To sell is human

'Sell' probably wasn't intended to be your go-to book on selling... [but] to rid the salesman of the image of that poor guy toiling for attention

Sell

The Art, The Science, The Witchcraft

Subroto Bagchi

Hachette

244 pages; Rs 499

Have you ever watched a video of Steve Jobs talking at an Apple product launch? What will strike you is that he almost always stressed customer experience over Apple’s technological prowess. At the iPhone launch, for instance, he didn’t talk much about the speed of the phone’s processor or its camera power or the screen resolution. What he did highlight was the fact that it was now easy for the customer because this one device was now both her music player and her phone. He also always stressed the aesthetics of a device, based on the insight that customers invariably appreciated simplicity and style over many other frills.

Now think: What is the standard image that comes to your mind when you picture an average salesman today? A pushy impatient cold caller who may or may not be interested in you; who may or may not have the information you really want at that moment; who is trying desperately to get you to buy one of his lemons. You are just another “prospect” for him and he is probably as eager to get over and done with the whole process as you are.

To use a cliché, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Even with the amount of information available today at the click of a mouse or a swipe on your mobile screen, the sales people you bump into at the shopping mall or on the other end of the phone seem to be all stuck in a time warp. They probably don’t have the time or training to know their products or their customers. Mind you, here we are talking of the “average” sales person, which would be a large cohort. That is probably one reason you see so much literature on the “art” and “science” of selling these days, on how it is time to reimagine the idea of salesmanship, prospecting and so on.

And now another. 

At the cost of sounding short, Subroto Bagchi’s Sell probably wasn’t intended to be your go-to book on selling or how a salesman could sharpen his prospecting skills. The intention perhaps was to rid the salesman of the image of that poor guy toiling for attention at the bottom of the strategy ladder. The good thing is that Mr Bagchi simplifies where other sales books make things complex, and drives home the point that there’s no reason that any reasonably intelligent person can’t move a sale forward. 

Come to think of it, we all need a bit of that unabashed cockiness to negotiate our careers and life tasks. Whether as a student, you are buying time from your teacher to finish that test or as a parent you are selling the idea of an early bedtime to your child when you are dead tired at the end of a long work day, for most people, not a day goes by when they are not selling something to somebody.

Since we are all doing that – selling – all the time, we know the basics intuitively and so Sell appears a bit simplistic coming from someone who admits “of the thirty years I have spent getting up every morning to go to work, I was a salesman on the road for more than ten”.

The format of the book is interesting, through. These are lessons gleaned from the author’s interactions with people – on holiday, at work, while stranded at the airport – that may not only apply to corporate entities but also to the life of the average Joe.

Coming back to my earlier point on the go-to books on selling, here are three on the subject that stand out: Take How to Win Friends and Influence People. It is difficult to overestimate the enormous influence that Dale Carnegie’s book had on the world of sales. Just ignore the pre-World War II publication date; the insights are timeless. Things like how to handle different personalities and to get all sorts of people to like you are especially relevant today when social networks have brought divergent groups of people together and given them a voice that can be heard from another end of the world.

Then there is Tom Hopkins’ How to Master the Art of Selling. If I am not mistaken he was probably the first to recognise what is considered common sense today: That selling is primarily a process through which you manage your own fears and apprehensions and focus on not what you want to sell but on what the customer needs.

Another book that may not be in the same league, but is important to mention here because it flipped the paradigm. Spin Selling is the book that helped turn the idea of selling from how it was conceptualised earlier – as an art – into a science. Author Neil Rackham went about systemically putting down hard facts on actual sales performance and organised the data points to identify what works and what doesn’t. 

Sell, in comparison, is a quick read; the author touches on a range of topics that include the physical and psychological aspects of communicating with customers when prospecting for a sale or when closing a deal. It also includes techniques that can help you forge strong and lasting relationships with the right people. From the keys to communicating, to the reasons you may or may not be able to close a deal, Mr Bagchi does a good job of covering the hygiene factors in a surprisingly jargon-free and straightforward manner.