Everyone’s Selling. No One Is Buying. Now What?

I’ve been in the sales and marketing game all my working career. I should be sympathetic. But honestly? Being sold to brings out my inner grizzly bear.

The fake-smiley voice on the phone, artificially perky and practised to death, asking how I am today, yuck! It leaves me grinding my teeth and wanting to snarl,

“What do you care? ”.

We both know they don’t. We have never met. I am just the latest faceless number on their call sheet.

Then there are the cold social media messages that gush over how impressed they are with all I have achieved in my career. These always stir an urge to roar a demand that they tell me even one fact that they know about my career.

I guarantee they won’t be able to. I also know the next part of the pitch will be telling me I deserve more recognition/followers/success and only they can help.

Yawn.

I bite my lip. Again. Most days, that’s enough. But press the wrong buttons on a bad day, and this grizzly doesn’t just growl, she roars.

These beyond-poor attempts at sales all play into our long-established hatred of being sold to.

When sales isn’t selling

When I first got into manufacturing, I was, to say the least, ignorant about the processes involved.

This meant I was heavily reliant on my senior people. Sales and marketing were my bag. Production was theirs. And if either of us were honest, neither side had the remotest interest in changing that.

I trusted them and their choice of suppliers, provided the gross margin percentages stayed the same or improved.

So, for a long while, I paid little heed to the quiet, tall man, with horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed jacket that smelled faintly of pipe smoke and old paperbacks, who would briefly put his head around the door and ask quietly if it was “ok to go and see the boys”.

I was more than happy to put my head back into my own work and leave this scintillating conversation on special offers and suggestions that would make the team’s life easier entirely in their hands. One less stress for me.

I had customers to talk to. More important to listen to. And those customers always wanted the new, to be the first to have next year’s new styles.

Scratching my head one day and out of ideas as to how to achieve this, it struck me that it might be worth picking the stranger’s brains. Long shot but worth a try, I thought.

I was wrong. Big time wrong.

It was the best decision I could have possibly made.

Ray and I started having the occasional coffee and discussing products that would deliver what our customers were looking for.

Now he was talking my language.

It was more than that. From the very first moment, he made me feel safe, listened to and managed to inspire a more scientific interest in me than I had ever thought I had. I would listen with fascination while my coffee cooled.

Our products immediately expanded and improved. Using him as an expert sounding board for what the customers wanted or to upstage our competitors became an essential part of our company’s strategy.

In addition, he was always a welcome guest in my office, a pleasure to chat with, and a brilliant listener with a sympathetic ear, bringing an air of calm to the chaos of a fast-growing start-up. His knowledge was vast, and his help invaluable.

I never once felt sold to.

Nevertheless, over the years, I must have given him around a million dollars' worth of business.

A well-earned, appalling reputation

Ray’s style was a million miles from anything we associate with selling.

We have hated being sold to since the first encyclopedia salesman stuck his foot in our doors and told us our lives would be ruined if we didn’t commit to buying one book a month for the next thirty-six.

Naivety proved no defence against aggressive selling and left many a family to end up with the latest volume in place of food on the table.

Perhaps it went back earlier to the 19th-century snake oil charmers, selling treatments for a variety of ailments which turned out to bear no relation to a snake nor be remotely useful in treating any ailment.

Desperate for medical relief, people handed over their coins.

Or perhaps we have George Parker to thank, who from the 1880s developed a habit of choosing newly arrived immigrants, desperate to capitalize on America’s success. He would then “sell” them famous landmarks from The Statue of Liberty, Madison Square Gardens and the Brooklyn Bridge, assuring the unsuspecting that they would make their fortune from toll charges.

It is hard to believe how such absurd scams could succeed, yet they did. And they cost people dear.

These salespeople

• Exploited human weaknesses, be it a desire to belong or a fear of illness
• They promised better times through money or knowledge
• They regularly used scarcity and exclusivity as pressure points

Massively successful con men; yet these are the premises that advertising was based on.

Chronic over-sold-to-exhaustion

Companies and sales departments moved on, and they quickly discovered the powers of persuasion in advertising. For decades, it inspired us to naively part with our cash.

Now we have severe ad fatigue.

Like a badly developed photograph, we have been severely over-exposed.

What happens with that overexposure is that we get

• Bored
• Disinterested
• And oh, so tired of it all

And that is a problem for marketers. Click rates drop. So do conversions. However strong the brand, marketing falters.

Where once we fell for that glorious holiday-setting AI image, now we have seen enough AI faked-up spam to last us a lifetime or more.

In our over-busy, stressed and uncertain worlds, pleasure has become an option in comparison to work, and we are too tired to enjoy what is supposed to be fun. We are increasingly sacrificing self-care, and exhaustion is taking over, making us harder to inspire and therefore to sell too.

We live life through an exhausted blur, and the over-selling is making it so much worse.

What once worked is not working now.

We scroll past the same recycled images, the all-too-perfect promises, the glittering AI-generated lies, and see them for what they are: pixelated pressure, modern-day snake oil in high-res.

And we hate it all.

A 9-step process to success

People buy from their hearts and emotions and those are earned through trust.

And they are not getting that in the new synthetic world.

But where does that leave businesses? To survive, we have to sell.

The only way to do that is to win back that trusting partnership of seller and customer within an AI world.

Here is a simple 9-step process to win it back:

1. Be transparent and authentic in everything you do. Be clear where AI is used in your processes so the customer always knows where they are and never feels fooled.

2. Use AI for repetitive tasks but keep the human sales side to have one-to-one conversations, to provide humanity and personal one-to-one empathy.

3. Be open to challenge. When customers ask tough questions, embrace them. When customers criticise, learn from them.

4. Train your team on EQ (emotional intelligence) and how to sell consultatively. Remember Ray? His success lay in being the best consultant money could buy. This in turn made him reliable and trustworthy.

5. See yourself as a partner, investing in your customers’ success and happiness.

6. Never push products; instead, meet needs.

7. Drip feed how you are using AI to improve meeting those needs, so customers see that it is both useful and limited and become less suspicious of it.

8. Using your regular feedback processes, check for brand trust levels, specifically on AI within your sales process.

9. Regularly check with your customers how their needs are being met, and what their new needs are and be sure to adjust your approach, both AI and human accordingly.

Channel your inner Ray.

Be your customer’s safe place, their source of knowledge, the partner in their success and happiness.

In the new age of AI, reintroducing the human is the only strategy left.