their attention to the products offered by the firm. Sales sector is one critical unit that is directly traceable to the gross output of a firm considering the entire value chain efforts imposed on products and the ultimate user being the customer.                   Just like any other value in the world, the question of personality is a formless, indescribable, insubstantial, and inexpressible ambiguous attribute a sales person could have, but a constructive and definite character of an individual capable of further improvement and through theoretical and practical methods. It is often absurd to stick to the belief that sales persons are entirely gifted insinuating the attributes cannot be acquired by any other means. As Quick (1992) puts it, the idea of purely acquiring the sales skills and knowledge through training is equally dangerous as the â€Å"gift† belief. The history of world achievement by outstanding individuals disapproves these arguments as other have significantly achieved beyond others’ previous achievements by learning new ways of doing things. Sales field is not an exemption especially in today’s dynamic economy where inventions and customized brands are the order of business (Forsyth).                   However, learning about sales is quite expensive and many willing individuals find themselves at the end of the rope before the entire in-service training is finished. Learning by experience is much better than just using past experiences that teaches less or nothing at all. Using personal past experiences is better than using others past experience that makes an individual lag behind by trying to profit from a virtual experience (Johnson, 2000) . It is important to mention that as much as some would learn from experience of others, such a method demands a scientific scrutiny by using facts and figures. Therefore, employers and sale leaders have a duty to spot top sales talents with a strong and commendable background in sales and marketing. Most HR managers possess the view that perfect sales people are born: a person can be trained to perfect the sales skills but the basic drive for success has to exist in a person’s inner being. They have to be aggressive, competitive, and able to handle the hard knocks that come with sales; celebrating and enjoying the passion of the roller-coaster, sales are not exceptional in this field. It is remarkably evident the best sales people have something to prove their achievement: either their career, financially, family or others’ success. A sales professional called Daryl (2013) provides a thought of both aspects of born and bred sale people: in her successful career in financial technology and outsourcing industry, Daryl argues that certain personalities provides themselves to being great sales persons and they only require training to finesse the skills.                   The best known sales people are generally confident do well in dealing with people they meet for the first time, good in team building, dealing with tenacious characters and maintaining acquisitive relationships. These natural abilities when combined with a little training and experience refine their character building great sales persons. Employers are obliged to nature these natural skills, mentoring them and guiding to allow a profitable utilization of the skills in the environment. Those considered as born sellers succeed, but eventually fail for not utilizing the other aspect of breeding. At this level it is right to point that successive selling is achieved by utilizing born sellers’ attributes like confidence, tenacity and passion for promoting a firm’s products and services. Failure is experienced in a case where born attributes have not been bred to dig into customers mind by asking questions to enable them fully understand the kin d of products or service they can derive from a seller. Without training, a customer may perceive the seller as having not fully developed a solid foundation of empathy and trust upon which a client feels should be presented on products and service provision. A sense of equality is offered through questioning a customer about their wants and needs: a feeling of privilege is built upon the process of enquiry creating a mutual satisfaction (Hession, 2001).                   Sellers considered as â€Å"born† have often succeed in their career due to their desire to create a mutual coexistence with their customers, openness, and asking insightful questions aiming to get to the bottom of the matter before the deal is terminated. Therefore, more friendly sellers reassure the customer that their interest are catered for building their trust and understanding driving the customer to even purchase more from the same firm. On the other hand, bred sellers stand a better position to sell or closing the sale due to lack of pushy or selling concern, a different case with â€Å"born† sellers.                   For a person with a desire to excel in sales, they need to top making excuses based on their personality, but start from where they are now. Achieving full potential in this field calls for a positive mindset of learning and progressive development of skills and â€Å"born† attributes that makes greater sales professional. These attributes are only learnt by bold person with the gut to risk their social reputation as they practice it. According to Harvard Business Review (2011), an estimate of 70% of successful sales team has inborn natural instincts that greatly determine their sales career path and success. On the other hand, a 30 percent and below is a group of self made sales persons implying that they learnt from the selling environment without the benefits of natural attributes. More so, the analysis presented a 40 percent of people who enter the sales field without these natural instincts, but later fail or quit. Another 40 percent will per form at an average rate, with the remaining portion performing above the average. It is important to point out that the figures above vary by the type of industry and the nature of products or services sold.                   Based on past studies, the question of discussion should lie on what determines the fate of sales persons without natural traits. It might be simple to mention the obvious factors that lead to success of a sales team like hard work, passion, persistence, empathy, intelligence and integrity, but another set of key factors worth listing are greed, language specialization, modeling the experience, political insight and language power. The most important distinguishing element in the success of a self-made sales person is the language power. More often than not, sales person recite the features and benefits they offer, but finds it had to hold an intelligent conversation about the firm’s daily operations (Bird, 2012). It is paramount that business firms develop their own language to deal with technical issues relating to the daily operation in order to facilitate a mutual comprehensive understanding of meaning of words and terminologies used. A techni cal consist of abbreviations and acronyms used on their products.                   According to Bird (2012), the ability of a sales person to analyze comparable experiences and similar data into expected molds is referred to as modeling of experience. Sales activities involve a continuous consolidation and accumulation of like information from customer interactions and sales calls. From these activities, sales person are able to predict future happenings under similar situations and plan for the right responsive actions. Self- made and successful people stand a better chance of storing, and retrieval of all information that occur during sale cycles and calls. This experience is a better way of learning from experience, by ensuring past mistakes are avoided in future sales activities. A political acumen is another important element in ensuring openness and diverse approach to selling and dealing with customers. Sales is a practice that take s a human nature where, the outcome is determined by people and politics breeding successful sale s team should prioritize on political acumen to effectively determine customers’ motivation and influence to their decision. Greed applies in sales on a different dimension from the normal association with a corrupt character: the term is applied in reference to the desire of a better pay for one’s time. Time is a factor that determines how much a sales person gets at the end of the deals made, and therefore effort should focus on winning as many deals as possible within a limited time. It is the greed that motivates sales person to push hard for a better gain (Bird, 2012). Therefore, a lesser sales person does not possess this trait that act as an inward drive to settle as many deals as they can. Conclusion                   The above variations presents a better opportunity for sales leaders to train their â€Å"born† sellers (considered successful in their own right), by analyzing what a successful and efficient sales force feels, interacts and sounds like considering the strengths and weakness of both types of sellers. According to this analysis, the role of a sales leader includes developing the existing sales team to offer different types of services. Similarly, when recruiting, a leader should identify the candidates with a desire to be nurtured and molded to fit in the effective sales team. A seller needs to be ‘all rounded’, and not only a tradition â€Å"born† seller termed as successful without fully realizing their potential. Many self-made and successive sales persons have learnt to apply their acquired experience a profit5able manner to build their intuition. It is important to understand what counts and spend time on it while navigati ng to powerful decision makers to find a chance to convince them buy from your firm References Bird, T. (2012). Brilliant selling: What the Best Sales People Know, Do and Say. Harlow: Prentice Hall Busines. Forsyth, P. (2010). 100 Great Sales Ideas(New ed) From Leading Companies Around the World. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish. Hession, R. (2001). Drive a Great Sales team for Sales Managers Who Want Results. Oxford: How To Books. Johnson, T. (2000). Effective Sales Management,Hhow to Build a Winning Sales Team. Los Altos, Calif: Crisp. Quick, L. T. (1992). Making Your Sales Team #1. New York: AMACOM, American Management. Source document