Barry W Thornton Blog

I received a note from James on my blog about fighting the price battle in a salesman’s mind, he notes:

“What if the problem is the inability to listen and the urge to react without thinking it through? Sometimes I think that’s why we are going downhill.”

Thank you James, good insights and I agree with you.  I don’t think I can find many who will argue that the school system stopped teaching critical and analytical thinking as well as listening a long time ago so the problem is not recent.

But the sales process is designed to handle this.  Given that the basic sales dance consists of:

1 - Introduction - establish credibly and trust

2 - Define the problem you are addressing to get everyone clear on the terms and on the same page

3 - Present a solution that has value to the customer, explain that value proposition, answer clarifying questions

4 - Do a ground clearing Close (push the customer to a start making choices).

5 - Objections - Listen to the objections from the customer, go back to #2 with a modified presentation. Loop through #2 through #5 until until there is either a close, you progress to the next Gate Keeper, you agree to meet again with more data, or they carry your broken body out the door.

Built into this process is the ability to handle James’ issues if you instead have ‘the ability to listen and the personal power to think it through” (thanks James).

This means you must be clever and devious in many ways.  It all falls on the salesman’s brain, dummies don’t sell well.  In fact sales is one of the highest mental arts there is.  All that stuff about rocket scientists, mathematician, etc. is a load of snow (I know, I am one).  They don’t require 1/10 the mental effort as does a good salesman.  In science you have years to figure out the truth of a matter - in sales you have only minutes, maybe only seconds to figure it out, make a plan, and act on that plan.  I find sales infinitely more fun and exhilarating than sitting my office working on epiphanies, which goes to the heart of the matter - nothing ever happens until a  sale is made!

Great ideas happen all the time (and most have little or no value), great closes are as rare as flowers in a snowstorm and even more valuable because they make the world work.

I’m not going to dwell on the importance of Cell Phones. This ‘technology that almost works’ does well enough to have changed the world.

For Second and Third-World countries (or better, regions, for it transcends nation-state boundaries) the Cell Phone jumped the temporal gap. This brought the best noted aspects of the Information Age to the folks on the last cars of the current Economic Age train. Thus the train got a lot shorter.

But most of us reading this blog live in the First-World, in places that still have land-lines in common use. If you have chosen to live most of your life using the ever-convenient Cell Phone, then you have not developed an interesting skill called “deep listening”.

You can hear many things on a land line that are not even transmitted on a Cell Phone. Things like breathing, small changes in pitch, diction, pronunciations, body movement, chair noises, background noises, all of which are important clues to what is really being said beyond just the voice message. It is claimed that 90% of a real conversation is done in body language. In business, where information is key to achieving one’s goals, losing all that information can mean failure. Worse off, when you don’t practice, you can’t get good at the skill. So when you do need it you can’t use it.

I never thought I would say this, but the land-line is a device that offers fidelity, that is faithful reproduction of the audio events going on at the transmission end. It is no hi-fi by any means! But it is hi –fi compared to a Cell Phone. What a Cell Phone has is good “intelligibility”. A term that means that the parts of the sound that the human mind can pick out and decode easily as speech aren’t always best communicated in a Hi-Fi Way. Cell Phones do things to the signal that, if you told a dinner-friend with hi-fi interest about, would cause him to get up and leave without paying. Even with these anti-fi processes going on what the other person actually said is something your mind spends a lot of time guessing about. This is even a better reason to not Cell Phone and drive at the same time.

So what does this have to do with business? Simple – on the phone, any phone, you are a blind man. If you are like me, if you want to hear them sweat. If you really want to hear either the pain, interest, apathy, or joy in between words, then the Cell Phone fails as a tool. While some folks say that body language counts for 90% of a conversation, let’s say it is only 75%, or even 60%. On the cell phone you get none. Over half the phone information we are basing our work on is invisible to us!

While the Cell Phone more or less gets the word across, the land-line lets you hear the chair creak! The recommendation from this old sea-dog is to have your social conversation on your Cell Phone. But for business you need a land-line in a quiet place where you can concentrate. You to this because you are blind. . . and smart! Serious results require serious planning.

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008 all rights reserved