Inside Sales Lead Management Featured Article

Generally, the strategies that inside sales teams use for closing deals revolve around finding what customers have in common on an abstract level, and finding an edge to take advantage of that similarity. Crafting a perfect opening sentence and nailing down how to bend a customer to agree to a sale is important, but what about simple human interaction?

According to Dave Brock of Business2Community.com, simply treating the customer like a human being and talking to them like one is still one of the most important tools that a sales representative has when trying to close a deal. “Selling is about people,” he writes, “interactions between people, and how we engage people most impactfully.”

With so much focus these days on sales technique, it seems that sale agents are forgetting how to actually talk to people. He points out that when sales agents step out of their roles as sales people and address 'civilians,' the interactions between people are very different. Instead of trying to figure out the “right” answer to a given social situation, human beings simply flow from question to question in a conversation with ease. According to Brock, “Understanding what drives human interaction, developing our skills to interact with humans, as humans, is sometimes lost in all the stuff we wrap around our sales techniques.”

Of course, this is not to say that sales techniques are useless. After all, the reason they are so popular is because it has been proven time and again how effective they are. Instead, inside sales teams should remember that there is more to the sale than simply repeating the same strategies like a robot – after all, an automated IVR system could easily replace human employees if this were the case. That means treating customer interactions like natural conversations whenever possible in order to connect with the customer on a personal level before moving forward and accomplishing the task at hand.