The Hindu Business Line : The salesman is a liar!

THE salesman lies his way to a sale. Closing the sale is a path that demands many a lie. The path to successful selling is cobbled with the well-told lie, the glib tongue that tells the lie and many a secret tradition of telling the glib lie that needs to be mastered by the novice.

Selling is a science that depends on the well-told lie. This might be a debatable statement, but the consumer out there in the marketplace nurses a dominant attitude towards the profession of selling at large and the hapless salesman in particular. If you are a salesperson, I would check out everything that you say twice over, particularly if I am giving my daughter in marriage to you!

Sales as a profession and salesmen and saleswomen of every hue suffer from society's ire. There is this great big issue of `sales talk' and `sales spiel' that colours the mind of many a consumer. Many a sales father, grandfather and great grandfather have been responsible for the situation that clouds the mind of the consumer today.

Successive and successful generations of the use of hyperbole, at times much beyond the acceptable norm, have left lesions of distrust of the salesperson at large.

And there have been various degrees of the well-told lie at play. At the level of gross insensitivity are the cases of the outright lie that have stared back at the consumer! Like the several cases of sales made in the US, the mother of them all consumer markets. Take, for instance, the sale of 60 x 40 sites on the moon sold to mud-in-the-face customers who took the salesman selling this piece of real or virtual estate rather seriously.

And then there are cases of the lie told sensitively. The buyer of a refrigerator is told of a warranty that runs into 15 years. The company is about to close down in the next six months!

And then there is the truth that is not told! I buy a hob and chimney for a hard-earned forty thousand rupees. The salesman sells it to me with every story in the copybook of selling. Two weeks down the line, the technician lands up from the company and asks me if I would like holes drilled onto the hob knobs as these hobs are designed for low-flame Italian cooking! `Sir, for Indian cooking, you can customise it with holes drilled for a price.' The salesman never told me this!

There are therefore large chunks of truth not told. Both lie at the two opposite ends of the spectrum of the selling approach. Selling sure has got a bad name over all these years of the practitioners of the profession, picking and choosing from this menu at hand!

Is the salesperson at the lowest rung of the selling hierarchy to blame more for this state of affairs than his superior? While a cursory glance at the marketplace might tell you just this, a more detailed scrutiny will tell you that the man in the game of selling, be it the salesperson, his/her supervisor, the Sales Manager, the Regional Sales Manager or the General Manager, they have all been equal players in this game of `tell the lie or hide the truth.'

The decades that have gone by and the generations of selling folk that have trod their way through the terrain of selling have left an indelible scar. It is not that every selling organisation has been as guilty in the game of hyperbole and practice of the lie. A scan of what has happened over the years tells us that as much as 40 per cent of salesmen in the US, 52 per cent in the UK and 54 per cent in Germany seem to suffer from this image-issue at hand!

Half the flock being guilty is enough to tar the entire profession of selling with the same brush that blackens the rest of them all!

Selling today therefore suffers from a credibility issue. Let me paint the future scenario then. Is there something called `New Selling' at all? Something that can correct the credibility canker that hurts one and all?

Yes, there is! There can be!

Visualise the future then. The selling organisation (which one is not?) announces a policy that tells one and all in the company that the lie must be left at the doorstep before entering into the job at hand. Walk into the office and the showroom and make sure that it is a lie-free day! No degree of the lie will be tolerated! Every consumer query will be answered with nothing but the truth. Never mind if the truth hurts the organisation and its sales volume!

The Truth Salesperson will further still not only not tell a lie, but will desist from hyperbole as well. All selling adjectives at play will need to come to a halt. Wow!

The Truth Salesperson will do one more thing - not hide the truth. Never mind if the customer does not ask the relevant question that deserves the answer. At the end of the customer interaction, the Truth Salesperson will tell the customer answers for what he has not asked, but what he ought to have asked! Wow! Again!

The Truth Salesperson will take the prospect through the stages of creating awareness of the product at hand, and right on through the stages of interest creation, desire-stoking, the action of purchase and the subsequent stages of product satisfaction in a sheer Gandhian sort of manner. What's more, this guy will not be glib-tongued at all! This guy will not push the prospect into the sale. Instead, just as the customer is about to say yes to the buy, he will hold him back and take him through the options that other competitors offer. He will take the customer through the pros and cons of what the competition has on offer as well! Wow! Wow! Wow!

The Truth salesperson as I visualise him or her is a complete robot of truth. A person who has been programmed to represent the fact and not deviate from it. A salesperson whose goal is to enrich the customer and his knowledge of what's on tout! The end goal is not selling for the short term! The end goal is building a reputation! A reputation that will get every sale there is to make in the future to the Truth Salesperson at hand! The salesperson as friend, philosopher and guide! Someone I can trust! Someone I can respect! Someone I will go to every time I need anything to satiate my want and need and aspiration!

Is this possible then? Is this the pure fantasy of an aging regular in the game of selling?

Believe it or not, this is going to happen sooner than later! The first ones to do it will be the ones who will go laughing all the way to the bank. Not right away, but in the medium-term future that waits out there in this lesion-infested profession of selling!

Who will do it first?

(The author is a business strategy consultant and CEO, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc.)

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