Back in the day, salespeople needed to be extroverted simply to survive. Today, not so much.
.. Customers, however, don’t find
extroverted salespeople charming. On the contrary, most customers tune out the moment a seller looks or sounds like the stereotype.
.. The near-universal dislike of stereotypical salespeople stems directly from the traditional definition of selling:
- Intruding (to get your foot in the door)
- Pitching (to persuade the customer to buy)
- Persisting (to push until you make the sale)
Effective selling is quite different. It consists of:
- Research (to understand the customer)
- Listening (to understand individual needs)
- Reacting (to adapt to the identified needs)
.. These are all classic introverted behaviors that are difficult for extroverts to do well.
.. Back in the day, salespeople needed to be extroverts, because most new sales opportunities evolved from cold calling, originally in person, but later by telephone.
.. Inbound or email marketing, however, demands an ability to research a customer, see the world from the customer’s perspective, and adapt to the customer’s situation and specific response–all skills that come easier to introverts than extroverts.