When I was about 26 or 27 years old, I was tailgating before a Florida Gator football game when I met a younger brother of a friend of mine who was attending UF. After talking for a while, he asked if I was in sales. When I answered with a surprised “Yes, how did you know?”, he claimed “You’ve got the sales personality.”
I took his statement as a compliment, which he intended. Just a few weeks earlier, I was told by a more seasoned and more successful salesperson in our organization that “people buy from people they like”, so I was feeling pretty good about myself. I had also recently been told by my boss to stop worrying so much about learning our technology. In his words, “That’s why we have application engineers. You just need to build the relationships.”
All these statements were true in the late 1990s, which is when they were stated. But are they true now? Of course, the more one likes a salesperson, the more likely they are to buy from them, but are the abilities to maintain a friendly personality and develop relationships still more important to our success than knowledge? How about next year and beyond, as our return to normal?
I don’t think so. In fact, on the totem pole of important sales skills, I think that a salesperson’s knowledge caught up to their personality years ago. However, as we move into our new normal – which won’t be normal, by the way – knowledge will be critical to one’s success and personality will be a bonus skill.
It comes down to math. As we move into 2021 and beyond, how many times will we have the opportunity to use our personality? As discussed in my previous three posts, we’ll be communicating through different means for now on – ways that don’t allow our personalities to shine. We’ll still have phone conversations, lunches, and in-person meetings, but not nearly as many. Understanding this – and the dynamic of the Internet becoming our customers’ primary source of information over the last 15 or so years – I believe that your knowledge will be a larger factor in your success than your personality.
