Sales Tip 1823: Subtle Selling - Carolina Braeuninger

“If I just would have to sum up the first thing about subtle selling in one sentence, it’s be a business partner and on equal footing for your prospect from the very beginning until the very end.” – Carolina Braeuninger in today’s tip 1823.

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Transcript:

Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes in the form of another clip from an interview with Carolina B. on episode 183 of the Sales Success Stories podcast. Listen to this.

Carolina Braeuninger: I think that the thing that helped me be on top of the leaderboard for four years now, especially in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, is subtle selling. Because the craft of sales has a very or rather negative view in our society here. So whenever you tell people that you start a career in sales, they immediately think that you want to either sell them an insurance or a car. Massively overpriced or massively undervalued. You can choose. And the thing that or how I first learned about sales was actually in the insurance industry when I was in a brokerage and they sold me an insurance and they somehow saw that I had some sales potential and they tried to get me into their training program. And all the tactics that I learned there were not resonating with how I wanted to be sold to. And after just turning down their training program offer, I decided that if I was going back to sales, I never wanted to do it that way.

And as I just told you, all these podcasts that are still sticking around form these old white men selling, like in the 80s, you have these very blunt sales tactics where people just try to push you into something, talk you into a decision, a buying decision. And subtle selling for me is not only the complete opposite of doing this old way kind of sales, but for me, subtle selling is more being an advisor from the get go, from the very first cold call until the very last email that I send over when I just hand over my one client to customer success. Because just also based or rooted from the fact that sales is not a proficiency that people admire here in Germany, when you try to oversell or overly sell people, they’ll just block you from the get go and you will never have the chance to spark a conversation.

Even if you change your employers and you’re selling a completely different product and they’re in a completely different situation, but you will have lost this opportunity for the rest of your life. And especially in Germany, it’s better to pitch people way less than slightly too much. And I had to learn this the hard way because in networking events nobody wants to know what you’re selling until they’re actively asking for a pitch. Nobody wants that. If I just would have to sum up the first thing about subtle selling in one sentence, it’s be a business partner and on equal footing for your prospect from the very beginning until the very end.

Scott Ingram: For links to the full episode, to connect with Carolina and more, just Click over to DailySales.Tips/1823. Once you’ve clicked over there, be sure to click back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening.

Link to full episode featuring Carolina:
Episode 183: The Subtle Art of Selling with Dealfront’s Carolina Braeuninger: Insights from Germany