Why I love Sales: Building & Fixing & Winning

My friend talked me into attending a wine tasting at a new local winery. As we sat, he listened to me describe my newest customer. I must have been getting excited.

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With a smile on his face, he said, “You really love this stuff.”

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“Yes”, I told him, “I want to improve the way my customers do business. Understanding the other person’s point of view at the granular level is important. Consultative selling means digging into the customer’s motivations - what’s driving them, and developing a solution that fulfills, or for me, over-fulfills their needs.”

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Why I Love Sales

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This is a great question. Why do I drive myself and my team to consistently surpass customer expectations?

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I have been competitive since I was born and for me initially, it was all about the win. My friends and family would say two of my core attributes are integrity and honor.

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As my sales career advanced, the true value of a product became important to me. I want to sell products that solve real issues. I want to measurably improve the customer’s situation. When the product has real value, I am totally committed. That includes hiring, training, mentoring, and motivating sales & marketing teams. I am willing to throw everything into a company if I believe in the product. It’s a little nostalgic and romantic, but that’s how it works for me.

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I want my customers to have a better solution. I want to win, but I want my customers to win too!

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Under Promise + Over Deliver

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I task myself with constant improvement. As a salesman, I don’t compete against other salespeople only; I also compete against myself. Growing my skills and improving my personal sales performance has been crucially important. This has led to the discovery that repeat and referral customers are a big part of success. Satisfied, happy customers are the way to grow a business. The best way to create happy customers is overdeliver on your promises and overfulfill on their needs.

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Market Changes & Opportunities

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“We can’t sell in this market - everything has changed.” Driven by customer expectations, technology, and demographics, market changes are accelerating. Across many product areas, sales models that existed for decades have disappeared, typically in less than 5 years.

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Many traditional organizations are unable to react to these market changes quickly. In my experience, the overall level of sales skills and sales leadership at all companies has been trending down for decades. There are multiple reasons for this. But there is a silver lining. Great opportunities exist for the nimble, motivated sales & marketing team to achieve success - simply by being better than the competition.

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Fixing, Winning & Love of Sales

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I love building motivated, high-performance teams with advanced sales & marketing processes. This includes creating collaborative, diverse cultures and companies. More points of view lead to better ideas and the ability to establish rapport across a broader spectrum of customers.

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Better sales processes mean listening to customers and the market, researching companies and decision-makers, and creating relevant, impactful messaging. Successful 21st-century sales & marketing teams apply many disparate tools including psychology and emotional intelligence. My teams use the most modern techniques and technologies to develop data-driven, customized sales solutions to craft value propositions and deliver results.

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I like fixing things, I like winning, and I like building great sales & marketing teams.