Sales Sincerity

Sales Sincerity

What does it mean to be sincere about selling? If you ever saw the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street”, you may remember a pivotal scene where Jordan Belfort gets a job at a penny stock sales outfit and he makes a call that changes everything. He outright lies on the call and convinces the client to buy 10k worth of penny stock in a company that was absolutely nothing he said it was. He used seasoned sales techniques to convince the buyer on all aspects, and closed a massive sale, based on all lies. “That”, is the polar opposite of sales sincerity.

Sales sincerity means you’re selling something, either a product or a service, or both in once, based on the actual value with all truths in questions and answers. If the buyer isn’t interested in the actual value as it stands on its own merits, then the value isn’t worth it. That’s why salespeople who don’t have a true value, must lie and embellish in order to close a sale. They must inflate the value beyond its truth.

I remember my very first sales home improvement lead, as well as my very first sale. Having never been a salesperson prior to going to leads, I thought I was supposed to “sell”, but once I showed up my true nature overtook any prospect of being a salesperson.

My first lead was a wealthy older woman in a Beverly Hills condo. I don’t think I had ever seen such a gaudy décor with so much high end artwork in my life. What she wanted was to convert her 12’x30’ patio yard area from grass and plants to artificial turf. But she also wanted to change the drainage because it was always damp. I carefully assessed the conditions and discovered that the drain inlets in the yard ran into the concrete parking structure below. I determined that changing the drains wasn’t possible, because the pitch of the buried drain pipes could not be altered, because that would entail changing the super-structure of the concrete parking garage. I also determined that even were I to raise the elevation of the turf above the drain inlets, that the turf level would have been higher than the surrounding established concrete elevations. I explained the adverse conditions and had to respectfully decline the job, because it simply wouldn’t work.

A true salesperson wouldn’t have looked at it that way. They would have simply measured the area and started building embellished value so they could drop a high price and try to get a contract signed. If that were to happen, the work would transpire, the system would have failed.

That’s the difference between sincerity and sales.

On my very first “sale”, it was a home in Venice and the client was going to have her 40th bday party and was concerned that a step height from the tiled patio was too high down to the grass, and wanted to add a step for safety, in case drinking party goers missed the step and fell. I assess the work purely from a cost and method standpoint: must drill into the concrete for rebar dowels, must build forms, pour concrete, let it dry, remove forms, and add matching tile to the new step. I explained all this method and the husband and wife were thrilled with the explanations and asked, “How much?” I was in my first position to quickly try to run costs through my head on the spot, and wasn’t sure, but assumed 3 trips, and some materials and labor and the cost of that being maybe 2k or so, so I said ”$3,000”. They both gasped and questioned it. So then I explained the multiple trips, the alleyway parking restrictions and otherwise adverse conditions for such a small job, and then they understood, and we sat down and I wrote a contract.

In the end, I was wrong. It cost more than I thought and I didn’t make a single penny. But I still bought a bottle of wine, went back there after the job was done and gave her the wine and thanked her for being my first sale, to which she was astonished and exclaimed “But you were so versed in everything, I never would have thought that.”

So again, the sincerity of explaining the work methods and difficulties was sincere and true, and the cost was fair.

To this day, 170 jobs and 3.5 years later, those philosophies still reign true.

 Russ Putnam

Your Enhanced Space, LLC

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