The solution for sales staff who hate selling
It’s not uncommon for the customer service staff I coach to confide in me that they don’t like having to sell to customers. They feel that selling is equal to being pushy or putting pressure on their customers. They fear customers will call them out for only caring about selling and not caring about them.
What’s often at the bottom of these feelings is that these staff as customers, have had bad experiences with sales people. They felt pushed, they felt pressured and they felt the sales person was only interacting with them to sell, not to genuinely help.
Staff with great customer service skills may avoid a position that has an element of sales in it because it can make them feel anxious and uncomfortable.
For a while in my career, I was one of those people. For 16 years I worked in Banking which was a very sales driven culture. We had daily, weekly and monthly sales targets. We had daily, weekly and monthly review meetings to check in, check up and make sure that the individuals and the team were hitting those targets.
Not hitting targets was a cause for concern. It was a horrible kind of pressure that would make me squirm when I had to share my sales numbers. Even on the days, weeks or months when I met or even exceeded the targets, the pressure was relentless to keep going. It was never ending.
Some customer service staff love selling. They find it motivational and they enjoy the challenge of hitting targets. What makes selling easier for some and excruciating for others can be a blend of things ie. Natural Behavioural styles is great indicator of how customer service staff will perform in a sales environment but so is experience, passion for the products and services they are selling and the training they have received in communication and understanding customer expectations.
What made ‘selling’ easier and less stressful for me was to remember that all I had to do was think like a detective. I considered every customer as a puzzle I could solve. The puzzle was how could our products and services help them? I used my skills of active listening, open questions, empathy, paraphrasing and following up.
I used my people skills - also known as soft skills.
The other thing that helped greatly was to change my thinking from ‘I have to sell to customers’ with ‘I have to help customers’. When I changed my thinking I changed my outcomes. My natural behvaioural style is to help people and when I started helping instead of selling, my anxiety eased, customer satisfaction improved and those targets became easier as I was confident enough to dig deeper and find more things to help customers for example;
Some customers engage with a business ready to buy. They have done their research and they know what they want. Customer Service Professionals respect those customers and their self identified needs but they also weave into the conversation other products and services that may not have considered that would also be helpful.
If you or others in your team are struggling with the selling side of sales, contact us today and we can deliver the soft skill training that will turn sales anxiety into helping happiness.
Our soft skills are what make us likeable – and customer service professionals have excellent soft skills and so make excellent sales people.