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August 15 - August 16, 2016
the first of three reasons why more of us find ourselves in sales: the rise of small entrepreneurs.
sales—in this case, traditional sales—isn’t anyone’s job. It’s everyone’s job.
Interacting with customers around problems isn’t selling per se. But it sells.
A world of flat organizations and tumultuous business conditions—and that’s our world—punishes fixed skills and prizes elastic ones.
Designers analyze. Analysts design. Marketers create. Creators market. And when the next technologies emerge and current business models collapse, those skills will need to stretch again in different directions.
To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.
“It’s about leading with my ears instead of my mouth,” Ferlazzo says. “It means trying to elicit from people what their goals are for themselves and having the flexibility to frame what we do in that context.”
non-sales selling: the ability to influence, to persuade, and to change behavior while striking a balance between what others want and what you can provide them.
Brand names provide some assurance of quality.
“Girard’s Rule of 250”—that each of us has 250 people in our lives we know well enough to invite to a wedding or a funeral. If you reach one person, and get her to like you and buy from you, she will connect you to others in her 250-person circle. Some of those people will do the same. And so on and so on in ever-widening cascades of influence.
“People want a fair deal from someone they like.”
No haggling. Transparent commissions.
Whether you’re in traditional sales or non-sales selling, the low road is now harder to pass and the high road—honesty, directness, and transparency—has become the better, more pragmatic, long-term route.
“A-B-C,” he explains. “A—always. B—be. C—closing. Always be closing.
the new ABCs of moving others: A—Attunement B—Buoyancy C—Clarity
the ability to move people now depends on power’s inverse: understanding another person’s perspective, getting inside his head, and seeing the world through his eyes.
ultimately it’s “more beneficial to get inside their heads than to have them inside one’s own heart.”7
“negotiators who mimicked their opponents’ mannerisms were more likely to create a deal that benefited both parties.”
“The most common thread in the people who are really good at this is humility,” she told me. “They take the attitude of ‘I’m sitting in the small chair so you can sit in the big chair.’” That’s perspective-taking through reducing power, the first rule of attunement.
top salespeople have strong emotional intelligence but don’t let their emotional connection sweep them away.
introverts are “geared to inspect,” while extraverts are “geared to respond.”35 Selling of any sort—whether traditional sales or non-sales selling—requires a delicate balance of inspecting and responding. Ambiverts can find that balance. They know when to speak up and when to shut up.
teach yourself to be a bit more like that benevolent lizard and begin to master the techniques of strategic mimicry? The three key steps are Watch, Wait, and Wane:
How to stay afloat amid that ocean of rejection is the second essential quality in moving others. I call this quality “buoyancy.”
Bob’s self-talk is neither positive nor declarative. Instead, to move himself and his team, he asks a question: Can we fix it?
Like all effective sellers, Hall is a master of attunement. He listens and observes more than the stereotypical yap-yapping salesman, but he also adds his voice and makes his case with vigor when the situation demands.
emotions can be contagious. That is, the effects of positivity during a sales encounter infect the buyer, making him less adversarial, more open to possibility, and perhaps willing to reach an agreement in which both parties benefit.
inserting a mild profanity like “damn” into a speech increases the persuasiveness of the speech and listeners’ perception of the speaker’s intensity.
Hall seems to have found the proper mix. He says that he tries to begin his day with one or two sales calls that he knows will be friendly. He also seeks positive interactions throughout his day.
learned helplessness was usually a function of people’s “explanatory style”—their habit of explaining negative events to themselves. Think of explanatory style as a form of self-talk that occurs after (rather than before) an experience. People who give up easily, who become helpless even in situations where they actually can do something, explain bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal. They believe that negative conditions will endure a long time, that the causes are universal rather than specific to the circumstances, and that they’re the ones to blame.
Norman Hall has the optimistic explanatory style down. When he was rejected, as he was several times during the sales calls on which I joined him, he explained the rejections as temporary, specific, or external.
One way to begin is to visit Barbara Fredrickson’s website (http://positivityratio.com/). Take her “Positivity Self Test”—a twenty-question assessment you can complete
try listing Fredrickson’s ten positive emotions—joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love—on your phone, computer, or office wall. Select one or two. Then in the course of the day, look for ways to display those emotions. This will give you a psychic boost, lift up the people around you, and increase your chances of moving others.
allow yourself what she dubs “appropriate negativity”—moments of anger, hostility, disgust, and resentment that serve a productive purpose.
If part of the reason was that some of your work this year wasn’t up to your typical standards, get a little angry with yourself. You screwed up this time. Then use that negative emotion as the impetus to improve.
thinking through gloom-and-doom scenarios and mentally preparing for the very worst that can occur helps some people effectively manage their anxieties.
“It is in fact the discovery and creation of problems rather than any superior knowledge, technical skill, or craftsmanship that often sets the creative person apart from others in his field.”
“part of being an innovative leader is being able to frame a problem in interesting ways and . . . to see what the problem really is before you jump in to solve it.”
First, in the past, the best salespeople were adept at accessing information. Today, they must be skilled at curating it—sorting through the massive troves of data and presenting to others the most relevant and clarifying pieces. Second, in the past, the best salespeople were skilled at answering questions (in part because they had information their prospects lacked). Today, they must be good at asking questions—uncovering possibilities, surfacing latent issues, and finding unexpected problems.
“the contrast principle.”11 We often understand something better when we see it in comparison with something else than when we see it in isolation.
“Adding an inexpensive item to a product offering can lead to a decline in consumers’ willingness to pay,”
the “blemishing effect”—where “adding a minor negative detail in an otherwise positive description of a target can give that description a more positive impact.” But the blemishing effect seems to operate only under two circumstances. First, the people processing the information must be in what the researchers call a “low effort” state. That is, instead of focusing resolutely on the decision, they’re proceeding with a little less effort—perhaps because they’re busy or distracted. Second, the negative information must follow the positive information, not the reverse.
the qualities necessary for sales and non-sales selling today—the new ABCs—include a keen mind, a deft touch, and a sense of possibility.
the catcher (i.e., the executive) used a variety of physical and behavioral cues to quickly assess the pitcher’s (i.e., the writer’s) creativity. The catchers took passion, wit, and quirkiness as positive cues—and slickness, trying too hard, and offering lots of different ideas as negative ones. If the catcher categorized the pitcher as “uncreative” in the first few minutes, the meeting was essentially over even if it had not actually ended.
In the most successful pitches, the pitcher didn’t push her idea on the catcher until she extracted a yes. Instead, she invited in her counterpart as a collaborator.
The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you.
The ultimate pitch for an era of short attention spans begins with a single word—and doesn’t go any further.
several scholars have found that questions can outperform statements in persuading others.
The reasons for the difference go to the core of how questions operate. When I make a statement, you can receive it passively. When I ask a question, you’re compelled to respond, either aloud if the question is direct or silently if the question is rhetorical. That requires at least a modicum of effort on your part or, as the researchers put it, “more intensive processing of message content.”
Rhymes boost what linguists and cognitive scientists call “processing fluency,” the ease with which our minds slice, dice, and make sense of stimuli. Rhymes taste great and go down easily and we equate that smoothness with accuracy. In this way, rhyme can enhance reason.
People were quite likely to “read emails that directly affected their work.” No surprise there. But they were also likely “to open messages when they had moderate levels of uncertainty about the contents, i.e. they were ‘curious’ what the messages were about.”
