The Spirit of Kaizen: Creating Lasting Excellence One Small Step at a Time by Robert Maurer

Author:Robert Maurer [Maurer, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Published: 2012-10-10T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

INCREASE SALES

Even for the best salespeople, the

act of selling can be intimidating

or demoralizing. Conventional

wisdom tries to inspire or invigorate

salespeople out of their fear, but

kaizen dismantles fear by taking an

easy, calm path around it.

Selling is scary. This is true, no more matter how you define “sales.” For our purposes, I’ll define sales broadly. It’s an act of persuasion that encourages other people to exchange their money for your goods and services or to lend their support to your idea. Sales activities include:

• Selling sweaters at a Gap store.

• Pitching a proposal to some prospective clients.

• “Selling” your company to shareholders during a speech.

• Making cold calls to sell a product or fund-raise for an organization.

All of these activities are tailor-made to produce fear. Salespeople offer themselves and their products to the world, and more often than not the world responds with rejection or even rudeness. For a fortunate few, preparing for a sales call (or pitching a proposal, or approaching a customer who is standing in front of a sweater display) is like going up the first steep hill of a roller coaster. It’s a moment of anticipation before the delirious thrill of plunging into the fast-on-your-feet activity of sales work.

For the rest of us, there’s kaizen.

The majority of salespeople don’t enjoy the fear, a fact made plain by the high turnover rate in sales departments. Kaizen is an ideal tool for training and retaining sales personnel, because it’s perfect for frightening situations. Most of us are programmed to mentally shut down in a scary situation. This doesn’t make us poor salespeople. We are simply responding to physiology. Recall how the brain responds to fear: when we are faced with a challenge that we feel is serious, the amygdala senses a threat to our survival. Like a bouncer at a trendy nightclub, the amygdala muscles past the rest of the brain and takes charge. It sends our classy, well-dressed intentions out the door. It orders our mental processes to slow down. Sometimes the amygdala sends messages telling us to face the danger directly, but most of the time it shouts, “Everybody! Run to the basement for safety until the danger is past!”

Yes, you can choose to hire only those salespeople whose brains naturally relish the excitement of a sale. But these people tend to burn out quickly. Training a sales staff can be expensive, and dropouts are costly and inefficient. Why not teach all of your salespeople a strategy for managing their fear? This is the kaizen method of moving past fear, one small step at a time. Imagine that fear is a lion standing between an employee and the sale. Kaizen doesn’t rush at the lion. Kaizen sings the lion to sleep and then pads softly, quietly past the lion.

Instead of asking employees to make a big change to the way they act, encourage them to make small changes in the way they think. These kaizen steps include:

• Changing the way they talk to themselves.

• Changing the way they imagine the sale.

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