The Power of Value Selling

4People Buy from People: Building Credibility, Trust, and Rapport

Sales professionals still face a perception problem.

There's a classic icebreaker that some of our workshop facilitators use at the beginning of sales training sessions because it never fails to get laughs. It's a series of memes showing various perceptions of sellers. On one side of the spectrum, there's an image of a confident professional leading a boardroom presentation, captioned: What my mom thinks I do. At the opposite end of the scale, we encounter everyone's worst nightmare of a sleazy salesman, captioned: What the world thinks I do.

Why does this unflattering perception persist when the majority of B2B sales organizations embrace buyer‐first selling philosophies?

Yes, in the days when sellers controlled the flow of information about products and services, some were less than transparent about the true capabilities of their solutions. Buyers got burned; skepticism skyrocketed.

Then things changed. Today's buyers have a wealth of information they can tap into on demand, eliminating the primary mechanism that enabled the less‐than‐reputable among us to mislead potential buyers. And yet—that used‐car‐salesman meme still gets a reaction from everyone in the room. The slide goes up, and laughter ensues. Why do people find that funny? Why do people laugh like that to begin with?

It's a question we've wrestled with as humans for millennia, but at a high level, it's safe to say that laughter is an immediate, ...