The Purpose of Sales

In these days of incredibly varied forms of communication I am sometimes at a loss for how to manage being an effective sales person. Phoning, texting, emailing, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc, etc etc, it becomes overwhelming. It's not really time management or even project management, it's how to shout out in all of these places so that someone, who is a potential customer can hear. And buy.

In the world of electronic signaling, there's something called "signal to noise" ratio, and today, the ratio is pretty small. In essence with all of these channels coming in, most people are likely to dismiss or simply ignore all of the feeds. We hit Next on our voice mail before three syllables come through, we auto filter immense amounts of email (most we'll never even open), and we scroll and scroll and scroll through posts by friends, family, strangers, business associates, and so on. In a lot of cases we could flip through most anything.

I admit there's a lot of trash. There's a huge amount of trash. Communiques that needlessly flow in all directions clog and flood our sensibilities and about the only thing left is to ignore. It's a room full of noise that we have to excuse ourselves from, just to think. For that reason, people who sell products and services are left to increasingly shout louder. Send more emails, post more pieces, Tweet until your fingers bleed. Somehow if we just repeat the signal enough, it's bound to get through.

Stop!

There's only one purpose for sales. One. And that's to create action. If what you're doing is not creating action, then you are not doing your job. That's right, if your phone call, email, post, tweet, text, airplane pulled sign, whatever, does not cause someone to DO something, then you wasted your time. Worse, you wasted your company's time, your clients time, and all of the money associated with making that communication happen.