Are you willing to spend 30 seconds to make yourself wildly more successful? If you make these three tiny changes in your internal dialog, you will immediately and automatically find it easier to sell. Prospects will warm to you, and you’ll find it easier to develop all opportunities, big and small. Sound too good to be true. It’s not. I’m serious. Here are the three tiny changes:
- CHANGE #1: Describe what you’re selling as a “verb” rather than a “noun.” For example, suppose you’re selling for an industrial glue manufacturer. If you think that your job is to sell “glue” (a noun), you’ll talk to the customer about product features. If you think your job is to sell “gluing” (a verb), you will tend to uncover your customer’s gluing needs. Then you can show your offering can fulfill that need.
- CHANGE #2: Think about selling as helping the customer rather than making a sale. To do this, you simply expunge from your mental vocabulary the standard ways of describing sales process, like “convincing,” “persuading,” and “overcoming.” Instead, you reframe the selling process of visualizing, with the customer, how (if they had your product) their problems might be solved and their goals achieved.
- CHANGE #3. Consider a sales call successful even when you don’t make a sale. Many salespeople get so caught up in “winning” that they foist unwanted products onto the customer. Rather than adopting a dogged determination to make the sale, make it clear — first in your own head and then directly to the customer – that you’re more than willing to leave if you can’t actually help the customer.
The above is based upon a conversation with Mike Bosworth, author of the bestseller Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets.
