Why so pushy?

The portrayal of salesmen (not being gender-biased, here) in movies or modern literature has mostly been of being a well-dressed, sweet-tongued but greedy pushy devil. 

How did we reach here? Were the car or encyclopedia or vacuum cleaner salesmen really this pushy? Were the targets unrealistic or the incentives too lucrative? Whatever might have been the case, the image has lasted through the decades and trickled to a lot of extents to tech B2B sales too. The change in designations (growth director, solutions consultant, and my favorite Evangelist) hasn’t really helped either. 

In my limited experience of 14 years, I have come across more than 200 salespeople. Apart from a few (will talk some other times on this), most are very genuinely warm and emotionally intelligent people. Sales spearhead most of the modern-day organizations which translates to the added pressure of achieving the numbers as well the very lucrative incentives. 

Below are some of the common traits I have observed amongst most of the salespeople: 

• They do care. Be it about their organization, colleagues, and most importantly about the clients. You have to witness the heated arguments between sales and delivery/product teams to believe this. Remember they give their word to the client before getting the purchase orders.
• They are chasing targets. There is no doubt that they are chasing targets, but then who isn’t? Finance, HR, Production, Tech, etc… everyone has targets. Sales come across pushy as they are at the forefront. 
• They are arrogant. Now, this is a tricky one! Oxford defines Arrogance as “the behavior of a person when they feel that they are more important than other people, and are rude to them or do not consider them”. Some of them are genuinely arrogant however the majority are trying to be confident and intelligent. This can come across as arrogant sometimes. 
• They possess high emotional intelligence. Like in life, “constant rejection” in sales can be very frustrating and can lead to breakdowns. Moving from a meeting to meeting making almost the same pitch with energy and enthusiasm has its own toll. 
• They party hard. Well, do I need to expand further on this?

As you would have figured out that this is largely a one-sided view of salespeople. Will flip the coin and put my thoughts about the other side sometime soon.

Happy Selling! 

Stay Safe, Stay Healthy!