The Art and Skill of Sales Psychology: Why Buyers and Sellers Do What They Do by Brad McDonald

Author:Brad McDonald [McDonald, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sales
Publisher: Sandler Systems, Inc.
Published: 2019-03-26T20:00:00+00:00

Take Out the Head Trash

Have you ever attended a one-day sales seminar— packed with great closing tactics, nifty ideas for overcoming objections, and slick methods for delivering rock ’em, sock ’em presentations—only to find yourself a few days later doing the same things you did before the seminar? What happened? Where did all the great ideas go? Why didn’t you implement what you learned?

When I was 16, my father paid for me to take some golf lessons from a local pro. After several sessions, the pro told me it was time to get on the links and play a round on my own. I set up on the first tee and got ready to swing when four old men (well, old to me, anyway) came up behind me waiting their turn. Their staring made me a nervous wreck. After three lousy shots, I still was not far enough along the fairway for them to tee off. It seemed like the whole world was watching me flail. Not wanting to further embarrass myself, I picked up my ball and went home and haven’t tried golf since.

The pro taught me a lot of useful skills and tactics—grips, swings, stances, and the like. But he never touched on the fears, anxieties, and doubts that lay between my ears. I didn’t have the conceptual tools needed to deal with embarrassment and humiliation—real or imagined.

Short-term sales training typically addresses sales skills. Attendees learn great tactics from masterful sales trainers. But this same training never covers the conceptual problems—head trash—that plague most sales or business development professionals. All the skill training in the world won’t help much if the head trash is not eliminated first.

Here are five conceptual problems that affect, at one time or another and to one degree or another, almost everyone in sales.

1. Buy cycle. How do you treat salespeople? Do you bust their chops for a lower price, pump them for free information, and then say you need to “think it over”? People sell the way they buy and buy the way they sell. However you treat salespeople is how you will expect and allow prospects to treat you. If you can’t make a decision, don’t expect your prospects to either. If you want to stop getting think-it-overs, make this pledge now: “I will never again tell a salesperson I need to think it over. It’s ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for me—nothing else.”

2. Need for approval: Most human beings want to be liked. It’s more fun than being not liked. But a problem begins when you want to be liked more than you want to make a sale. Everyone has psychological trash they’re carrying around. A lot of it has to do with not being liked or loved by the right people—parents, spouses, and friends. So you take these unmet needs into sales calls. If you want to leave a sales call with your prospect liking you more than you want to leave with their check, you might have an approval problem. Remember—sales is no place to get your emotional needs met; sales is the place to go to the bank.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.