Take a moment to think about your last few customer calls.
When you first spoke, was the recipient of the call excited, glad to speak with you, thrilled to buy—or suspicious, frazzled and impatient? If you said the former, I want your job. The truth is, most prospects don’t want to be sold; rather, it’s your job to move them from a negative emotional state to a positive one. This is the key to become a top sales performer.
This involves creating a structure.
Having a structure in place not only helps us increase our consistency, it keeps us balanced. Take one of the most difficult aspects of selling: the challenge of maintaining true rapport while also creating urgency.
How do you connect at an emotional level and then roll up your sleeves and sell? In order to become a top sales performer, entrepreneurs and creatives have told me their number one challenge is maintaining the proper tension between the two.
Conventional wisdom has long held that selling is about building rapport and making a friend. Salespeople who were nice, accommodating, and sold to a prospect’s emotional motivators made sales and money.
But customers have changed. They have options. Lots of them. With increased choice comes increased complexity. With increased complexity comes analysis paralysis. There is growing evidence that the best salespeople, entrepreneurs and creatives today are not only skillful at establishing trust but are respectfully assertive.
According to Mathew Dixon and Brent Adamson in their book The Challenger Sale, sometimes a prospect’s greatest need is figuring out what they need. Your role is to help them do that. And doing that takes courage. Your ability to lead with heart, but also ask the tough questions will determine your sales success. Top performers today balance relationship-building with respectful assertiveness—heart and sell.
Learn more from Shari Levitin on how to give people the authentic sales process their hoping for. RSVP Today.
