The Oscar-winning movie The Music Man contains a key scene that says a lot about sales. The main character, Harold Hill, sells student’s music instruments and uniforms under the false premise that he’ll remain in town as the music teacher. When the scheme unravels, the little boy he’s befriended accuses: “You’re just a liar! There isn’t a band!” Harold Hill’s response is classic. A sad look comes over his face and he says: “I always believe there’s a band, kid.”
While Harold Hill was just a con-man, his remark contains a truism about sales. In order to sell at the highest level, the sales pro must be congruent in his or her beliefs. In the case of a flimflam artist, that requires the sociopathic behavior of lying, both to the victim… and to oneself. In the case of honest selling, that congruence can only be achieved through matching your honestly-held beliefs with the honest attributes of what you’re actually selling.
Without that congruence, the customer will tend to feel that something is “off.” Daniel Goleman, in the book Social Intelligence, explains that a million years of evolution has given human beings the capability to automatically “read” facial expressions, voice tonalities and body movements to confirm whether somebody else constitutes a threat. As a result, most people are pretty good “lie detectors” and thus can tell, at a visceral level, whether a sales pro is being honest or not.
There is an important lesson to be learned here. Ron Willingham, author of Integrity Selling for the 21st Century, says that your success as a sales pro will depend heavily upon whether you have congruent answers the following questions about your beliefs:
- What are my basic values about people and life?
- What do I think selling is all about?
- Do I believe that I can take the necessary steps?
- How committed am I to taking these actions?
- Do I believe in the product or service that I’m selling?
If your answers to these questions are incongruent, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to sell at the highest level. You’ll find it extraordinarily difficult to perform the basic mechanics of selling, because everything you try to do will force you to fight an internal battle withing yourself. And, of course, most customers will sense this and be reluctant to buy from you.
For example, if you truly believe that “it’s a sin to tell a lie” you’ll probably flub the close if it requires you to misrepresent your product. Similarly, if you’re not truly committed to helping a customer, your protestations that “you’re only here to help” will fall flat and simply generate skepticism. Ron recommends that every sales pro take some quiet time and go through that list of question, answering each one truthfully, and then examine the answers for incongruities.
In a future post, I’ll tell you what to do if your beliefs aren’t congruent. Unless, of course, you want to be like Harold Hill…
