Sales Coaching: Ugly Sales Is Not For You

If your business is based on any service industry ugly sales is not for you. You may be wondering what the heck is ugly sales. You may have never heard it referred to as ugly sales, but you certainly felt how ugly it is when you’ve been on the receiving end of ugly sales.

Ugly sales is the self-serving sales tactics practiced by selfish salespeople who only care about themselves and view sales as an event rather than the beginning of a long-term relationship. Salespeople are naturally competitive and competition is a good thing unless the pressure to perform leads you to put your needs ahead of the best interest of the client. This short sighted perspective prevents you from ever attaining long-term sales success.

If you’ve fallen into the trap of practicing ugly sales:

• you treat your prospects and clients like they’re rivals getting in your way and keeping you from your sales goals.
• you’re overly aggressive in your zeal to close the sale.
• you try to manipulate and coerce your prospects and clients to your way of thinking.
• you’ll argue and debate every objection and stall, and you won’t hesitate to belittle a prospect or client that doesn’t see things your way.
• you refuse to leave or allow the prospect/client to leave until you get the sale.

If you think this is the way to sell, you enjoy the challenge, you view yourself as being a winner when you can get the prospect to succumb you’re headed on a path to failure. Sales should never be a loser winner event. When you think of sales as an event rather than the beginning of a long-term relationship you’re missing the opportunity to build a business.

And build a business is what you must do to succeed in service sales. To succeed in sales in a service industry you must: seek to understand the prospect’s goals, put the prospect’s wants first, build your credibility through your demonstrated integrity, and develop relationships that promote customer loyalty and referrals. Ugly sales are based on tactics that do more harm than good to both you and your prospects/clients. If you identified one or more behaviors in the ugly sales list make a commitment to yourself to change that behavior so you can earn sales through mutual respect and mutual benefit.