Reason Why People Don’t Like Being Sold To

It’s sad that standards of sales professionals and their ethics have generally been lowered so much across industries. I have personally seen just a decade ago, companies not allowing their sales professionals to make sales calls without undergoing a structured induction and training program. With competition increasing leaps and bounds and in a race of sales against production, I observe sales people being hired and thrown in the market without even basic sales training. There is an assumption that if the sales person is a fresher, ‘he would learn by himself in the field’ and if he is experienced, ‘he would know it all’.
There’s chaos all around when these untrained sales people go out by themselves and communicate with prospects. The intent is just to go out and ‘SELL’ so that they hit their monthly/annual targets. The basic characteristics of true sales professional thus seem to be missing:

• Competence
• Communication
• Customer-First Attitude
• Reliability and Responsibility
• Appearance
• Poise

This results in prospects rejecting them as they do not like being ‘sold to’. Here are reasons why people don’t like being sold to:

1. There’s a lot of selling all around

With competition increasing each minute, the prospects have sales people trying to connect to them at the same speed. They have sales people visiting their offices, cold calls over telephone, emails, voice mails, social media invites, and the list is endless. When all of this adds up and is continuous, it becomes annoying. The prospect becomes uncomfortable and all the more confused. This plays a major role on how the prospect feels, when you try to approach him for making the sale.

2. Sales persons can be annoying

As discussed in the opening, majority of sales persons these days can be annoying. While prospecting or making a sales presentation, the sales person tends to be talking about his/her company and its products or services. It becomes all the more annoying to a prospect when the discussion becomes sales person centric and the intent of identifying customer needs and offering a solution seems to be missing.

The situation worsens when the sales person does not qualify a prospect and keeps on persisting for the sale of the wrong product to a wrong person.

3. The sales person may appear to be pushy

For a successful sales transaction to take place, both the seller and the buyer must have their needs satisfied. The need of the sales person is to close the sale and get the order whereas the buyer wants the right product at the right price that solves his problem.

When the prospect feels that the sales person is just interested in closing the sale without any intent of solving his problems, the sales person appears to be pushy and no one likes a product being shoved down his throat.

4. Salesperson does not seem trustworthy

However good a product may be, and whatever efforts might have been put in by the salesperson to push the sale, unless the prospect has been put to ease by asking good and relevant questions to uncover his needs, the prospect won’t buy. The sales person does not seem trustworthy to a prospect till the time all of the above has been done, all objections have been attended to and the product has been supported with enough proof. The sales person must build rapport and trust to make the sale happen.

5. Sales person seems to be partial

All prospects need to be treated equally, with dignity and respect. All prospects big or small are important and deserve respect.

When a prospect feels that he is not being provided the same price and treatment as they would to other customers, he may feel offended. He feels that the sales person is taking advantage of him and he is just being sold and would not buy.

Once the sales person starts communicating more as a business person than a sales person, with an approach that is more about “all about you” than “all about me”, building a foundation of trust, separating good and bad prospects by qualifying them and considering prospect’s interest also in mind when making a sale, he surely would turn the table.

Remember, people love and enjoy buying but they hate being sold to.