On The Road

Now that I have completed my first week of my internship in order to learn the nuts and bolts of Stauffer, I am now on the road with our sales team. This is the role that I will be playing for the majority of my internship.

I am doing "sales ride alongs." In other words, I am riding along with experienced sales people in our company and seeing what it looks like to work as a sales person day to day within a specified territory.

This by far has been my favorite experience as an intern. The skills that you learn from different individuals is not something that can always be learned within a classroom based setting. Many scenarios are hands on experience. Also as a salesperson, you are dealing with different individuals with all types of personalities.

The majority of my sales ride alongs have been focused on relationship building. I believe relationship building to be the most important part of the sales process. Buyers/purchasers for companies are approached daily by salespeople. In order to get through to where you want to be as a salesperson, and to start discussing purchasing, pricing, etc. you must be able to build rapport with the purchaser to help create that initial buyer/seller relationship. Without that relationship, purchasers usually do not care what you have to say, or what product you have to sell.

There are many different ways to help build rapport with a purchaser. It depends on your personality and style of selling, and also on the person making the purchasing decision. I encourage you all, as potential salespeople or even just consistent readers, to try out a few techniques/styles and figure out what works best for you. The best way to go about figuring out what style approach to take is to find out what personality type category you fall under. A DiSC quiz is a great place to figure out what your category is. Using DiSC will help you to learn more about yourself and the appropriate style you should use.

What I want you to take from this post is that every salesperson is different. Although we are all different, every purchasing decision starts with a relationship. Building a relationship and knowing how to interact with different personality types is the greatest competitive advantage you can have as a salesperson.

Thank you for reading and please feel free to leave any feedback! Also I encourage you to take a DiSC test!