Too Strong of an Offense Can Be Offensive

We all like to make sales or presumably we'd be in some other line of work. We all look for and welcome opportunties to enage a customer about a potential sale and see if we can effect a positive outcome.

Defensive selling is order taking - letting the customer set the terms and eventually declare that it is time to buy and offer the order. This often happens in retail. In many ways, it's not really selling but just being there to process the order and deliver it to the customer.

Being on the offense (as opposed to being offensive), or intentional selling, is having a process and effectively executing those steps to make a transaction come together.

One of the things that traditionally has given salespeople a bad reutation and a black eye is the blurring of the line between wanting to make a sale and needing to make a sale.

When we operate on the customer's agenda and seek to determine what they need and what their desires are, we can be much more successful and create much stronger relationships than when we try to service our own agendas of making a sale to get a payday.

When we press too hard to make a sale because it's clear that we want to make a sale more than we want to satify the needs of our customer, we become very offensive. No sale is likely on these terms even though the customer and the product may be a good fit for each other.

Patience, relationships, and caring for the customer will net us our sales, but the focus must be on the customer.

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