Average salespeople delude themselves into believing that buyers make rational, logical decisions based on empirical data and information. But that's not how the human mind works. Emotions come first, then logic.
Rather than fold like a cheap lawn chair and lower the price, Joe managed his own disruptive emotions and flipped the buyer script, “Your price is too high.” He then shaped the decision process until it became virtually impossible for Mr. Colaizzi to make any decision other than yes.
2
A PERFECT SALES STORM
Your chances of getting struck by lightning go up if you stand under a tree, shake your fist at the sky, and say “Storms suck!”
The sales profession is in the midst of a perfect storm. Buyers have more power – more tools, more information, more at stake, and more control over the sales process than at any time in history.
Technology is accelerating disruptive change at an ever-increasing pace, creating fear and insecurity that leaves buyers clinging to the status quo. Technology also serves the purpose of lowering barriers to entry, thus releasing a relentless onslaught of “me-too” competitors. Differentiating on the attributes of products, services, or prices is fleeting at best and more difficult than ever before.
To buyers, it all looks the same.
Legions of salespeople and their leaders are coming face-to-face with a cold, hard truth: what once gave salespeople a competitive edge – controlling the sales process, command of product knowledge, an arsenal of technology, and a great pitch – are no longer guarantees of success.
Meanwhile, buyers have lost all patience for kitchen-sink data dumps of features and benefits and canned product pitches. They expect more from their interactions with salespeople. Buyers want to emerge from sales conversations with value beyond a dissertation of the rep's marketing brochures.
In response to this shift in buyer expectations, salespeople are being told that they need to offer insight, teach, challenge, and add value. However, deteriorating attention spans have made it difficult to get buyers to sit still long enough to be given insight, taught, challenged, or provided with added value.
These “modern” sales concepts sound intriguing and promising on the pages of a book or in a seminar, but land like a lead balloon in the real world with real buyers because the majority of salespeople haven't mastered the situational awareness and emotional intelligence to leverage these techniques effectively while maintaining human connections.
Many of the salespeople attempting these techniques leave buyers exasperated because the techniques just come off as self-important pitching. Salespeople are not learning and mastering interpersonal skills. They do not understand how to engage buyers on a human-to-human level.
Adding to the problem is an entire generation entering the workforce for whom text messaging, e-mail, and social media posts are the preferred, arm's-length form of communication.1 This new generation is a conundrum. They are socially aware but view human-to-human relationships in the abstract.
In this perfect storm, it's no wonder so many salespeople are struggling. It's no wonder that sales leaders are frustrated and more stressed out than ever. It's no wonder that buyers are starving for authentic human interaction. And it's not surprising that most companies are experiencing sales pipelines clogged with stalled deals, and staring down the barrel at 50 percent or more of their salespeople missing their quotas.
Meet the Ultra-High-Performance Sales Professional
In this new paradigm, though, there is an elite group of sales professionals who are crushing it. In this age of transparency where information is ubiquitous and buyer attention spans are fleeting, these ultra-high performers have learned how to leverage a new psychology of selling to keep prospects engaged, create true competitive differentiation, and shape and influence buying decisions.
The ultra-high sales performer is acutely aware that the emotional experience of buying from them is far more important than products, prices, features, and solutions. They know that to sell value, they must be valuable, and they must earn the right, through human relationships, to teach, offer insight, or challenge.
Over the course of this book, I'm going to take you on an unprecedented journey into the behaviors and mind-sets of the highest-earning sales professionals. I'm going to open a window into their minds and show you their techniques, frameworks, and secrets. You'll learn how to:
■ Leverage human behavior frameworks, heuristics, and cognitive biases to influence buying behaviors.
■ Manage and control the Disruptive Emotions that are holding you back.
■ Improve Sales EQ and build on the Four Intelligences required for ultra-high performance.
■ Shape and align the Three Processes of Sales to lock out competitors and shorten the sales cycle.
■ Influence and manage relationships with The Five Stakeholders You Meet in a Deal.
■ Flip the Buyer Script to gain complete control of the sales conversation.
■ Leverage Noncomplementary Behavior to eliminate resistance, conflict, and objections.
■ Disrupt Expectations to pull buyers toward you, direct their attention, and keep them engaged.
■ Gain Micro-Commitments and Next Steps to keep your deals from stalling.
■ Tame Irrational Buyers, shake them out of their comfort zone, and shape the decision-making process.
■ Answer The Five Questions That Matter Most in Sales to make it virtually impossible for prospects to say no.
■ Shape Win Probability in your favor to gain an unbeatable competitive advantage.
Sales EQ begins where many of the great books and sales training programs like The Challenger Sale, Strategic Selling, Insight Selling, and SPIN Selling leave off. It addresses the human relationship gap in the modern sales process – the emotional side of selling.
I want to be crystal clear about my intentions. I didn't invest a year of my life writing this book merely to make you a better level of average. Screw average. To hell with mediocrity.
I'm pulling back the veil from ultra-high sales performance. My mission is to move you into the top tier of salespeople in your company, industry, and field. To help you become insanely successful – an elite top earner.
A Note about the Word Stakeholder
Throughout the book, I use stakeholder as a generic term inclusive of buyers, amplifiers, seekers, influencers, and coaches. These roles are also, in my work and the work of others, defined as prospects and decision makers. For expediency and to avoid confusion, I have chosen to use the term stakeholder.
3
THE IRRATIONAL BUYER
Life is simple, but we insist on making it complicated.
Everyone in my industry knew about the opportunity. It was a rare gem that caused my competitors to throw everything at it. One of my competitors flew the stakeholders around in a luxurious corporate jet to visit its manufacturing plants, wining and dining them along the way. Another competitor feted the stakeholder group at premier sporting events.
I agonized that we were going to lose the deal because we weren't keeping up with the Joneses. My company didn't have the resources to entertain a large stakeholder group like our competitors could, nor was it in our culture to do so.
Adding to my anxiety were our no-frills production facilities that were dated compared to the competition,