Do you ever feel self-conscious during a call with a prospect? When that fear creeps in all your prior intentions go right out the window. If you are focused on yourself, you are focused on the wrong person. You are there to help them solve their burdens. When you are fearful, it keeps them from getting the solution they really need.
Apologies to the person who created the “flower and the bee” concept but I think that epitomizes perfectly the problem with most sales processes today.
And do we ever have a problem.
The ‘flower and the bee’ phenomena goes like this: in nature the flower must pollinate itself. It sits there waiting for the bee (one of the many ways pollination happens) to pollinate it. The flower does not labor, nor does it stress about bees showing up. Bees, on the other hand, are scurrying about trying to find food, and pollinating the flower.
In business, sales people are typically the bees and the customer is the flower. Sales people scurry around the country looking for food.
Why does it have to be that way? Why shouldn’t the sales professional be sitting – allowing the prospect to show up for them? Why?
It’s because we don’t plan it out that way. (We actually might, secretly, like the scurrying about looking for plants -err prospects.)
We have bought into the flower/bee process so heavily in sales that we refuse to even admit that it’s all wrong. (We also do this when job searching…wrong again.) Read more
Are you Going All The Way With Your Sales Message?
Or, are you dancing at the margins? It’s time to get in the game with delivering your unique message!
Sometimes our success has less to do with our actions – and more to do with the model that we use to see our opportunities.
It is said that great leaders are effective when they can remove all impediments to success. In your personal affairs, there are three conflicts that might be roadblocks to your ultimate success.
A client of mine, after a two day event, asked me to summarize all 16 hours into one page. I’ll do better than that. Here it is in two words.
My eyes glaze over when I read psychology texts about motivation. There is rational v. irrational. Intrinsic v. extrinsic. Natural v. organic. Throw in some “incentive theory” and you have a bowl of sh** soup. All very confusing (to my simple mind).
Since most of us are in the business world where we are on a daily mission to share ideas, solutions and plans, it makes sense to go back to the simplest of elements that your audience is really motivated by: Pain & Pleasure.
As a sales trainer and leadership coach, my role in life is to bring clarity to people so they can excel at their careers. I have found this simple pair of words to be monumentally important. Read more
Statistics suggest that 70% of us are visual in how we take in information. I prefer to think of it that we are all 70% visual. Social scientists would tell me that interpreting that initial number in the second way is wrong but, oh well.
The bottom line is that if we want to understand something at a deeper level, I believe we need to learn how to draw it out, graphically.
I was in a conversation recently coaching a sales manager whose company had just been purchased by an outside firm. And the new sales model was very different than the old one. I asked him if he had ever explained the differences to his team. He said he had, and that it wasn’t taking root.
I then ask him if he’d ever drawn the old and new process out – side by side.
“Why would I do that when I’ve told them over and over and over?” Read more
We start sales training classes with a very simple question: “What is the intent of a salesperson?” Almost everyone misses it. They say:
Your intent is no longer to go out and get deals. Your intent should be to help the prospect identify, reveal and fix his/her problem, even if he/she decides not to use you to get it fixed. Read more