Most people reject and many resent the suggestion that they would make a salesperson. In truth, everyone is a salesman or woman and has been good at selling throughout their lives. 

When as a small child, you resort to guile and persistence, blackmail and coercion to get your own way you were selling yourself.  There was never a day in your life when you didn’t sell yourself, an idea or a suggestion. 

When you got into a scrape you tried the ‘gift of the gab’ to get yourself out of it. When you fell in love you sold yourself to the person you hoped would respond.  Whenever you applied for a job you worked hard at selling yourself.  

Forget sales courses unless selling such sales courses are your line of business.  Sure, I picked up helpful tips from ‘how to be a great salesman’ books for which I am grateful. Hints and guidance over time helped to increase my commissions. However, whilst you can make a salesman better you cannot make a salesperson out of someone who, despite a lifetime’s experience, is simply uncomfortable in a salesman’s job.

Over my years as a sales manager I interviewed scores of job applicants. These mostly included hard-bitten pushy-pushy foot-in-the door stereotype salesmen. As their approach was confrontational they were rarely successful in selling a company’s products.  To such get-rich-quick salesmen selling was simply an opportunity to get the better of their potential customer. I would rather wash sheets in a brothel.

Whenever I interviewed a job applicant I was clueless at predicting their success or lack of it. The most outstanding and successful salesperson I ever had the good fortune to employ was no one’s idea of a salesman. 

I groaned when after a timid knock on the door Fred pulled up a chair in front of my office desk. Fred arrived at the interview on time as expected. 

As we chatted and I probed I discovered Fred to be the sweetest-natured and most inoffensive man I had ever had the pleasure to meet. Fred reminded me very much of the hapless English comedian Stan Laurel of the Laurel and Hardy comedy duo. I imagine Fred had never killed a fly.

Knowing Fred couldn’t sell sweets to a starving kid, I decided that there was no way the inoffensive applicant was going to make a salesman.

Couldn’t he?  Fred was such a sweet-natured pully-pully salesman no one had the heart to refuse his blandishments. When others on the team were weakly (sic) reporting one or three mediocre Grade 1 sales, Fred constantly called in with up to ten sales of which many were high-paying Grade 4 or 5 statuses. You know why?  No one had the heart to say no to him.

Sadly, Fred and I had got together rather late in life and my best salesman ever passed on to the great opportunities in heaven. R.I.P. Fred. ~ Michael Walsh Business Expert.

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