You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar by David Sandler

You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar by David Sandler

Author:David Sandler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2015-02-18T16:00:00+00:00


Amateur Salespeople Are for the Birds

Amateur salespeople make professional salespeople look bad. They tend to be overenthusiastic, impatient, too animated, and downright insulting.

Amateur salespeople look like vultures sitting on a telephone wire, waiting for a squirrel to get hit by a car.

The professional salesperson, on the other hand, is always in control, patiently waits for “the kill,” and is a credit to our profession.

As you critique your future sales calls, review your selling techniques, but also think about how you appeared in front of the prospect. Relax. Don’t come “off the wire” too quickly, and you’ll go to the bank more often!

What’s this got to do with your life as a professional salesperson? Easy. Use this rule of human relations to your advantage. Make yourself Not-OK on purpose, and you’ll automatically make your prospect (or customer) feel OK. By being Not-OK in front of a prospect, you strip away all the preconceived notions the prospect has inherited about your profession, the buyer-seller dance, and you as a salesperson. You’re not a threat when you act Not-OK.

Am I telling you not to be professional? Am I telling you to act stupid? No, on both accounts. By acting Not-OK, I mean that you should not flex your intellectual muscle. Don’t act superior. Don’t use buzzwords. Don’t appear to be Mr. or Ms. All-Together.

Struggle a little bit!

At first, it’ll be difficult—or awkward—struggling on purpose. But every technique created by Sandler Training requires practice—reinforcement training—to accomplish it.

Let me tell you another personal story. One of my first jobs was buying national advertising for a company. I didn’t know much about this subject, so I did my best to educate myself. One afternoon an experienced salesperson came to visit me with the plan to sell me some advertising. I immediately thought to myself, “This guy knows his stuff. I can learn from this guy.” I was, in fact, bonding with this salesperson, and I planned to buy from him until he said to me, “By the way, have you ever had spots before?”

Suddenly, I didn’t know what he meant. He couldn’t be talking about measles. And yet, up to that point, it was only a case of measles that had given me spots. Since I didn’t know what he meant, I started feeling Not-OK. And since I didn’t want to look stupid, I said to him, “Excuse me. I have another appointment. You’ll have to get back to me in a few days.” And that was the end of the sales call.

What happened? The OK/Not-OK Rule went into effect without my even knowing it existed. It’s a normal reaction. When someone makes you feel Not-OK, you will fight for OK-ness by getting rid of the one who makes you feel Not- OK. One super salesperson who used a buzzword lost his opportunity to make a sale. It was safer for me to get rid of him than to admit that I didn’t know if I had ever had “spots” before.

How much wiser it would have



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