Sales: How I learned to Love the Idiot

Customers are stupid; its just a fact of life. If you work for tech support, each mindless moron who forgets to plug the computer into the wall is like being stabbed in the face with a branding iron. Or if you work in say, the car rental industry, trying to explain the complexities of why we require the customer to give us some meager collateral for a 30,000 dollar car can make you want to do some face stabbing of your own.

But the sad fact of life is that at one point or another, we are all the ignorant consumer. We are all idiots when it comes to things that we don't immerse ourselves in regularly, and while it's easy to call the next guy in line a moron for not reading his contract before signing, it's just as easy for me to look stupid when I don't know what size suit I wear, or what features I need to look for in a lawnmower.

So I've been trying to learn to empathize better with customers. Really honestly empathize, not just understand what they are saying, and it's actually rather eye opening. I can imagine the feeling of unknowing for someone who doesn't know a thing about what I'm selling, and meet them on a level thats comfortable to them and can help them through a possibly unwanted sales situation in the first place. That's ultimately what sales comes down to; the relationship between the seller and the consumer. When i'm able to actually put myself in their shoes (which isn't always... yet), I can see them get more relaxed, they invariably buy more, it makes me have more fun at work, and we both leave the transaction smiling.

Empathy is a wierd thing when it really works, but it's also really cool to see what happens when we put ourselves in a different perspective. Just to end on a sappy moralistic note, if everone on earth could learn to love the idiots in their lives, I'd bet good money the world would be a much happier place in general.