The good old way of selling

“The world is changing fast, and so as customer needs. The old methods are obsolete. Therefore, we can no more sell as we used to do. That is why we developed a new way of selling…companies that used our method increased their sales by x%…”

Does that look familiar?

Yes, most of the companies offering sales training and almost all LinkedIn solopreneurs offering sales programs use a similar syntax, if not precisely the same.
It looks like an endless cycle, and I easily get lost in the middle of different “new” techniques and methods. In such situations, I like to take a step back and go back to the foundations of the topic.

To do so, I would like to take you back to the 1400s. Imagine that you are selling wool in Florence. As a tradesman (at the time, trade was almost exclusively men’s activity) and salesperson, your success highly depends on the quality of your products and your reputation. In such market societies, if you get a reputation of unfairness, people will not deal with you anymore. And you would probably have to move to another town. And if you have nowhere to go, you become very careful about how you sell.

It means that you don’t necessarily try new methods and techniques. You don’t try to manipulate your customers, either. To survive, you simply stick to the foundations of selling: act fair and trustfully and care about your customers.

I would argue that while developing all those new methods and approaches, most of us lost track of those foundations of selling.

That is why I would prefer someone to offer “The old way of selling” as a training module.