For a long time I have talked about becoming conscious of what’s going on in the minds of the people you’re communicating with – what attitudes, objections, concerns, questions, prejudices might people have towards what you’re saying.
It seems to me that you must always be respectful of people’s positions – to work out how their response is the logical one bearing in mind the experiences they have had and the data they possess.
[Update - The initial way I described the following was an oversimplification - and I knew it - Sharon Drew gave me here most current description of this point, so I've updated it - her words are in italics, just to be totally clear)
The book that’s rocking my world at the moment (there’s always one) is Sharon Drew Morgen‘s Selling With Integrity. In it she posits a totally respectful way of selling – looking at the sales person (and that’s you, whether you think it is or not) as the servant of the buyer (of your product, your ideas, your recommendations). Their (your, our) job is to manage the internal, off line decisions they need to make to help them all buy in to a new solution, or to change.
According to Morgen, we’ve always focused sales on our product and the buyer’s need, and then we’ve sat and waited while they took their time returning. We’ve never known how to enter the buyer’s private, internal world. Morgen has a model that will give us the ability to manage this.
Buyers object, Morgen says, because we are pushing data, and price, and our needs and selling patterns, too early on in the buyer’s buying decision. So they defend themselves.
So I go: What if objections don’t live in isolation? What if we’re making them by pushing our own agenda?
I wonder how much further we might get if we just work with people where they are…
(NB I sent Sharon Drew some fan mail, and she tells me that Selling with Integrity is terribly out of date – her most up-to-date thinking is in Buying Facilitation®. I’m gonna download it and have a look… Keep you posted.)
How have you found respecting where people are to be more effective than trying to persuade?
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Hi Andrew
Nice post
I see a ready parallel here with teaching and learning: in order to teach someone, you need to reach out to where they are right now, or they simply won’t understand (or remember) the thing you told them, because there’s no appropriate context in their current cognitive state. Likewise, when selling something, if you can’t talk to the buyer’s current emotional state, they’re not going to be able to picture themselves wherever it is that you’re trying to get them.
I think of teaching as a process where you go to someone’s side and show them where they could be and then help them get there; it makes total sense to me that selling ideas (such as in teaching/training) and selling goods or services is essentially the same process.
Thanks; these are good things to be reminded of!
Chris
Hey Chris
Yeah, it’s pretty easy to forget that when we’re communicating with someone, we become part of the same system.
Some of the outputs of that system are then our responsibility. But because we’re so used to them happening consistently, we don’t realise it might be because of our consistently ineffective approach.
Thanks for the comment – look forward to more…
When talking to a buyer, you have to listen and make sure we understand them and yes, pushing your own agenda does make them have objections. Vaguely about being sold to, which they then turn into an actual objection.
Dr. Letitia Wright
The Wright Place TV Show
http://wrightplacetv.com
http://www.twitter.com/drwright1