You Before Me: The Key to Mutually Satisfying Sales

I have been doing insurance sales for nine months, and I came into this career with no sales experience and (truthfully) a natural apprehension towards sales in general. Almost everyone has that apprehension, including you right? How often does the term "salesperson" make your heart flutter? Probably not much.

And who could blame you? The negative experiences tend to far outweigh the positive ones. It's a lot easier to remember the aggressive car salesman or the guy who stops you while you're walking through the mall to sell you some moisturizer than it is to remember someone who actually helped you buy something you needed.

I'm by no means an expert - that is, unless you consider nine months sufficient time to become an expert at something - but I've definitely learned one big thing:

The more I (the salesman) think about myself, the less I'm likely to close anything.

You probably resonate with this as a customer, too. Imagine going into a Best Buy and having the sales rep stare you down from the moment you walk in to the moment you leave. Or imagine them hovering over you constantly and explaining the benefits of TVs while you're trying to browse on your own. Okay, so that's obviously bad, but in reality the events that shut down a sale are a lot more subtle. Making it obvious I'm reciting a script and not really listening to you, or spending more time talking about my day than yours, or pushing just a little too hard to make the sale happen are all very real ways of shutting you down, and making it seem like I'm more interested in myself than in you.

If I'm a customer, nothing makes my sales-barrier go up quicker than a salesperson who is more interested in themselves than in me.

But just as quickly as these barriers go up, they can come all the way down when that same person treats me like a person, not a number.

When you start asking me questions about my day, and you talk to me in a down-to-earth, empathetic way, when you relate to me because you seem interested in me as a person, and not my money, now you've gotten my attention. Why? Because you're showing a genuine concern for me and my needs.

It's amazing how consistently I see this play out in my career. When I'm more focused on what I'm going to say next than on listening to what the person in front of me is saying, it shows. And it's cost me a lot of sales. But when I stop focusing and worrying about myself, and connect with the person in front of me, it results in satisfying sales, and even enduring relationships.

This is all well and good of course, but it's nothing new, and there's no reason to constrain it to the realm of business. In the next part of this blog, I'll discuss the benefit of putting "you before me" in everyday relationships.