Harvard Business School: What MBAs Don’t Know about Problems in Selling

While most people are good at selling themselves in friendships and earning good grades in college, when it comes time to sell products and services, we forget the basics about exercising this important skill (McCormack, 1984). Every day we sell our families’ on our roles as Dad or Mom, our employers on our work skills, or our work in volunteer organizations. However, when it comes to employing these natural powers of negotiation and persuasion in a purposeful way, we start to freeze up. Why? Our perceptions of what it means to sell are out of balance.

Selling Is An Important Skill

Some managers may think of selling as crass or unimportant, but it is an important skill that every senior executive has mastered. Management training that can be found in business schools is helpful but it is not a replacement for quota-carrying sales experience. Leadership and managerial training are important but no replacement for mastering the art of persuasion. Let’s face it; business schools can’t and don’t teach selling skills, but these skills can be essential for climbing the corporate ladder from middle management to the executive suite (McCormack, 1984). Listen up, newly minted MBAs…

Selling Can Be Seen as Intrusive

There is a social stigma attached to professional selling that is undeserved. In general, there is a temptation to go along with others, especially our peers or those we admire. Those who are selling and those who are being sold to can perceive selling as intrusive. An awareness of the intrusiveness of selling can be an asset to the MBA in the right context (McCormack, 1984). Instead of considering your sales efforts to be intrusive and resist practicing them, use your understanding of sales-related intrusiveness to reach buyers without turning them off to your product. Do not use intrusive sales techniques, but be aware that any sales techniques might be perceived as being intrusive in the wrong context. Sensitivity to the buyer’s situation, coupled with patience, can provide effective support to the sales process.

Overcoming Your Fear of Selling

Fear of rejection and fear of failure can stop your sales efforts cold. The MBA must know deep down and on the surface that rejection is not a problem but an opportunity. Learn to love the word NO in all its glory! Salesmanship starts when the customer says NO. It is at that point when we truly discover the scope of the customer’s knowledge about the product and the resistance to buying the product. Moreover, the fear of failure is really cleverly-disguised fear of being a pioneer; if you are not making mistakes and failing, you are not trying hard enough to succeed. Overcoming the twin fears of rejection and failure is the hallmark of sales winners. In all my years of business, I have found only one difference between winners and losers (in all areas) over the long haul: winners thought they were winners and losers thought they were losers, with each becoming what they had allowed their fears to help them envision.

Reference

McCormack, M.H. (1984). What they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School: Notes from a street-smart executive. New York: Bantam Books.