Sales Terminology - It’s like putting a carrot in front of a donkey

David Somerville is a secret blogger.  He writes for the internal blog at the parent company of Simply Online Services.  When we were last chatting he was telling me about a blog post he was putting together and kindly offered to share it to the world at large, via my blog. 

Sales people. Don’t you just love them? Well being a marketing manager generally not, as I spend much of my working hours listening to exactly why I should spend my budgets with them.

The subject of ‘what makes a good sales person’ is a big one; but allows me to introduce to you the phenomenon of the ‘ism’.  These ‘ism’, a colourful collection of uniquely composed phrases, have overtime been refined by the account manager of one of our jobs boards, CareersInRecruitment

At first we listened with disbelief, and a great amount of humour. Surely he didn’t just say that?! But, despite the unusual vocabulary targets are hit consistently, business flourishes and you have to wonder, is there more to selling then straight talking?

We started to record these, mainly for our own amusement, so below is a list of our 10 favourites (in no particular order), so you can decide for yourselves whether they would work on you…

1. You know what Accounts departments are like. They don’t see facts and figures, they only see numbers
2. Proof in the pudding that it’s money in the wind
3. High quality candidates are like a game of Poker…they don’t show you their hand
4. You don’t leave your CV so your boss can trip over it
5. There isn’t a big red button on the desk that says “make vacancies come in for this job”
6. You’re sifting through the rubbish to find the gems
7. We’re the pinnacle force at the forefront of recruitment
8. It’s like putting a carrot in front of a donkey
9. Gonna give you another bite of the biscuit
10. I haven’t pulled it out of the book of wonderful telesales lines