The best salespeople are the ones that leave me alone until I decide to buy. I was furniture shopping a few weeks ago and found some stuff I liked at the first place I went to.
I told the salesman there I was just starting to look and if he gave me his card, I would deal with him if I decided to buy and would be paying cash. He said no prob, he does work on commission and left me alone unless I had a question.
Went to a few other places, saw some stuff I liked, told them the same thing but the salespeople followed me around jabbering bullshit. Very irritating.
I made up my mind, went back to the first place, looked the dude up, and spent some money. He was happy and I was happy.
He got the deal mainly because I liked his product but I will admit the hardsell crap from the others had some influence.
Heh. I hope you got the Glengary Glen Ross reference there.
But you’re right, my word is my bond and my honor, if I sacrifice that, what do I have left? Nothing worth living for, that’s for sure.
I’m a telefundraiser, and the most despised and generally disrespected fundraisers at my workplace are those who previously have had a ‘sales’ background. They just ooze insincerity from every intense and hyped-up pore.
The manipulative and guilt-oriented crap they spew makes me (and 90% of the other fundraisers) cringe and wish them a painful and early death…and an afterlife where they are stuck in a room with just a phone…that rings constantly…and at the other end is a telemarketer who won’t take NO for an answer!!
Regardless of how fair it is, the stereotype of salesman as dishonest and corrupt has been around at least as long as I’ve been alive. I’m pretty skeptical that once salesmen were known as pillars of morality, and just recently they’ve managed to destroy that reputation.
Unfortunately, you are the exception. The vast majority of people are like catsix, who would sooner spit on a salesman than seek him out to get him the commission. Those people, if they walk out the door, they’re not coming back to buy anything.
There’s an inherent problem with having salesmen. If the salesman is simply a product expert there to help you determine the best product for your needs, customers will use them for knowledge then buy from a place without salesmen, because it’s cheaper. So, salesmen wind up being guys who can sell, people who can close deals, those guys are often annoying but effective, and don’t necessarily know a thing about the product. Or, the store dispenses with high priced salesmen and replaces them with low priced register jockeys who can’t help you at all.
It seems that some places can hire salespeople pretty willy-nilly because they don’t need to pay them much if they’re on commission. No skin off the company’s back, dig?
But, there are still good salespeople out there, and I suspect that in the past there were just as many idiots and assholes in the profession. I was buying eye-glasses last week, and had a very professional, very intelligent salesperson who was wily and on-her-game from the second I walked in. They’re almost fun to deal with.
I’m not sure what type of position you’re talking about here. Regardless, you have grossly underestimated the value of a good commercial loan officer to his or her bank.
I don’t tend to deal with them on anything that doesn’t have a negotiable price. I do my own research, find out what I want, and will either order it online or show up at a store to buy it. I am not there to shop or to be given a pitch. I am there to purchase an item I have already decided that I will buy at the price that store is offering. If the price is negotiable, that’s really the only reason I’m talking to the salesman. I don’t need to know that the Honda has all wheel disc brakes because I already did that research, and I want to buy one. My goal is not to learn about the product, it is to get the absolute lowest price I can. In that case, all that matters to me is which one’s giving me the lowest price.
Fine by me. I’m not at Best Buy or Circuit City to ask questions. I’m there because they have an item I want at a lower price than any other store or website that I have visited. Perhaps I am fundamentally different from the average person in that I’m not at Office Max asking which computer I should buy. At the very most, I will ask someone where they keep the video cards to save myself the five minutes of finding the right aisle.
For people who aren’t innately sociopathic, there are books, seminars, training courses to [del]indoctrinate[/del]bring them up to speed - with names like “close that sale”, anyone - not just the certifiably insane - can learn the techniques and skills necessary to badger and coerce unwilling consumers into buying expensive and unnecessary tat they didn’t want.
Sociopath doesn’t actually mean “someone who is willing to profit from the drooling consumerism of the average American.”
The fact is that while not many salespeople are sociopaths, sociopaths do quite well in sales. If you winnow the field by concentrating on sales for corporations with little regard for honesty, sociopaths do even better. Then if you narrow the field further, and concentrate on sales of luxury, or “elite” merchandise, sociopathy becomes a definite positive influence on ones success in sales.
Mostly, it’s just ordinary folks trying to make a living. Market collapses will certainly bring the scum to the top, though.
As a salesperson and someone who manages other sales people I hear where you are coming from. I’ve always been against the bullshitters who will say anything to make the sale and then avoid the customer when problems arise.
In some ways I blame the cooperate mindset that keeps pushing numbers over quality of service. Best Buy got sued because their salespeople were lying to customers to sell the extended warranties. A friend of mine who worked there objected at sales meetings and told management they could not instruct their staff to lie and get away with it.
OTOH I’d say it’s a shared responsibility. The customer owns part of it. It cost money to have a professional educated sales staff. Customers have told us that price is king and that matters more than service. In order to compete on price the big chains have gone to more part time help.
My suggestion is that when you find a decent store that has a good staff please give them your business even if it costs a little more. As part of an independent store competing against the big box guys I appreciate it when customers come to us out of loyalty.
That is a shitty attitude to have going into a sale negotiation. If you want the absolute best deal, then you’ve right by doing your homework. You have the advantage, you know your shit, and you want to purchase. Let them know that, but the salesman is NOT your enemy. In your position, you ought to take advantage of him to get him to throw in free stuff to get your money. You won’t do that by treating them poorly.
I’m not sure if I agree with this. In fact, I think that a market collapse will winnow out the sleazy and incompetent.
Look at the downturn in construction. Every week there are firms declaring bankruptcy. We’re thinning the herd, and I believe it’ll be the best for the trades in the long run. It’s going to be a really hard time for sleazy morons to stay in business.
fisha, building contractor, which by definition has a lot of “selling” involved. So hate me twice.
The problem with auto and real estate sales is that both are almost always one-time sales – there’s very little prospect of repeat business now that autos are kept for decades rather than three years or so. Even more so for housing of course. So there’s no incentive to make the customer happy with their purchase long term. The thing to do from the viewpoint of capitalism is to maximize the profits on every transaction as much as possible, and to hell with the customer. This does indeed tend to produce rapacious salespeople.
If people are keeping their cars for decades now, I certainly haven’t seen it! Where do you get that kind of info??? The average trade cycle is still less than 3 years. We get plenty of repeat business. People SAY they want to keep their new vehicle till it dies, but the reality is they are back in 3 years for something else. I will concede your point with real estate, but not with autos. You are way off base. We go above and beyond for our customers. It is essential in our business to cultivate a relationship in order to get referrals and repeat business. If you can’t get referrals from your customers, you are indeed a sucky salesperson, and won’t last long. Salespeople that have been able to make it for 3 years start to see the trade cycle and no longer have to rely on walk-ins for sales. Our salespeople that have been here 4 years or more only work from their customer base. Rarely do they get new business, because they don’t need it.
With cars also, it’s common for households to have more than one vehicle. My father kept to his word about keeping his work truck for a full decade, but in that same period of time we bought three other vehicles. If you have two cars that you keep for six years each, you’re still buying a car every three years on average.
If they can afford to throw in free stuff, they can afford to lower the price of the item I actually want to buy. I would prefer they do that, rather than attempting to ply me with free but typically worthless crap that is supposed to make me think that I’m getting a hell of a deal when in reality, I am not. Don’t tell me you can throw in this coffee table, a 200$ value, for free in order to get me to buy the sofa, because I am going to respond that I do not want the coffee table, and you should take the 200$ off the price of the sofa.
When I’m in the market for my next car, I will do exactly as I did for the previous car. I’ll take my research that I have very carefully done and spend up to six months looking for the deal that I want. I will go to various dealerships and I will haggle every single one of them until I get an acceptable price, and that’s where I’ll buy the car. The idea of just going back to the same place and dealing with the same person doesn’t appeal to me because I know from experience that I can get a better deal by haggling at various places until one of them presents an acceptable number.
I’ve had my current car for over six years. It took me eight months to find it and get the deal I wanted on it, but I got exactly what I wanted, from the dealership owner. The salesman said he couldn’t make that deal, and he’d have to talk to the owner of the dealership, and I pretty flatly said that if I’m not speaking to someone who can make the decision, I’m walking. Ended up in the owner’s office getting the exact price I was willing to pay. Never once have I asked anyone to give me the name of a salesman to talk to, and I never will.
If you mean market collapses will weed out the scum and get rid of them, I agree to an extent.
The mortgage boom brought a lot of dirtbags into the business. I knew a lawyer who gave up his partnership to do mortgage sales because it was more and easier money. I knew lots and lots of car salesmen, telemarketers, and high school dropouts who were attracted by what was essentially free money in some cases. I’ve been out of the business for a year but I suspect (and hope) that a lot of these people are gone now. A few of them I knew personally are in jail. They didn’t have the knowledge or skill to make it through the tough times. Only the predatory instincts to make it through the boom.
