Sales Professionals Are Researchers

by Ben Lai | Oct 1, 2019

Hi, it’s Ben Lai from Sales Ethos. Today I’m continuing the series on The Many Hats that Sales Professionals Wear. In this lesson we’re going to talk about how sales professionals are researchers.

Why sales professionals are researchers: Product & industry expertise

We all know that when we’re in sales, we need to be product specialists. We need to know the ins and outs of the product that we sell. That’s a pretty much a given. So as part of your role, you need to be thoroughly researched into what your product does. But in addition to that, you need to also be a product on the industry that you’re selling into. For example, if you’re selling into the mining industry, then you need to know the world of mining, the ins and outs of how the business works, what are their challenges, what are their goals, and how your product fits in to solve the challenges and help them to achieve those goals. So as a researcher, you need to be well versed in your product, but the industry as well.

Why sales professionals are researchers: Psychology expertise

The next thing that salespeople need to be proficient in when it comes to research, they need to understand human psychology and how that fits into all of the sales techniques that they use. For me personally, when I first started my sales career, I was constantly reading sales books. But I also read a lot of books on psychology. Famous sales trainer Brian Tracy also wrote a book just called The Psychology of Selling. We have to understand what makes people tick and how they think in order to be effective at persuading and influencing their decisions. And of course we want to be very careful with these things. We don’t want to use these techniques in a manipulative way, but we need to at least be aware of the factors that are at play and the experts in that.

One small example might be what are the psychological signs of trust. You may want to always demonstrate that you’re a person of integrity and always someone who puts the client’s interests first and then trust rises as a result. It’s a very simple psychological concept that we need to be aware of as sales professionals.

Why sales professionals are researchers: Self-development expertise

The final thing that sales professionals need to do as a researcher is to constantly look for ways to develop themselves. Sales training books of course are going to be fantastic for this purpose, but you need to read widely as well. Look at the books that teach you how to control your own behaviors and your own thought patterns. Some of the greater inspirational authors that I’ve listened to and read include Tony Robbins, or Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn, Brian Tracy, and numerous others. The more you read, the more you know about how to master yourself. And self-mastery is something that is a very big thing nowadays.

Conclusion

So to summarize, professional salespeople, researchers, we need to be thoroughly knowledgeable about our product and our industry and our clients. We need to be well versed in human psychology and sales techniques. But we also need to be experts in ourselves. We need to constantly look for ways to improve ourselves through a self-development literature. So what are other things that you find that you need to research and be experts in? Leave a comment below. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. And remember, that integrity plus skills equals success.

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