Daily Closer

Sell cars? Nope. People make decisions based upon outer and inward circumstantial information to own vehicles. That Kia Optima you just sold this morning isn't so drastically superior from the Hyundai Sonata sitting across the street, or really any other similar classed vehicle for that matter. We're living in a world of over-saturated information - gone are the days where the salesperson is needed to point out and explicitly explain the features included in the LX versus the SX model. It's all available online and chances are your customers came armed to the teeth with that kind of frivolous knowledge, and besides, people don't buy power seats. They buy cars... or do they?

Now, obviously the objective answer here is yes. The real answer here is no, however, because people buy relationships and experiences. You're selling yourself, and you're doing it even when you think you're just chatting up a fellow co-worker at the water cooler. It's a simple notion and nothing ground-breaking, but it's easy to forget once you step outside of a direct sales or business profession and into a seemingly unrelated line of work. 

The reality is as adults we aren't too far away from where we were as youngsters. Kids understand the vital importance of social skills because hell, their entire experience in school revolves around their social status, living and breathing in "we" terminologies. Plus, mixing in all the new life experiences with flaring hormones and emotions makes things a little intense.

After graduating high school, maturing and developing focus and independence, we begin to lose sight just a little of how interdependent we are as a race. We're a clan-oriented species built on the hierarchy societal standards established, fighting for dominance to ensure individual survival while collectively guaranteeing autonomous growth. We all want to succeed, individually and collectively, and we've set up a pretty kosher ecosystem to do that in. At this point along the timeline of human existence we've got a whole slew of technologies swarming around us to perpetuate our continual growth and even more distractions to inhibit our attention spans. So, we get tunnel vision in the grand scheme of things. Bob's busy focusing on tasks A, B and C and they have entirely nothing to do with people and absolutely everything to do with assembling cup holders. Before he realizes it he's been with the company over 20 years and hasn't really progressed anywhere, albeit the three dollar per hour wage increase.

It's not because he was an utter failure at putting together the finest cup holders. It's because he forgot to assemble relationships, network within his company, build rapport and constantly close his higher-ups on himself. He forgot that in life no matter what industry or business category you fall into, you're ultimately in the people business.