If you want to outdo other job candidates and successfully win a job offer, look to exceptional salespeople for inspiration. You can use the strategies they apply in successfully making a sale to your own job search, particularly in snagging that elusive job offer.
Before proceeding to the sales strategies themselves, it's best to first recognize the many misconceptions about professional selling. Doing so allows you to view the sales profession in a much better light, and to see how you can relate its success principles to winning a coveted job offer.
One myth is that the sale is a contest of wills - one where the salesperson keeps talking and talking so that he wears down a resistant buyer until, ultimately, they both collapse in an exhausted heap over a completed deal. Nothing could be further from the truth. Any professional sale of goods or services should be a meeting of the minds, a meeting where the salesperson learns the needs of the buyer and where the buyer leans how the product or service the seller is offering can help meet his needs. If the salesperson is not actively listening for the potential buyer's needs, the sales will not happen. If the salesperson is preaching ("My product is great") rather than teaching ("Here's why my product is great"), the sale will not happen. These two points reinforce why the winning job interview must be an exchange of ideas, not a one-way infomercial.
Another sales myth is that there is only one successful sales personality. The stereotypical image of the successful salesperson is that of a sharply dressed, fast-talking extrovert. While some personality types do have an easier time learning professional sales techniques, many low-key, informal introverts make excellent salespeople (Warren Buffet, investor extraordinaire, and Bill Gates, who built Microsoft into the biggest software company in the world, come to mind). Regardless of what type of personality you have, you can learn and easily use super sales techniques to your enormous advantage.
The last sales myth is that some things sell themselves. Wrong! Every product or service must be fully and engagingly described to the potential buyer in a way that demonstrates how it meets the buyer's needs. You couldn't sell chocolate-covered bars of gold bullion for 10 cents a pound unless you knew how to fit their desirable characteristics to the needs of the customer and then help your buyer overcome whatever objections, logical or illogical, he may have so that you can close the deal.
That said, here then are the techniques super salespeople use which you yourself can employ:
1. Make an effective "close."
In the terms of professional sales training, the "close" is when you strive to uncover any objections or reservations your potential customer has, and you help your potential customer communicate the decision he has made during your presentation. Notice the use of the word "help," not intimidate, dominate, or bludgeon your potential customer. An intelligent potential buyer (that is, your interviewer) will resist any effort by you to manipulate or overwhelm him even if he has already made a potential buying decision in your favor.
There are those few occasions where some buyers can be bullied or mesmerized into putting their name on the dotted line or saying yes, but getting them to follow through (that is, putting through the purchase order or taking delivery) will be next to impossible. They were probably just agreeing with you to get you out of their office.
A close is successful if the buyer immediately responds and
