When a Good Girl Goes "Bad" to Do Well in Sales

You would think that being "nice" was a good thing!

When a "Good Girl" - a woman who follows the rules even when the rules are wrong and stop her from succeeding - takes being nice as her standard as she goes onto the Sales Field to play the Sales Game, she is bound to fail.

She might think it "rude" or "pushy" to ask for the sale. She is bound to lack the creative ways she could use to unlock the doors that the prospective customer could walk through, wallet open. She thinks that being assertive in sales might just be about manipulation, and that leaves her feeling conflicted because she knows that "manipulation" and "nice" just don't go together. So she goes into charm and niceness as deeply as she can. 

And it just doesn't get the job done.

The Fundraiser misses her sales opportunity. The Saleswoman uses niceness to excess and misses, sometimes entirely, the benefits of service through assertiveness and strength. 

It's clearly well beyond time to jailbreak through that "niceness" moniker and taste the free air of successful sales by seeing everything about it through a service and caring lens uninhibited by personal disempowerment.

So, what can the Good Girl do? What should she know that she doesn't know? How can she get the sale without jettisoning her inherent sense of service, and care for others?

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1. Niceness v. Kindness
   
   "Niceness", to the woman trained (as are we all) to "be" nice, is a disempowerment. It suggests that we stop asking for what we need or want; that we make ourselves invisible and inaudible when we think the other is impacted in any strong way by our words or presence.
   
   "Kindness" leaves room for us to breathe, room to push our boundaries and still know ourselves to be caring people. When you realize that the entire idea of simply "being nice" carries with it a world of social shoulds and shouldn'ts, you can start to disentangle yourself from your allegiance to the idea, and opt instead for being a kind person who is also strong, capable, persevering, assertive.
   
   It isn't in fact "nice" to hold back options that the potential client doesn't know of - options that could make their lives easier if only they knew them. So opt for kindness instead, and give yourself room to include other options in your sales approaches. You will see, and feel (!), a big difference in your results.
   
   
2. The Strong Mother/The Good Friend
   
   The old Sales construct is a combination of pushy and impersonal and fake.
   
   That is not what the Good Girl is attracted to.
   
   This is what she is afraid of being, and the only opposite she knows is "niceness".  Fortunately, with niceness out of the way and with kindness in its place, we now have room for connecting authentically.
   
   Like a strong mother or a good friend, you are the bridge between the person you are trying to help (a.k.a. sell to), and the information they need in order to figure out - with your passionate commitment to the worth of your offering - whether or not to buy.
   
   Would a strong mother allow you to say, "No!" to something that would truly help you, no matter how many times you said no? Hardly.
   
   Would a good friend allow you to walk away from something truly useful to you without making sure you would know and consider absolutely every single aspect of that something? Not in a million.
   
   So, shouldn't you persevere in providing all of the information necessary? All of the information that this person you care about doesn't know? Of course you should.
   
   This is what is meant by being of deep service in sales. And you can't do it while you're wholly committed to "being nice".
   
   
3. Don't Talk About Sales
   
   If you want to continue to be "nice", or if you just can't help it because you're genuinely a nice person, please be nice about connecting with your prospective customer. Laugh with them, talk about the dog barking or the children laughing in the other room.
   
   Have a conversation. The more you connect, the better you feel about what you're doing. You're serving that person by providing something simple, but increasingly rare: true, authentic connection, a moment of ease.
   
   The benefit to you as a salesperson is that you will also learn more about what you can offer, and the customer will relax and offer you more space to make this a conversation between warm acquaintances, rather than a cold business transaction.

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