This is an article I wrote for the Professional Sales Association after Dean and I did a presentation there a week or so ago. I thought I would share it here, too. Enjoy!
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Friday before last, SagePresence had the pleasure of speaking at a PSA breakfast meeting. It was a great morning, and my partner Dean Hyers and I were honored to bring our method to inspire others to decisive action through connecting with appreciation and leveraging story structure for our messages to the group.
As I was packing up to leave, PSA President Cindy Mikolajczyk said something that really resonated with me: “Thank you for your talk about connecting…about inspiring and not pushing, and about the win-win. As sales people, we don’t hear messages like that. But we all know that really is the way it should work and the way it really does work.”
As a guy who spent years in the sales trenches, I knew she was right. I knew the best sales I ever made were those were I knew I’d found the win-win. Where I was able to achieve a real chemistry with my customer and find that elusive space where we both gave a little and got what we needed at the same time.
These were also the sales that tended to get me in hot water with my bosses. Because they rarely fit the mold of what the conventional wisdom—the well-established “rules” set down in sales manuals from time immemorial—dictated.
According to this “wisdom”, the sales process was something like a chess game. My job was to stay one step ahead of a potential customer’s objections and ultimately wear them down to the point where they couldn’t see any more reasons to say no. Now, I am not here to pass judgment on anyone or any process. In fact, I will tell you that this mode accomplished the basic mission of “sell, sell, sell”. Also, it provided very clear marching orders for me to follow with each prospect.
But wait…let’s look at the last word in the preceding paragraph. “Prospect.” Merriam-Webster’s defines the word—that is, the one in the zone of “possibility”, which seems to most apply in this situation—as “something that is awaited or expected.”
Here’s the rub with the conventional wisdom. First off, “prospects” don’t buy things…people do. Second, even if I presume to remember my customers’ humanity, telling myself I am concerned about their needs or giving them a fair deal, it doesn’t change the facts. If I’m approaching the sale from this vantage point, I view my customer as being there to help me make me a sale. I am focused on me.
I didn’t like selling this way. I did it when I “had to”, but I admit that I avoided customers and lost opportunities—or fell into the zone of “order taker”—because following this conventional wisdom felt…bad.
Why did it feel bad? I need to answer that question with another question.
What’s the number one thing that undoes sales people? It’s the same thing that undoes presenters: focusing on ourselves. When our attention is on ourselves, we can’t make a connection with others. Our anxiety rises, and it continues to rise because we get caught in a feedback loop of first, self-examination, and second, self-recrimination. We try to hide our anxiety by feeling (or give the impression we are) less nervous. Problem is, shutting down our feelings shuts down our presence. It warps how we present ourselves in high-stakes moments. In some cases, this causes us to avoid the situation altogether, which in the case of the sales person means avoiding the very thing that makes them a living.
Although Cindy’s right that very few sales managers seems to talk about selling strategies in terms of achieving chemistry or finding the win-win, someone has been talking about it. It’s been nearly 25 years, believe it or not, since Spenser Johnson, in his groundbreaking bestseller, “The One-Minute Sales Person”, told the world about “a very successful sales person” who got there by helping others get what they want.
The good news is that we don’t have to have to subscribe to the conventional wisdom in order to be good sales people. In fact, Johnson’s method, which broke my world wide-open, only works if our goal is a win-win. It begs for us to take our attention off ourselves and put it where it belongs—on our customers.
At the PSA meeting, we learned from Dean that pointing our attention on our listener is the first step to building a connection with them. We actively and intentionally appreciate something about them to help us put our focus on them, as we saw in the presentation that it’s impossible to appreciate someone and focus on ourselves at the same time.
This is, I believe, the reason behind the reason that Cindy was so excited after our presentation. She saw how our talk illuminated some truth about selling—that the conventional wisdom isn’t the only way. Further, if we can make sales, keep the attention off ourselves, and achieve the win-win maybe we can dread the process less and come to actually enjoy it.
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