---
title: "Salesperson: Are You Selling Yourself or Selling Goods?"
description: "Everyone knows that without process there is no result. The results of doing business are simple: performance and payment collection, further speaking, profit contribution. What about the process? That is the common business execution work, such as market coverage, display, customer relations, and promotion activities. However, these process tasks are done every day, spending a lot of manpower and resources, seemingly all the necessary work is done. But the actual results are still mediocre. Bosses complain that employees are dawdling, and employees complain that the business work is too difficult. There is always a reason for everything. Here, we switch to a most fundamental perspective..."
author: "潘文富"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2015-10-26"
language: "en"
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# Salesperson: Are You Selling Yourself or Selling Goods?

> Everyone knows that without process there is no result. The results of doing business are simple: performance and payment collection, further speaking, profit contribution. What about the process? That is the common business execution work, such as market coverage, display, customer relations, and promotion activities. However, these process tasks are done every day, spending a lot of manpower and resources, seemingly all the necessary work is done. But the actual results are still mediocre. Bosses complain that employees are dawdling, and employees complain that the business work is too difficult. There is always a reason for everything. Here, we switch to a most fundamental perspective...

Everyone knows that without process there is no result. The results of doing business are simple: performance and payment collection, further speaking, profit contribution. What about the process? That is the common business execution work, such as market coverage, display, customer relations, and promotion activities. However, these process tasks are done every day, spending a lot of manpower and resources, seemingly all the necessary work is done. But the actual results are still mediocre. Bosses complain that employees are dawdling, and employees complain that the business work is too difficult.
There is always a reason for everything. Here, we switch to a most fundamental perspective to look at this issue: business personnel work around selling goods every day, executing various business actions. However, before selling goods, there is a prerequisite condition: selling yourself.
The so-called selling yourself means that the salesperson sells himself to the customer. In plain terms, it means the customer can accept, recognize, like, and develop a certain degree of trust. Ideally, it should create a certain differentiation compared with salespeople from other companies.
The reason why selling yourself should be a prerequisite is mainly due to two aspects:
1. Changes in market background
In most industries, oversupply is an indisputable fact. The so-called market economy means there are many products, and homogenization is serious. Everyone's products are similar, and the total market demand is limited. So everyone uses similar means to fight each other. Chinese people's innovative thinking is actually limited, but their imitation ability is extremely strong. No matter how novel the market promotion activities are, they are immediately learned by the other side, and they will even increase their efforts.
Therefore, when you do not have enough differentiated and highly marketable products, or have not reached the point where you can spend market expenses without blinking, business personnel can only act like grandsons in front of customers; being a grandfather is still a dream.
2. The core of sales behavior and actions
Doing business, its behavioral essence is people dealing with people. For interpersonal relationships to continue and cooperate with quality, the premise is mutual recognition and the feeling of interaction. People first recognize each other, then talk about business matters. That is what we call selling yourself. If you cannot even sell yourself, then forget about selling goods.
In summary, under the current market background, the total supply of various products is large, and the products themselves are seriously homogenized, giving customers more and more choices, allowing them to pick and choose arbitrarily. The effects of conventional business tasks (display, promotion activities, customer relations, etc.) are mutually offset. Therefore, no matter how well the business personnel do these tasks, the actual benefits are limited.
So, two points must be clear:
1. Sell yourself first, then sell goods. If you cannot sell yourself, of course you cannot sell goods.
2. Compared with competitors, comparing quality, brand size, price, promotion activities, and investment has little practical significance. It may even turn into a seesaw war of attrition, killing one thousand enemies and losing eight hundred of your own. Instead, turn to competing on people, competing on the recognition of your own business personnel in front of customers.
Bosses, stop complaining that business is hard to do, and stop accusing employees of not working hard. Instead, go back to the most basic point to look at the problem: can our business personnel sell themselves to customers? Or, to put it more simply, as a boss, when you look at your own business personnel, do they look pleasing to you? Do you like them? Do you trust them? If even the boss does not like them, will customers like them?
So how can this person be sold?
Selling things requires attention to appearance, and so does selling yourself. The following points are the basic conditions for selling yourself:
1. Appearance and hairstyle
2. Attire and personal items
3. Behavior and manners
4. Speech, including communication skills, the ability to read people, and reaction ability
5. Degree of understanding of customers
6. Professional level related to work
7. Temperament and character revealed externally
8. Specific work style
To achieve the above points, you must not rely solely on employees' own consciousness or awareness to improve. If employees had this awareness, they would have done it themselves long ago. Instead, it must be led by the boss. The related work is as follows:
1. Clarify the value and necessity of "selling yourself"
2. Clarify the current level of "selling yourself" among competitors
3. Set phased goals for "selling yourself"
4. Set related special expense budgets
5. Set the order of related technical training
6. Implement and consolidate and strengthen
7. Supervise during actual use
8. For employees who really cannot achieve "selling yourself", corresponding elimination processing
Among these, some work must be done in advance, such as appearance. Changing it later would be too costly; it can only be selected during recruitment. Employees with outstanding appearance or good self-quality will have higher introduction costs, but the effect of "selling yourself" will be better. Of course, not only the introduction cost is high, but also the various training costs later are not small. To have high output, you must have high input. However, most competitors are unwilling to spend this money, so they cannot guarantee the effect of selling yourself.
Salespeople must first solve the problem of selling yourself and gain customer recognition. This will also bring a new problem: employee self-inflation. Therefore, this "selling yourself" cannot be completely based on the individual level of the employee, but rather "selling yourself" under the support of the company system. The reason employees can "sell themselves" is because the company system plays a continuous role behind the scenes, such as training systems, related technical solutions, supporting equipment, information support, internal supporting services, etc. Once employees leave, they naturally lose system support and can no longer exert the effect of "selling yourself".
Finally, three points:
1. On the surface, competition seems fierce, but in fact it is homogeneous competition. Everyone is entangled in conventional models such as price, brand, and investment without jumping out. Of course, these competitive investments are also a bottomless pit that can never be filled. In essence, it is just a long-term war of attrition. Therefore, competition should be competition of people, competition of the comprehensive quality and ability of employees of each company, that is, competition of the boss's management ability over employees.
2. To solve problems, you cannot directly go to the surface of the problem, but follow a certain structure and order. If the problem of selling yourself is not solved, many subsequent problems cannot be solved, unless you spend money to smash them.
3. Employee problems, in the final analysis, are the boss's problems. The "selling yourself" mentioned in this article mainly needs to be solved by the boss's leadership. If the boss does not have this awareness, or is unwilling to invest, or lacks corresponding management ability, and even insists on finding reasons on the employees, then it is inevitable that the business is hard to do.
Pan Wenfu: Born as a private business owner, operated a family distributor company for more than ten years, and successively held positions such as sales manager, marketing manager, and trainer in several well-known manufacturing enterprises. He has dual perspectives and experience as a distributor owner and a manufacturer's distributor manager. His research fields mainly focus on internal management optimization of distributor companies, corporate transformation, innovative business strategies, operating cost savings, and optimization of manufacturer-distributor relations. He has the largest distributor topic database in the country and has maintained long-term material collection and solution research on more than 400 topics related to distributor companies.
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