Dave Kahle Wisdom

“He has the gift of gab.  He’ll make a good salesperson.”  It’s been a while since I last heard that expression.  The idea is, of course, that salespeople are good talkers. The idea is that if you are a good talker, you are well on your way to having the necessary qualifications for a sales career.  While that figure of speech isn’t popular today, the idea behind it continues to have currency.

That idea is, like so many other pearls of conventional wisdom, completely and utterly wrong. Good salespeople are not good talkers.  Rather, they are good listeners, good thinkers, and hard workers.

Good talkers generally make mediocre salespeople. They commonly delude themselves about their effectiveness and see their sales calls and customer relationships through a distorted perspective.  Since ‘talking a lot’ is one of their core personality traits, it makes them feel good when they exercise that trait.  Since they feel good, they think the customer must feel the same way, and therefore, it was a successful sales call.

Good talkers often see themselves as the repository for product knowledge and believe that their job is to disseminate as much product knowledge in the sales call as possible.

I had the ultimate example of this in one of my sales classes.  We were role-playing “presenting” a product – what should have been at most a ten-minute exchange.  This classic “good talker” turned it into a 35-minute monologue, which ended when I mercifully intervened and called time.  The person playing the role of the customer had actually begun to fall asleep.  The ‘good talker’ never noticed.

The “salesperson” saw himself as a product knowledge expert and a good talker.  And so, he lived up to that vision of himself.  I, on the other hand, saw him as a disaster.  In my evaluation after the class, I asked my client to consider whether he belonged in a sales position.

Unfortunately, the large quantity of customer contact that comes with the job of the salesperson presents an attractive source of ears and leads a lot of “good talkers” to a career in sales. So, they have a tendency to gravitate to sales careers, where they have lots of opportunities to exercise their personality trait and talk to a lot of people about a lot of things.

Alas, that doesn’t have a lot to do with what makes a sale happen or the processes and skills required to become good at the job.

Good salespeople, on the other hand, are better listeners than talkers. They instinctively understand that the customer feels better when he/she is able to share with them what’s on his mind.  In the communication process, the customer’s conversation is far more valuable than the salesperson’s, and the best sales calls are characterized by 75 percent of the conversation coming from the customer and 25 percent from the salesperson.

Good salespeople understand that the essence of the job is to provide the customer with what the customer wants, and the necessary prerequisite is to discover what the customer wants in-depth and in detail.  In this process, you can never discover what the customer wants when you are talking.  That only happens when you are listening.

That’s why “good salespeople are good talkers” is one of those ideas that have a debilitating effect on salespeople and sales teams.

Think about investing $10 bucks or so in a book that will really help you to improve your sales skills:  Question Your Way to Sales Success.

Read Part One, Part Two, and Part Three of this series to learn more about Beliefs That Hinder Salespeople.

*S-91; Podcast: SM-62