How do you sell in the 2020s?

The very short answer is exactly like you have done the last thousands of years. Nothing has changed in the basics.

A good salesperson helps the customer to get the value they need. Selling is about listening. It's about understanding the needs and helping to find the right solution for the customer.

Selling is not about achieving your sales targets by utilising whoever comes your way as the means to your ends. If the main focus is on you then you're not selling. You're brute-forcing your agenda and objectives on others.

If you need to manipulate or trick someone to buy from you it's not selling either. There are more descriptive terms for that practice.

A good salesperson is a rare species. Studies have shown that over 70 per cent of the sales force are mediocre or laggards in performance. That is a staggering number and something to think about.

Similarly, only a quarter of companies have a sales process that they monitor. And those who do, 90 per cent of them have higher profits than those who don't. You become part of the sales elite just by doing something very basic and common sense!

These results show something very fundamental*. Selling sounds so easy but yet so few do it right. What may look like simple does not mean that it's easy.

It takes a thick skin to get 9/10 times no in your face when you talk to someone. Rejection is no fun but you can get used to it.

But there's an upside as well. It's a great feeling when you can genuinely help someone and make their life better. It gets even better if you can form a long-term relationship that lasts for years and benefits both parties.

The more aligned you are with your customers' needs the easier it is for you to fulfil their wants as well. This takes some effort to learn to understand their needs, purchasing process and general ways of working.

Selling is about feelings. How you make the person that buys from you feel. We tend to forget the specifics but we seldom forget an exceptionally good or bad service. It's just natural to go back to someone who treats you right and "gets" you. The opposite works, too.

The digital world has shifted gears and customers seldom meet the salespeople IRL anymore. In many businesses, the customer contacts the company only when they have already decided to purchase from them.

The purchase process becomes more distributed between different sources, social media influencing and channels where you discover, learn and educate yourself and evaluate between different options.

A good salesperson can reduce the purchase process time for customers. This requires trust, credibility, professionalism and authenticity. It shows if you care about the customer's needs and want to genuinely help them to find the right solution.

Selling is a fine art that is too often reduced to automated processes and transactional data exchanges that result in bad customer experience.

Every company is becoming an entertainment company in this decade. You need to consider and excel the total customer experience where every contact with the customer is either deepening or distancing the relationship with a customer (or a potential customer).

We are also converging towards human-to-human selling where previous separate categorisations such as B2B, B2C and B2G are becoming less relevant. The more people work remotely and on-site work become less common what else there is left than people that remotely connect with each other (and the omnipotent dealing with automated services)?

When most of our interactions are with e-commerce systems personal selling becomes a luxurious and exclusive experience if done right. That is the challenge and the opportunity.

• The examples and studies are taken from a recent interview with Professor Paul Viio.