Good Salespeople Are Good Talkers - Beliefs That Hinder Salespeople

by Dave Kahle

“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.

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          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... READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE