Tales from the Sales-Dojo #1

I am pretty sure that you might already be aware that folks in various industries tend to have specific places they can hang out together and talk-shop or network or whatever.

 

Sales folks have their places too…

 

They gather together to socialize, network, bounce stories and ideas off each other, ask questions about how others handle situations, coach each other, and more.

 

Some of these groups are dedicated to specific types of sales like door knocking, car lot, remote, real estate (which I kind of laugh- real estate is less about selling and more about marketing in my mind), and more.

 

Anyways, most of them are kind of hard to find and any that are mildly ‘good’ or better are almost always private and a little hard to get into.

 

I call the sales dojo’s because they are packed with multiple highly accomplished sales practitioners and they all sharpen their skills with each other. The old hands in the sales game are happy to step in and guide the younger ones- asking those guiding questions that the wise always confound the young with.

 

Anyways, I belong to a lot of these private groups- I like sales.

 

And as you might imagine, there is a lot of interesting stuff that goes on in them…

 

I present to you Tales from the Sales Dojo #1

 

Trigger alert- if you’ve needed safe space in your life, might stop reading here…

 

In a particular sales dojo, a young buck asks:

 

“Anyone else who does in home sales, charge the client more because they make you wear a mask in their house?”

 

WHOA!!! That one took me by surprise…

 

This guy, I guess, has a problem wearing a mask so much that he feels like it is proper and appropriate to actually charge MORE money just because people have asked him to honor a simple request while in their home???

 

Holy cow! That guy’s got sales wrong… 

 

But what about the members of the dojo? How did they react?

 

Well, this is social media at it’s best so there were some pretty colorful responses. Language that I won’t repeat in an email, but I can say as a 30+ year Navy Sailor, I was impressed…

 

The first reaction was the best in terms of both content and intensity- it was an older sage who said (paraphrased):

 

“...what (effing) planet are you on? It’s literally their private property. Don’t like their rules? Don’t (effing) go”

Which in turn, of course, spawned a rabid response that doesn’t need to be repeated.

 

Over all, the side I would like to see ‘win’ did so with a resounding level of satisfaction… 

 

The sales-bros who just want our money were pounded by the majority who all bristled at the audacity of the original poster.

 

The lesson here is that there are in fact both good/honest and poor/dishonest players in sales. In this case, it seems, that the majority of commenters were of the good/honest variety (but who knows what stance the ‘watchers’ who remained silent have…).

 

The reason we all get that ‘weird’ feeling when we have a sales person zero in on us is because of this- we’ve all come across the sleazy poor/dishonest type and our defenses go up immediately.

 

While the majority of them are honest/good, the fact remains that they are all training and honing their sales skills, so we should too…

 

That’s why I am creating the Tucson Solar Insider Desk Guide for Buying Solar- so that we can all arm ourselves with the best information before we talk the solar sales folks, and especially be able to detect the one on our doorstep is a sales-bro who hates masks…  click here to get on the notification list.

Be Good!

Curtis