Are You Sure You Know The Right Answer?

I had an experience last week that shines a bright light on inexperience. We all have to start someplace as sales people. Most often we start with minimal training, minimal product knowledge, a desk, and a telephone. It’s the ‘baptism by fire’ approach. We flounder until we gain enough experience to be reasonably successful. The quotas and expectations are high and the success rate is low. This is a pretty brutal but common path to sales proficiency. We get beat up, our confidence suffers, and not many of us make it. The first months or years are tough. If it is difficult on us personally, it is no less difficult for our prospects and customers. They get beat up as well while we flounder. Carnage is obvious on both sides of the relationship.

Unless we’ve learned some real effective tools and skills, the underlying fear of prospecting and face-to-face contact with our customer base stays with us. So our longevity in the business doesn’t guarantee that we’re effective sales people. We have experience but are we really masters of our trade. Reaching that level has much to do with the kind of training and mentoring we got in the beginning. The self assurance, knowledge, and skill we bring to our experiences have so much to do the foundation we laid from the start. Understanding the value of mentoring and knowing when to bring the ‘experts’ in is crucial to laying a foundation that assures our success in a difficult profession.

There are a few things that prevent us from seeking the experts, those that would be our mentors. Pride can get in our way. With a degree of success, we can boast that we did it on our own, we did it our way. We might be insecure about asking for help and don’t want to bother others that are busy. We might think we know what we’re talking about and so don’t validate our information to make certain we’re giving our customers the solutions that will best serve them. Sometimes the mentors we’re given to guide us are inexperienced or ineffective themselves.

My story begins with a need to buy a new camera. I was building a music portfolio for my son. He plays guitar at dimly lit coffee houses and the pictures I was taking were turning out dark and unusable. The sales person at my camera shop listened to my story and said I didn’t need a new camera. The settings on my old camera caused the dark pictures. I was actually impressed that she didn’t try to sell me a new camera. Later that evening was the show that I most wanted to shoot, the reason I went camera shopping in the first place. The pictures turned out dark and unusable. I was not a happy camper.

I wandered into the camera store the following day. The sales person that helped me went looking for the ‘expert’. In less than a minutes time he knew I had the wrong camera. He apologized for the sales person’s inexperience. She had worked in the service department but was on the sales floor only two weeks. Within an hour I had exactly what I needed to get the right pictures for my son’s website.

I’m not certain how my experience impacted the new sales person. I don’t know if the ‘expert’ mentored her about the importance of seeking help from the experts. What I know is how it worked for me as the customer. I made a trip to the camera shop that was unnecessary. Gas isn’t cheap these days. I wasted valuable time making a trip that could have been avoided. Most of all I missed the pictures from my son’s session that I can’t get back. I’ve been in our business over 20 years and know how difficult it is to get started. I have great patience for inexperience because I’ve been there and I know the pressure you live with. If you are inexperienced, if you struggle with aspects of the sales process, find the ones in your office that know how it’s done. Learn from them; copy them when it makes sense as you carve out your own style, read blogs, books, seek quality coaching and training, and other information that will help you elude the floundering phase. The more quickly you become an expert the happier and more secure your customers will be. During insecure and uncertain times human beings most want to be secure and protected. That’s what you’re being tasked to do. Don’t let anything get in the way of the most effective and efficient way of giving your customers that gift. You’ll reap the benefits as well.

The two pictures you see are the before and after of my story. Quite a difference between a different setting and getting the right product. If you like good music and the Blues in particular, click on the link below and check out my son's web site. He has samplings of his music, a CD for sale, and spots around Minneapolis and St. Paul Minnesota where you can see him live.