What You Can Learn from Sales by Being a Customer

You don't have to be in sales to learn about sales tactics. You know what sales approaches you respond best to based on your own customer service experiences. Likewise, you undoubtedly have had awful service in the past, which you can use to educate your own business approaches. Knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to do when building business relationships, so use your experience to your advantage.

While people in sales need to have a certain set of skills, it all comes down to building positive relationships with customers. Think back to your most positive and negative customer service experiences, and think about what specific sales tactics made those experiences good or bad. At least part of it usually involves the personality of the representative. Those memories can help shape your own relationship with your customers and co-workers.

The most successful salespeople are able to mix their personality advantages with a set of principles and sales tactics that help make a customer comfortable. They establish a sense of trust. This is accomplished by not making the relationship all about money and by not following any kind of specific scripting. Think about when you felt a company representative was lying or using dishonest sales tactics with you. This is especially common when you are talking to a customer care representative on the phone and can tell that the person is simply reading off a branching script on the computer screen instead of really listening to you. You likely felt angry or bitter towards that person specifically, and therefore felt the same way towards the company. Remember that when talking to people at your own job. Having empathy towards a client or co-worker prevents you from being on the wrong side of that dynamic.

Even if you don't have a sales job, you are still selling yourself to your bosses, managers and co-workers on a daily basis to show your worth to your company. If you want keep your job or get a promotion, the exact same sales tactics apply, because you want your co-workers and bosses to trust you and see your value. You become your own brand and product, regardless of what your specific job title is.

You don't even have to rely on your own specific experiences. Walk through a store, and pay attention to the interactions among customers and workers around you. Do the same when walking through an office. You'll pick up a lot of good habits, and hopefully eliminate some bad ones, just through your own observations from a customer perspective.

A salesperson can learn some important lessons from experiences as a customer. Too many people don't consider this, because they don't see their jobs as sales positions. Never fall into that trap. Every company sells a product or a service, and your job exists to facilitate that somehow. Therefore, you need a solid set of sales tactics that start with listening to others around you.

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