Here’s my best piece of sales advice and why it’s easier said than done.
A few days ago, my friend texted me soliciting my advice about sales.
The text said:
“So now I need your advice….. You’ve done senior living sales for years. This week I’ve had a lion share of deals just fall through, people just going out and finding solutions on their own, communities that weren’t partnered with us, etc… Some of it my mistakes, others not. But I am discouraged – even had a good cry about it. What’s your number one tip to just dig out that hole(?)”
When I received the text, I was at work preparing to begin a shift. For a moment, I thought about waiting until after my shift to respond to her. In doing this, I would’ve allowed for more time to have an immersed conversation with her. But, by her text, I sensed she wasn’t interested in an analysis of her tactics. I know her well enough to reasonably decipher between her interest in an in-depth analysis of her sales abilities and a nudge of encouragement. Therefore, I trusted my gut and responded with a tip that’s relevant regardless of the situation.
I replied:
“First of all, it means a lot to me that you reached out and asked me this. I really appreciate that. Second of all, I know you can sell. I’ve seen you do it in some of the most difficult circumstances and have blown me away with your ability to salvage scenarios I thought were unsalvageable. Third, and most importantly, I’m not the best at sales but if I found any success in it, it wasn’t for any other reason than I treated the person (I was selling to) the way I would want someone to treat me, my family, or my grandparent.”
By reading her text, I got the sense that she was feeling pressure to perform. She’s a highly driven individual and expects a lot of herself. I also know the company she works for can be demanding and will apply pressure if it’s sales representatives are underperforming.
Sales can be a psychological battleground and often the war is won or lost in our own minds. Furthermore, I believe an ineffective way to support someone under pressure would be to scrutinize their methodology. This is especially true for those with an already proven track record like she has.
So, I gave her the simple piece of advice that’s always helped me when I’ve found myself in selling ‘slumps’.
Unfortunately, the advice I gave her is easier said than done.
It’s easy to think you’re treating someone the way you’d want to be treated but often far more difficult to execute.
This can be for one or both of two reasons:
To treat someone the way you’d want someone to treat your grandmother, you must exercise a level of empathy that requires an inordinate level of focus and attention.
It isn’t simply good enough to listen to the words that the person you’re selling to is saying. Sure. It’s a start but it won’t allow you to tap into the emotional connection required when selling senior living apartments (or anything). In order to fully empathize with that person, you must attune to their non-verbal cues, their body language, their appearance, their demeanor, their preferences, their body language and everything else they won’t explicitly express with words. Often, I’d go as far as imagining that I was actually sitting across from one of my grandmothers. It sounds batshit nuts (especially because both of my grandmothers have been dead for quite some time) but I'd actually act like I was having a conversation with one of them. I’d think of one of my grandmas sitting across from me and how she’d be feeling if she were sitting and talking to a young man like myself. As soon as I tapped into that feeling, it became that much easier for me to figure out exactly what they needed to know in order to make a decision. The better I got at empathizing with the person whom I was selling, the more successful I was at my job.
To treat someone the way you’d want someone to treat your grandmother, you must intimately understand the product or service you’re selling.
It’s imperative to understand what it is you’re trying to sell so you can understandably articulate why whoever it is you're selling should want to purchase it. It isn’t enough to simply recite the list of features and hope that the person you’re selling understands what each feature will do for them. You must know the problems your grandmother faces on a given day and how those problems make her feel. Once you understand those problems, you must intimately understand how the solutions to her problems that you have will make her feel differently. Far more effective to know how the feature will positively enhance her life than to simply tell her about the feature.
As a salesperson, it’s common to get caught up in the metrics, the goals, the targets, the quotas, the bonuses, and all of the other metrics associated with the hard numbers associated with sales. And, for good reason, without the numbers, it wouldn’t be possible to gauge success.
However, if you find yourself in a slump like my friend found herself, it’d be wise to remove yourself from the rigor of the metrics for a moment and recalibrate yourself to what it is you’re really doing.
Understand: you’re a human being trying to help another human being find a solution to a problem. As soon as you’ve lost sight of that fundamental objective, you’ve begun meandering down a path of uncertainty that will likely lead to underperformance.
We all fall out of sync with our selling rhythm at some point in our sales careers but the more quickly we recognize it and get back to the fundamental basis of what we’re doing, the less time we’ll spend discouraged.
As for this friend, I’ve known her long enough to know that she’ll regain her confidence and get back to her high performing self soon.
In the meantime, she’ll benefit from deafening all of the extraneous noise that comes along with a career in sales and remind herself to treat everyone she works with as someone she has deep connection with.
