The Hindu Business Line : A little bit of selling ... everywhere!

I think so. In fact, truck loads of selling in each of our lives. Each of us lives as an overtly participative human in this great world of a marketplace. Each one of us, in our own way, is selling our way through life.

The priest at the temple is selling the service he knows best to serve and the man behind the counter at your corner McDonald's is selling the humble burger with fries. Even as the priest lingers longer with the aarti as your dakshina is a note of bigger denomination, the guy at McDonald's wants to check if you will have extra cheese, extra mayonnaise and extra everything that costs a lot extra on the purse!

There is a little bit of selling that each one of us does all the time. And that precisely is the reason why selling is important. Does not matter who you are! Selling is a part of you and me, living the you and I lives we lead!

The teacher sells his thoughts to an eager-beaver audience in his class and the sexy siren on the silver screen is selling sensuality that will leave you senseless. Everyone sells. And everyone has something to sell.

The young man appearing for an interview in front of you is selling himself to you. He has packaged himself well enough by means of a snazzy resume and is sitting right in front of you today dressed in a blazer and tie. He rolls his Rs and Ps to an alien diction and every second he speaks to you, he is in sell mode!

I met an ardent fan of this column recently in Gulbarga. The SP of Gulbarga, Mr Ramachandra Rao. With the firm police handshake and police demeanour (unmasked even in his civil blazer and trouser), he is doing a job that involves a lot of selling. He has 5,000 police folk to control. This control is a selling job. A job that involves a lot of sales management techniques.

Selling is therefore a part of our lexicon of life. It is a natural tendency. Man is a competitive animal. And being one, selling is but one of the devices with which he aims to continue the purpose of life itself. Selling makes inroads into the most sacred of our institutions even. The `bride-viewing' ceremony, so common under so many different names in the different sub-cultures that dot our country, is one such sacred event! There is selling all over us and all within us as well. There is selling in the human psyche itself.

This selling skill and yen is both overt and covert in our demeanour as normal non-commercial beings. And guess what? Selling never stops. Not even after the sale is over!

Take the case of the hotel I checked into recently in Mumbai. It has the best international dog tag one can aspire for as a hotel. The sales executives of the hotel swayed my choice for this one time by a pitch that was a complete hardsell. They moved my franchise for these two nights in Mumbai to their property. The sale was made! I landed at the hotel and checked in. The sale was done!

Wrong! The sale kept happening. It happened when I called the telephone operator who kept me on hold for all of two minutes with Beethoven for company. It happened when the television screen reminded me with an automated message that asked me to reconfirm my date and exact time of departure as the hotel was running full. It kept happening as the guest relations executives (two of them at different times) kept calling up to check how I would like to settle my bill. In cash or by credit card?

A sale never really ends with the physical closure. The experience of the product or service is therefore just as important if not more to the selling process.

Take my case with the hotel. This is not a hotel that knows hospitality selling at all! Guests like me are impatient. We don't like to be kept on hold. The moment this happens on the phone, the mind does a quick mapping of all the hotels I have stayed in and maps similar or dissimilar experiences. The mind is then made up. This hotel is not with it.

A hotel is a place you want to feel welcome at. It's fine if your check-out time is ascertained once as you check in. There is a column on the check-in slip for this. Those frequent reminders on the screen and telephone tell me your hotel is doing well and is booming with good business but it certainly does not make me feel welcome.

Dear hotelwallah, you must coax your guest to stay longer if possible when your hotel is at its fullest. That is true service. The guest is not a pain to be serviced. He is the purpose of your business altogether.

Selling happens all the time in our lives. With language overt and language covert. While the overt selling at the 5-star property that came into my life last week stopped at the sales pitch of the sales executives who met me in Bangalore, the covert language kept dripping at every corner of the snazzy property!

Selling is really in all our lives. Each one of us is a good salesperson by the reality and purpose of our physiology itself. We are competitive animals. And competitive animals know how to survive. And selling is a survival skill. If you have to save your life with it, you will!

A peek into this basic tenet we explore in this piece will help us put together a more natural framework of selling altogether. Do you need to teach selling at all? No, maybe not. You just need to calibrate the skills of your group to suit your want, need, desire and aspiration as an organisation.

Are there genetically good salespersons and bad? Yes, surely so. Just as in ancient Sparta, there was the Spartan who was perfect and the guy who didn't get to survive as Spartan if he wasn't, there are good salespersons and bad. At the end of it all, it is the survival of the fittest!

Pick the better ones then for your enterprise. It's a good start!

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

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