Trouble in sales

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Has anyone else struggled in sales?

I think I do fairly well when I believe in the product. Then, I can just be honest and say, "Look this is a great product. I think it could help you. I want to tell you about it." I know how to be friendly towards people, and I have had success in sales with this honest/friendly approach.

But, when I don't believe in the product, I can't sell it. It feels dishonest. I want to say, "I don't think this is a good deal. I wouldn't recommend buying it." Instead, since it is my job and I need money, I simple stick to factual descriptions. It is hard to be friendly when I really feel that I am leaving out part of the truth. In my experience, this factual description approach doesn't sell well. Then supervisors aren't happy, and I feel stressed out by the whole situation.

I have left several jobs because of this issue. I don't like to sell something I don't believe it. It just feels wrong. Yet, some people I work with seem to think I am making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe they don't see the same problems I do?

I guess I will have to just keep moving jobs until I find something I really believe in. Anyone relate?

I don't think that sales is a good line of work for we Aspies. I know I could never do it. However, if you like selling products that you can believe in, why not try to find an on-line marketer that produces products and/or services that you can get behind?

i cant do sales also.....when i think of it i know i can sell but, really convincing people to buy something is really hard for me. dunno maybe im just really not a people-pleaser

I've had the very same issue and once quit a pretty well paying job where I was very well liked and fit in awesome because of that. I was working for one of those no-name phone companies that harass you to change your service. I was ok with it when I could sell the "clean" accounts, where people were gaining a true savings, but when I had to start coming up with nonsense just to get people to do it, then call me back annoyed when they saved 10 cents a month or actually even went up, I had to quit.

I started sales in a company where everything was according to a script, which was perfect. I hardly ever had to go off script (it was HIGHLY discouraged), as it was written by someone with a masters in psychology, and people just rolled over and did whatever I said. It was like the friggin Jedi mind trick. And I made ALOT of money. Or, what for me is. But it was totally dishonest and really messed people's credit up (it was debt consolidation) and that didnt sit well with me. But since it was scripted, and they really coached you up, very specific say this, dont say that, NEVER say this type thing. Voice inflections, tone, pace were all trained and observed with constant feedback, it really taught me a genuine skill. That and I've always excelled at mimicry so it was easy.


To me there's a part of sales that's extremely fun and rewarding. As a huge sports fan who's into stats and records, the competition added an element to the job that made me actually care about doing it well. That and other than owning your own business, there's no other job that I know of where you directly earn back what you put into it. More effort=more sales. More sales=more money. So there was real life motivation I could understand, unlike hourly work where my efforts only go to benefit whoever owns the lousy company, and only benefit me by extending an undesirable but necessary task.

I've learned a lot from doing sales jobs, not just about how to approach people and talk to them, but how to have good boundaries too.

I am good at sales, probably for some of the very same reasons that I'm not great at conversing on a more personal level. I don't spend a lot of time chit-chatting. I like to get right down to the point, present all the information, and get a definite answer. My approach is very low-key, but direct. I've had people tell me they really appreciate that I'm not like other salespeople.

On the other hand, sometimes people get annoyed with me because I do try to pin them down to an answer. I really dislike it when people try to be indirect or avoidant. When people hint at things and don't say exactly what they mean, I naturally want to persist until it's all out in the open. That can be an advantage, or a disadvantage, depending on the situation. Usually it's an advantage to selling, but like I said it may annoy people.

I am somewhat insensitive to rejection, not that it doesn't bother me, but it doesn't make me want to stop trying. Sometimes it actually has the opposite effect on me, especially if I think there has been a misunderstanding. Again, it's because I want to persist until all the relevant information has been exchanged.

I feel like my job isn't to get the customer to say "yes" to everything, but to provide them with the opportunity to say yes or no, and to understand exactly what they are saying yes or no to. And whether they say yes or no, I want to understand why, just to be sure everything is clear.

Sometimes a customer realizes they have said no based on a false assumption they made, and then they are glad that I persisted and clarified things. But sometimes the opposite happens, and I reverse a yes into a no because I keep giving them more information. lol

I think it's a myth that you have to be a "people person" to work in sales. It just depends on what kind of sales it is and whether you get enough downtime in between interacting with people. I need a fair amount of downtime, especially if I have to talk with a difficult customer. I couldn't do it if I had to continuously interact with customers.

Most salespeople I've worked with did not seem to me like they have great people skills. There is usually something really odd or offbeat about salespeople. I think the main thing is you need to have a virtual lack of inhibition about approaching other people. That's one reason why people with ADHD tend to gravitate to sales. Autists who have comorbid ADHD would probably be more likely to do well in sales.

Honestly and marketing don't do well together

That's your Values man, find a sales job where your helping people say in the interview you want to be one of the top salespeople AND help people

Going back and reading over these posts, it seems that my experience with sales had a lot more to do with the organizations I was working for than with the nature of sales itself. Reading some of these things, I can see how sales could be good experience for understanding social situations, and I see how it could be a pretty comfortable environment in some cases.

Yep. My own frustrations with selling have usually been more about the company and the work environment, rather than the actual selling itself, or the customers.

In my current job, what irritates me the most is that they don't count actual sales in terms of dollars...instead they come up with silly flavor-of-the-month projects for us to do and then we are measured on how many of those projects we complete. The project may only work for a handful of accounts, and may not really increase sales, and a lot of the time it just means we are wasting money on giveaways. But we have to complete so many just to say we met our goal as a team, so our supervisors get to look good. It really pisses me off because it's so wasteful and pointless, and because they don't put faith in us to customize our own projects for each account.

Then the byproduct of that is a few people on the team get really competitive over meeting the goal, and it turns into a pissing contest over who can get it first. And since there's no commission, they don't really get anything for it, so you know it's all about ego and ass kissing.

And half the time it will be things like...some people sell a high number of lower-tier contracts, while other people sell a lower number of higher-tier contracts, and the actual dollar sales might be about the same, but the people who sell the most contracts are the only ones who get recognized. And maybe so-and-so sold a high number of total contracts, but a year later you may find out that a third of that person's customers refused shipment so they didn't actually sell that much. And meanwhile someone else who sells in a more modest number of contracts, and actually follows through on them to ensure shipment, in the long run might have actually sold more dollars overall, but they don't get recognized for doing that.

It's all about appearances, and that may be the problem with a lot of sales jobs...it motivates people in all the wrong ways and in the long run alienates a lot of customers.