To Sell Is Human shows you that selling is part of your life, no matter what you do, and what a successful salesperson looks like in the 21st century, with practical ideas to help you convince others in a more honest, natural, and sustainable way.
Handling Rejection
Make a list of “What ifs?” for yourself. What if everything goes horribly wrong? What if something unthinkable occurs? What if this was the worst decision I’ve ever made? These questions may elicit unexpected responses, which may soothe or even uplift you.
One way to lessen the sting of rejection, and perhaps even avoid it entirely, is to write a rejection letter yourself.
Once the rejection is in writing, the consequences may appear less severe.
The letter may highlight weak points in your presentation, which you can then work to strengthen.
Three Questions
When something bad occurs, ask yourself three questions—and come up with an intelligent way to answer each one “no”:
- Is this permanent?
- Is this pervasive?
- Is this personal?
The more you explain bad events as temporary, specific, and external, the more likely you are to persist even in the face of adversity.
Enumerate and Embrace
Enumerate. If the number of times you are rejected surprises you, then you might be more surprised by something else: You.
You’re still around. Even in that weeklong ocean of rejection, you’ve still managed to stay afloat. That realization can give you the will to continue and the confidence to do even better the following week.
Embrace. Say out loud: I got all these rejections but kept going.
The Off-Ramp Push
Once you’ve found the problem and the proper frame, you have one more step. You need to give people an off-ramp push, a specific request accompanied by a clear way to get it done.
People need clear instructions and a specific call to action.
The Potential Gain: Banking On Uncertainty
People often find potential more interesting than accomplishment because it’s more uncertain.
When you’re selling yourself, don’t fixate only on what you achieved yesterday. Also, emphasize the promise of what you could accomplish tomorrow.
Honesty And Good Service
The only way to sell in 2016 and beyond is to be honest and transparent.
To sell is no longer to guard information and hand it out in bits and pieces; it is now a service, assisting people in navigating the wealth of information, explaining it to them, and convincing them to make the best decision, the one that is right for them at the time.
Agree To Disagree Later
Instead of using words like “no” or “but”, agree with their ideas and add to them, and then improve and improvise how you can further move the conversation along.
- The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness.
- The most effective salespeople are ambiverts, those who fall somewhere in the middle of the introversion-extraversion scale.
- The most effective self-talk doesn’t merely shift emotions. It shifts linguistic categories. It moves from making statements to asking questions.
- Elevate what you can do for them.
Interrogative Self-Talk
The most effective self-talk doesn’t merely shift emotions. It shifts linguistic categories. It moves from making statements to asking questions”.
On average, the self-questioning group solved nearly 50 percent more puzzles than the self-affirming group.
Interrogative self-talk, by its very nature, elicits answers, and within those answers are strategies for actually carrying out the task.
Interrogative self-talk may inspire thoughts about autonomous or intrinsically motivated reasons to pursue a goal.
You Are In Sales Already
Non-sales selling takes up 40% of your time at work, which simply means moving others in some way. This could include persuading them to assist you with a project, convincing them of your idea, or influencing them to support a specific strategy.
Whatever your profession, you are a salesperson!
The Curation Process
The Curation Process: Seek
Once you’ve defined the area in which you’d like to curate, put together a list of the best sources of information. Then set aside time to scan those sources regularly.
The Curation Process: Sense
Creating meaning out of the material you’ve assembled. Make an annotated list of web links or regularly maintain a blog. Tend to this list of resources every day.
The Curation Process: Share
You can do this through a regular e-mail or your own newsletter, or by using Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. As you share, you’ll help others see their own situations in a new light and possibly reveal hidden problems that you can solve.
Make It Rhyme
If you’re one of a series of freelancers invited to make a presentation before a potential client, including a rhyme, can enhance the processing fluency of your listeners, allowing your message to stick in their minds when they compare you and your competitors.
The Present Bias
Our biases point us toward the present.
So when given a choice between an immediate reward (say, $1,000 right now) and a reward we have to wait for ($1,150 in two years), we’ll often take the $1000.
Envisioning ourselves far into the future is extremely difficult—so difficult, in fact, that we often think of that future self as an entirely different person.
This conceptual shift demonstrates the third quality necessary for moving others today: clarity—the capacity to help others see their situations in fresh and more revealing ways and to identify problems they didn’t realize they had.
Less Is More: The Problem with Too Much Choice
Of the consumers who visited the supermarket booth with twenty-four varieties of jam, only 3 percent bought any. “At the booth with a more limited selection, 30 percent made a purchase.”
Adding an inexpensive item to a product offering can lead to a decline in the consumer’s willingness to pay.
Restricting their choices can help them see those choices more clearly and not feel overwhelmed.
Optimism And Pessimism
Agents who scored in the optimistic half of the explanatory style sold 37% more insurance than agents who scored in the pessimistic half. Agents in the top decile sold 88% more insurance than those in the bottom decile.
The salespeople with an optimistic explanatory style—who saw rejections as temporary rather than permanent, specific rather than universal, and external rather than personal, sold more insurance and survived in their jobs much longer.
Mimicking The Person
- Watch. Observe what the other person is doing.
- Wait. Once you’ve observed, don’t spring immediately into action. Don’t do this too many times, though.
- Wane. After you’ve mimicked a little, try to be less conscious of what you’re doing.
- Attuning yourself to others—exiting your own perspective and entering theirs—is essential to moving others.
Buying An Experience
Several researchers have shown that people derive much greater satisfaction from purchasing experiences than they do from purchasing goods.
Even when people ponder their future purchases, they expect that experiences will leave them more satisfied than physical goods.
Framing a sale in experiential terms is more likely to lead to satisfied customers and repeat business.
Low Effort State
The people processing the information must be in what the researchers call a ‘low effort’ state. That is, instead of focusing resolutely on the decision, they’re proceeding with a little less effort—perhaps because they’re busy or distracted.
The negative information must follow the positive information, not the reverse. Once again, the comparison creates clarity.
Successors to the Elevator Pitch
The One-Word Pitch
The ultimate pitch for an era of short attention spans begins with a single word—and doesn’t go any further.
The Question
By making people work just a little harder, question pitches prompt people to come up with their own reasons for agreeing (or not). When people summon their own reasons for believing something, they endorse the belief more strongly and become more likely to act on it.
