MARCH/APRIL 2017 | TAMPA BAY MAGAZINE 65
In his recent book, Change or Die,
author Alan Deutschman claims that
although we have the ability to change
our behavior, we rarely do. In fact,
the odds are nine-to-one that when
faced with a dire need to change,
we won’t. Most smokers who are
presented with a wealth of scientific
data on the dangers of tobacco do not
quit smoking. Our beliefs are what we
feel in our gut and those beliefs are
hard to change; we spent a lifetime
developing and defending them. This
explains why providing information
EDITOR’S NOTE: Sandler Training
provides proven, effective sales, corporate
and management training to high-achieving
companies and individuals throughout
Tampa Bay. Call Jim Marshall or Clint
Babcock at (813) 287-1500.
rarely changes how people think or act.
This also explains why your best
presentation may have absolutely no
positive effect on your prospect’s desire
to buy. And finally, this phenomenon
explains why most salespeople keep
shoveling information, features,
benefits, and fancy presentations at
prospects, even though those tactics
don’t cause people to buy.
Somewhere along the way, early in
our sales careers, we came to view
the selling world as a place where we
must convince buyers to love our stuff
by providing them with information,
facts, figures, and compelling reasons
to buy. Traditional sales training
reinforces this notion by emphasizing
the presentation as the most important
step in the sales process. Somehow we
forget that WE never bought anything
based on a presentation; we buy things
because we want them or need them,
not because a sales person tells us
they’re great.
Would you like to make more sales?
Try to make this change to your
selling behavior: STOP talking about
your features and benefits and STOP
dumping extraneous information,
brochures, and fancy PowerPoints on
prospects. Wait as long as you can
to tell the prospect anything about
your company, your product, or your
service. Spend the first fifteen minutes
talking about the prospect. Find out
his problems, concerns, fears, and
desires. Make your process about your
prospect, not about you.
Now the problem with that is what
we’ve already said, it’s not easy to
change ingrained habits. First of all, it’s
hard to resist the temptation to impress
our prospects with our knowledge,
even though we know, intellectually,
that people are not impressed with
knowledge. Secondly, when a prospect
asks a question, we believe that it’s
our duty to provide an immediate,
detailed answer.
It takes a concerted effort to change
long-term, ingrained habits. A halfday
get-motivated program won’t do
it. There are people in your industry
making twice as much money as you
by selling the same product to the
same market as you. There’s a reason:
it’s called behavior. Make a positive
change to your selling behavior and
you’ll make a positive change to your
income.
CHANGE YOUR
SELLING BEHAVIORS
By Jim Marshall and Clint Babcock
Sandler Training
of Tampa Bay
Honorary Chairs:
Margaret Word Burnside
& Aaron Fodiman