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Are you proud to tell people that you are in sales?

What job title do you have on your business card?

There's a sizeable list of terms such as Account Executive, Business Development Manager, Applications Engineer, Account Manager, Product Manager, Product Sales Engineer, Technical Sales Manager and perhaps you have a yet another variant.

But if you are in sales, why don't you just call yourself a sales man / woman?

It's clear that the titles in that list are a weak attempt to disguise the reality that you are the sales contact for your company. But why would you / we / the world try to camouflage this fact?

The answer is that selling has a bad reputation and we'd sooner pretend that we aren't really in sales, we're part of management. But hold on a moment, what is the function of sales, why should it be thought of as something 'nice' people don't do?

I use a friendly Martian to help with finding an answer to such questions, or if you have a 5 year-old handy they will do perfectly.

Explaining this to someone without the 'baggage' the rest of us have you might answer:

'What's a salesman? It's a person who works for a company which makes or does something specialised. The salesman knows a lot more about a particular product or service than ordinary people.

When someone needs an item which the salesman is an expert in, he or she tells the customer all the things they need to know so that they can choose something suitable. Then the salesman helps that person get the item'.

As long as you treat people by the Golden Rule, be proud to be in sales. Yours is a critically important function. Without your product (orders) your company wouldn't need workers, there wouldn't be any work for them.

Robert Seviour is a sales trainer specialising in business development for technical companies.

Source: www.isnare.com