The Importance of Tryst in Sales in Entrepreneurship & Life

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Importance of Sales Experience

As a part of the Business Leadership Program in Philips & similar first year training programs in many organizations for the fresh batch of MBA joinees, a small/big project in Sales is either a must or a top priority one. The leadership always reiterated how paramount was the exposure of sales for performing well in own domain & that every person in every department of the organization should be given atleast a little experience of sales. I didn’t register the gravity of that belief until I got into sales myself for own organization.

Sales is a tricky domain, especially when done for a new product by a new organization. Sales here doesn’t refer only to selling a product, but selling your idea, your capability, and your belief  to get potential clients, investors, colleagues, family and the market.

Robin Kumar Jha , the founder of TPot in his address to the young entrepreneurs, enunciated the importance of the prowess of the founder to sell it, as the indispensable trait for the long term success of the organization. He states how irrespective of how many marketing pioneers one got in the team, the founder needed to be good at it, no matter what. 

As much as being in Sales help you professionally, it changes a lot of things in the inside of you.

First being the empathy you develop with the ones engaged in sales. :-P

Success in sales doesn’t come easy, doesn’t come overnight. You learn, unlearn and relearn all the time. Vinay Singhal , the founder of Wittyfeed very aptly says that claiming an organization to be an overnight success is like killing the years of efforts and hard work that the team has lived with for years.

Behind every flashy successful deal in sales, especially for a startup, there lie a series of meetings & waiting, a pool of happy and sad emotions and a rush of anxiety around the conversion of the order.  And amidst this brouhaha, you learn a lot , a lot of things about yourself, about people, and about human nature.

Ironically when engaged in making the sales, we detest a lot of negative attributes that the clients demonstrate, be it making one wait for no reason, not being clear with decisions , keeping things pending for no reason etc., but we tend to assume the same attributes when we are clients to someone else. And these attributes are not just restrained to the professional sales; they perfectly fit in the situations of power imbalance. Remember how we keep dragging that cousin who keeps calling asking us to help him find job to “kal pakka krungi”. We are neither clear in communication nor keeping up with our words.

The myriad of experiences one gains in Sales and multitude of people one meets, a pool of observations unfold some strong life learnings which make one wish if there could be some standard human practices everyone followed, independent of where one lied in the position of power, let alone in client or salesperson’s role.

6 such key attributes identified are: 

1)     Never say things you don’t mean : If you can do a thing for someone , say it; if you can’t, say it too.

2)     Respect everyone’s time: Whether you are powerful or weak, giver or taker, established or struggling, in the client’s role or the sales person one, know that everyone’s time is important. It is a rare quality that distinguishes great Leaders from position holders

3)     Be honest with your words : People in need very quickly start to trust any ray of hope they see around, don’t give them false ray of hope

4)     Learn how to communicate with every kind of person : Are you all classy, no desi? All English , no hindi? All professional, no personal? With and for sales & a great life , you got to be it all.

5)     Be balanced with your emotions : Don’t be too happy in good times and too sad in bad times, things change overnight

And finally, the utmost important :

Don’t consider anything done, until it is done. There is a cosmic distance between ‘About to be done’ & ‘Done’.