Always Being Nice Is Not A Good Sales Strategy
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Always being the “nice” person and never creating any waves with your customers may not represent the best sales tips for your success.
Allow Me To Give You An Example From Hollywood
Freddie Prinze, Jr. is a well-known actor. Everyone likes him and he has stayed out of trouble. The same can be said for Nick Lachey, a well-known singer who used to be married to Jessica Simpson. He is also well liked and I’ve never seen him featured in a police mug shot.
So What’s The Problem?
The problem is that these two individuals are invisible. Name a really good piece of acting or bad piece of acting that Freddie has produced recently. Bought any Nick Lachey CD’s lately? Neither have I. Name even a bad song that Nick has produced in the last year. Can’t do that either.
These people are well liked, but they are invisible. Nothing about them stands out, good or bad. They’re not people you want to avoid, nor are they celebrities whose careers are of interest to most people.
These two “nice” guys take few risks with their careers. They like driving in the middle lane doing five mph under the speed limit. Consequently, they are consistently under the radar. This is bad for both celebrities and sales professionals.
Don’t Make This Mistake In Sales
“Nice” sales professionals are easily dismissed by prospects and customers because they don’t want to create any unrest or discomfort for anyone.
“Nice” sales professionals “share” customers with their competitors. They wouldn’t want to do anything to upset anyone. They treat their competitors with a little too much reverence.
“Nice” sales professionals are afraid to ask hard hitting qualifying questions that need to be asked regarding budgets, decision makers, competitors, etc.
“Nice” sales professionals don’t challenge customers with new ideas. As a result, customers never get fresh perspectives or new solutions on problems they are facing.
“Nice” sales professionals never try to up-sell, cross-sell, whatever-sell because they don’t want to push the customer too much. The customer could get offended.
“Nice” sales professionals always give the biggest discount possible on everything they sell because they want to be liked and feel secure in an account.
“Nice” sales professionals never seek out real decision makers because it could cause problems with recommenders and information gatherers.
Sales Tips For Success
Playing it safe never works in the long run. Take some risks. Shake things up a bit. Stand out and be memorable. Exude confidence – customers love it. It’s better to be memorable and selling, than “nice” and poor.
Invisible sales professionals only exist in a prospect’s business card file.
Further reading:
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©2009 Scott R. Sheaffer
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Tags: aggressive, assertive, competition, cross-selling, personality
We'd like to hear your feedback on this post - feel free to comment below!
June 30th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Great thoughts, SalesVitamins! Weighing the ROI at a given moment during the life cycle of a client becomes the difficult part of this. I’ve never been particularly “nice” in a sales environment where I was particularly knowledgeable. Counter to that, I’ve never been at a knowledge disadvantage where I was effective through aggression.
I’d like to see your thoughts or an article similar to a SWOT graph at 1) initial inception or engagement of a customer 2) Value building and negotiating initial terms and then 3) Maintenance and subsequent follow-on sales. It follows logic that a sales professional will be dealing with three unique mindsets and psychological objections at each of those.
Knowledgeable/Informative
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Nice——–Aggressive
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Consultative
- Joe Browning
September 5th, 2009 at 8:25 pm
[...] Click here for the entire article [...]
December 20th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
HI Scott, I’m new to this site but I absolutely loved the article- frank, to the point, and absolutely accurate. Yep, I’ll take financial and sales success any day over ‘nice’. Keep up the great work.