“…We always deal with similar companies as company A. Therefore, we are so sure that we can make them accept our ideas. You can totally rely on us…” My boss and I are having a call with an external party who claim they can help us. However, without any solid evidence, we both think it’s not reasonable to trust them.
“OK! Alright! No Problem!”
We both think this guy is chit-chatting just like a normal sales who want to close a deal and earn the commission. Normally, at this stage, sales will agree on everything and promise every request from clients’ side. Once the deal is closed, they will pass us to their technical team to follow up.
However, this is not what we want.
Currently we are facing a big problem and need an expert to resolve the problem. Therefore, we make many calls to many well-known companies for quotation. However, I guess the economy is really bad these days, most of the external parties are keen to pick our call and fight for our deal. They are showing a “Nothing is Impossible” attitude just like Adidas slogan.
If it is in America, it could work. However, we are now in Hong Kong, one of the places in the world that is filled with skeptical people.
Most of the Hong Kong people don’t trust others so easily, especially those who always say they are capable of something but don’t have any track records.
After the call, I told my boss that I thought the guy over the phone was just chit-chatting and I didn’t think he knew anything about what he just said. My boss nodded.
We want practical people
After many calls with different external parties, we finally found a guy who look practical. He is a typical accountant-like person who talked step by step in case we lost track. He was so nice to analyse the problem we were facing and showed us several possible solutions.
When I was listening to what he said, I thought how come he was willing to tell us so many of his opinion, even we didn’t pay for nothing! In other words, he might lose this deal even after he showed his expertise.
My boss and I thought he should be the one.
Of course he was not like the sales we have been dealing with who had better presentation or nice tone. He was talking with flat tone, but we are OK with that because we were not looking for an interesting person, we were looking for a person who could help us resolve the problem.
This guys has showed his value to us.
Selling with knowledge
I think most of the people in the world has a wrong mindset on sales people – they think sales people should know how to chit chat. Because most of the people are not good at chit chat, they think they are not qualified as sales people.
It is correct that sales people who are good at chit chat may earn a good 1st impression to their possible customers, but whether they know how to chit chat or not is not important. The most important thing is that they have sufficient knowledge to provide value to their customers.
For example, a sales who knows the pros and cons of digital marketing and show you a lot of successful stories might be able to earn some deals, but a sales who can immediately recommend some useful digital marketing solution or opinion to specific fields will definitely “wow” the audiences and win A LOT more deals. The latter has showed a lot more value to other people than the former.
At last, my boss and I had a few calls with that practical guys and agreed to employee his company to solve our problem, and we are both confident to his company.
I personally has learnt something from this incident.
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If you want to know more about what I have learnt from other successful people, you can click the below link. This could the one of the life-changing articles for you:
