Why is it that so many of us don’t like salespeople?
If you took a random survey of folks on the street, asking them to say the first word that comes to mind when they hear the term “salespeople,” you’re bound to get overwhelmingly negative responses. You’re likely to hear words like “slick,” “slimy,” “insincere,” “shark,” “trickster,” “con”. For a good percentage of the population, just the sight of an approaching salesperson, reaching out to shake hands, smile gleaming, is enough to chill the blood and pull up the drawbridge.
As if this isn’t bad enough, many salespeople share this low opinion of their profession. In my sales training workshops, I have an exercise where I ask the audience, “Who didn’t like salespeople before becoming one?”
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This training was built around tactics and techniques designed to engage customers in a kind of verbal cage fight aimed at forcing Mr. and Mrs. Consumer into a corner where they had no choice but to cry out, “Yes, yes! I give up! I’ll buy! I’ll buy!” While this approach was successful in generating sales, it also did a pretty nifty job of giving the profession a busted lip to its integrity and a black eye to its sense of trust. The stereotype of the conniving salesperson became a fixture of the modern world’s imagination. A new generation of snake oil hucksters was born, and pop culture, especially plays and movies, reinforced that the sales snakes were out there, hiding in the weeds, ready to pounce and prey on our wallets. Remember Richard Dreyfuss and Danny DeVito, the scheming aluminum siding salesmen in Tin Men? How about Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino, the desperate, lying real estate agents in Glengarry Glen Ross? Or, how about Kurt Russell in Used Cars, a human oil slick of a salesman who considers the rolling back of a used car’s odometer second only to breathing? With vivid cultural images like these, is it any wonder that we don’t like salespeople, or that salespeople often struggle with liking