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10 Sales Cliches I’m Sick Of
When did gimmicks replace good value and common sense?
I was in sales for a number of years and have been bombarded by an avalanche of sales calls for even longer. What I’ve seen over the years has made a career in sales harder and harder to stomach for anyone with ethics or even a modicum of empathy.
Ideally, sales involves finding a good product or service and a client who needs that product or service. It has deteriorated, in many cases, to finding a pigeon and then taking the money and running. I saw this when I worked at AAA.
At the time I was working for AAA, a membership carried with it a little bit of a cash payout in the event someone was involved in an automobile accident. The policy maxed out at $16,000 after four years. The trick was that $16,000 was $40 per day up for up to 400 days. So a person would have to be in the hospital as the result of an automobile or transportation accident for over a year to collect the full $16,000.
The insurance feature was sometimes touted in an effort to get members to renew. Basically, it was, “You have $16,000 in insurance. You don’t want to lose that, do you?” Technically that was correct, but I doubt if most people pitched that way had any idea of how hard it was to collect on.
