Stay Curious, Produce Success
By Dave Hoffman, Editor
Entrepreneurs like you and I would do well to turn it off and enjoy once in a while. Last week, I planned to relax and enjoy Peter Frampton at the Warner Theater in DC. I didn’t quite turn it off, though. In fact, half the songs Frampton played spoke to me about the levels of professional development that many salespeople go through
Four Day Creep – Humble Pie
Four Day Creep is a song Humble Pie played on their live album Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore. It’s attributed to Ida Cox, but according to Wikipedia, is quite different from her version. It’s a good starting point for several reasons. First, Humble Pie putting their own twist on the lyrics when they perform it live is a good analogy for a young salesperson going off script for the first time. Second, well, these are the lyrics:
I want you to love me
Til the hair stands on my head
I want you to love me
Make me dizzy make me feel like playing
I want you to love me
Like a hurricane
I want you to love me
And stop stalling I love her again
“I want you to love me.” It’s an understandable mistake all new salespeople encounter when they confuse being liked with selling a product. Wanting approval creates a smokescreen that sidesteps the larger goal of finding a fit for your customer needs. Approval needs to come internally, from your own company, or ideally your own self. The art of sales is creating a mutual agreement of why your service will serve a pressing customer need.
Baby I Love Your Way
Once a newcomer becomes a little more confident, they raise their own status by trying to switch roles and give approval to the customer. A little overly enthusiastic praise that keeps the customer on the phone demonstrates a bit more confidence than wanting to be liked, but still misses the point of the sale call. It’s not a mutual admiration society, it’s about coming to an agreement. Most people will respond positively to praise, and that’s not what you want. You want to make it easy for them to say no if this isn’t going t o help them. When they finally realize it’s about agreement, the move on to the next phase.
Do You Feel like We Do?
Now this song is about empathy, and finding alignment. It’s a step in the right direction. It is about finding common feelings about the solution being sold. It adds a critical piece of sales skill that competent sales people have, and that is asking questions. But experienced observers see the problem. This is a closed ended question. Worse, it’s likely to get a false yes because it still has an element of wanting to be liked baked in. “Are we kindred spirits?” is the question. When a salesperson barrels through his pitch with enthusiasm, it’s easy for the prospect to enthusiastically agree, and that is a false positive. The next level of evolution is to move into open ended, non-leading questions, which brings us to
Show Me the Way
This song is better known as “The song with the thing that goes wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah,” but it’s called I Want You to Show Me the Way (note the emphasis on “you”). This is when we step up our game to the level where we’re letting our prospects talk us through their problem, and describe an ideal solution. We are now uncovering problems and working consultatively for both of us to understand whether our service is the solution. This is the only way sales takes place, the only question is how easy do our efforts make it for the prospects to show us the way.
Black Coffee
You can be coached, but ultimately, you’re going to get better when you roll up your sleeves and make it happen. So grab a cup of black coffee, put Frampton Comes Alive on your playlist, and see which songs fill in the missing pieces to your sales process.
