国外的销售经历【郁闷篇】

As I mentioned in my last article, I lost the case. The reason was pretty simple. The customer had already trialed, bought the new machine from another supplier before I visited her. The secretary just wanted to use my quotation for reference, in case she bought the machine at a higher price. She did play it well!

Sometimes I understood my customers, because they would see many sorts of sales people every day. And that was annoying! I was considered lucky because most of the customers I visited would show me their good manners. They either told me reasonable reasons to reject me or left me their name cards and asked me to come back again. And there were quite a number of customers who put some serious warnings to prevent sales people from entering their doors. I’d read many of them, and one impressed me deeply. It was written like this: We shoot at the first salesman everyday!

I knew there were thousands of people who were doing cold-calls every day, yet the number of the companies they could visit was limited. I remember one day an admin girl told me when I visited her that I was the 20th salesman who visited her on that morning! If I were her, I would not have showed my politeness to every single sales person at all!

As a salesman, I knew how disturbing I was, even though I was selling the most expensive machines (in OA industry) in that country. I felt myself more like a business consultant for my customers, because I helped them analyze their running costs of the office equipment. And I always had some good and useful methods for them to save their costs. In that way, I was quite successful.

Some salesmen sell their products only. They don’t give their honesty, friendships and long-term co-operations to customers. They don’t care if they are useful for their customers either. And they only sell cheap things. In Singapore, we called them: Cheap cheap style people. Frankly, we looked down upon them!

I would be upset if my customers treated me in the same way they did to those cheap cheap style people. I was different. By showing them my professional behaviors and knowledge, I made them believe that I was different! I failed sometimes, though. Because they gave me no chance to explain!

Everybody wants to be a Star of sales. The point is: can you handle all the rejections and frustrations you will meet/have every day? Are you sure you have your own ways to motivate yourself? I was not a successful salesman in a way, cause I don’t have sufficient ways to motivate myself. I was emotional to make friends with every customer of mine, and I have many friends in Singapore. On the other hand, I was too emotional to be a mature and realistic salesman. So I quit it! I had others reasons for that, though!