A few ago I spoke at my one day conference at The Institute of Directors. Feedback was generally excellent although there were a few comments on the delegate's feedback forms complaining that what I was promoting appeared to be 'Hard Selling'. That was quite a surprise to me as I had qualified precisely why my approach to sales is the way it is. See what you think...

Firstly I explain to the audience that consultative selling is of course the professional way to sell. But it has it's downsides, particularly because a number of sales people given the title 'Sales Consultant' think they have become Consultants, feel more comfortable being consultants, do a lot of unpaid consulting and don't sell very much. That's why I much prefer the term Sales Executive

I also emphasised that:

Yes - we are customer focused

Yes - we act with total honesty and integrity - possibly a great deal more than many of our potential customers who often seem to think it's fine to lie to salespeople, expect free consulting and don't return calls but do give us unlimited access to their voicemail.

Yes - we go out of our way to build relationships

BUT - we are still SELLING. That's how we earn our money and in my opinion, if asking for the business and using techniques to avoid 'I'll think it over' is hard selling then I'm all in favour of it as long as it's done subtly.

To illustrate my point I also told the story of a client of mine who asked me to help him recruit someone for a short term contract to develop a sales and marketing campaign for a new product launch. I believed I knew the perfect person for the job and arranged the meeting which I also attended. Now the thing to know about my client is that he HATES being sold to. I've known him go into a frenzy at the slightest hint of a soft sell, let alone a hard sell. So this was going to be an interesting meeting because I knew my candidate Steven would sell himself subtly big time.

To cut a long story short, in the 90 minute interview, Steven asked my client thirty-six closing questions. I counted them - my client didn't spot them and certainly didn't realise he was being closed step by step. When Steven left, my client congratulated me on a excellent choice and remarked that it was a pleasure to meet someone who didn't try to sell to him. Steven got the job.