Most of the times, potential customers are busy with their daily lives, working for their hard-earned livelihood and then a salesman appears; an insurance girl or a travel agent calls or someone selling a property knocks on your door – it appears salespeople are after your money.

It’s not because the customers don’t want to buy; it is because they don’t want to be sold to — again it’s because all they see is someone making money from them. It doesn’t feel good to them. It hurts their pride.

Why do people don’t like when they are being sold to? You’ll find that.

Customers do not like being sold to because it hurts their ego. They do not like being sold to because it feels like they have been manipulated. When you try to sell to customers, they feel it is not their choice. They are not fulfilling their dreams; they are fulfilling someone else’s dreams.

Sensitivity of the buyer is more at stake because he is parting company with his hard-earned money. Buying in a way suggests that the customer has parted with his money willfully whereas selling suggests that customer may have been forced to part with his money because the salesperson outsmarted him! No buyer wants to be outsmarted.

Buying somehow has a positive connotation. Selling on the other hand, a contrary.

Buying gives a feeling that the customer has done a favour to the salesman whereas selling suggests that the salesman may have wrongfully drawn the favour. Buying suggests the customer has patronised the salesman. Selling suggests customer may have had his arms twisted in the process. Buying suggests the customer is more dominant of the two; selling suggests the seller may have had an upper hand.

Hence, the customer doesn’t want to be sold to. He wants to buy. In order for him to buy, we need to create value rather, than sell.

Companies have realized that you don’t need to sell to the customer, you just have to build a phenomenal brand — a product that everyone will want to have through enormous pull created by marketing, branding, merchandising etc., without having to see the salesperson ever.

In a business such as ours selling power plants, what we need to do is create a pull through relationship building based on honesty, humility and hard work, quality and speed of response, end to end service from producing and presenting a proposal to repeat sales by the customers etc. Soon we will not be selling; the customers would be buying from us.