Hi, you’re listening to Sales Journey podcast, Episode 227, 63% of Salespeople Will Do This and It Drives Me Crazy. This is Tasha and I’m the founder of Emerge Sales Training. For those of you that are new to the podcast, this the podcast for network marketers that want to up-level their sales and their sales leadership skills while being a good human. We publish episodes two times per week now, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and this podcast is scheduled to go live on April 11th. So that means you still have a couple of days to grab a ticket to our 2018 True Impact Live Event. You can get a streaming ticket if you are anywhere in the world to Live Stream and have your team over to your house, or you can attend locally here in Southern California. You can get a ticket at emergesalestraining.com/socalevent. All day tickets are from 9-4:30pm Pacific Time, at $70. That is just a great investment to learn a lot of great things. Check out the details at emergesalestraining.com/socalevent.
Here is the rant… I was recently rereading the book, The Science of Selling, and they did a study on 800 different sales people and only 37% of them had a consistent process to help their customers while the other 63% not only didn’t have a process to help them get consistent results, but they were also engaged in behaviors that were actively discouraging people from buying their products. I was freaking out because that is not good. I call this behavior unselling someone, and we run into it as customers all the time. And it is super, super frustrating.
I think that sometimes we look at sales and people, and it gets a bad rap, right? Because people think that selling is about convincing someone to get something they don’t want to get. In this book, The Science of Selling, it really talks about creating an optimal environment for the buyer to feel comfortable with moving forward with a solution that’s going to solve their problems. I think that so many of the behaviors that we as people who are selling a product, or service, or what not, it has to do with our confidence and we don’t portray enough confidence in our own product. So the question is, if we don’t have enough confidence to say, “Yeah, I think you should get it”, then why would our customer have enough confidence to pay money for it?
So it reminded me when I was reading this and I was getting all hot and bothered about when I went to go buy some new roller hockey skates. I have been playing ice hockey, roller hockey for a long time. But in college, I got stress fractures in my shins. I had some really good roller hockey skates are too heavy, they hurt my shins a lot. I had been saving up and doing some research, and I was going to go in and get new skates. So I took my own skates with me to this hockey shop. My old skates were pretty good, but they are about 12 years old. So, I was talking to this guy at the shop and we were looking at, and this might freak out when I say it, but I was looking at a pair of skates, I think they were $700 or $750 and then another one that was $950. And that might sound crazy to spend almost a thousand dollars on hockey skates, but if you’ve ever been injured, you know, that you’ll pretty much pay anything to stop feeling pain. I was looking for a lighter skate.
So, I’m talking to this person who works at the hockey shop and I asked him to go weigh my skate and the other skates, I think it was like the Middle Line Virgin. He came back and I was like, you know, there’s a lot of money for skates. I was just a little unsure because sometimes I have a habit of throwing money at problems. I said, well, what do you think? You know what he said? He said, “Well you have pretty good skates, might as well just stick with them”. I was like, OK, well I’m not going to convince you that I should drop down $700 to $800 on skates right now, and so I left, but I left and I was so sad because I really wanted new skates. I got home, I told Charlie, my husband, what happened, and he said, “You need new skates, go back to a different place and get the new skates.”
And here’s the crazy thing – I got the new skates. They were lighter and my shins haven’t hurt since I got them, but that salesperson actively discouraged me from buying something I already had every intention of buying and I already knew how much they were. And that’s not always the case, but I knew how much they were, I looked at them, I had the money and I was like, OK, am I making a good decision and was wanting to buy these? He basically was like, “No, keep these other ones.”
That’s really, really bad. We can’t do that. This is unselling a customer who is ready and excited and willing to buy. When I think about unselling, I think about my mom. She might be watching this, and my mom is awesome. We went through a remodel, we had a pipe burst and she says, “OK, well if we’re going to redo the kitchen, then we also have to redo the bathroom.”
I was like, that doesn’t make any sense, but she was on me.
She’s like, “It’s only going to be $2,000 more to redo your bathroom and then it’s going to match your kitchen and you’re going to love it.”
I was like, no, I get super cheap obviously because I spent all my money on hockey skates and doing the bathroom was not on the list of things to do with this kitchen problem that we had and she just kept at it.
Finally what she said to me was, “All right, it’s $2,000. How long do you plan on living here?”
(I don’t deal well with change.) So I was like forever, we’re never moving.
So she says, “So let’s say you live here another 30, 40 years. How much is $2,000 spread over 30 years?”
Well, not very much, mom. Obviously 30 bucks a year or six, 60 bucks a year or something.
She says, “OK, well then do you think it would be worth it if you’re never going to move?” She looked me dead in the eye and she said, “I promise you will not regret it.”
I had a lot of resistance and so I said, OK, that’s what I needed to hear. What will I regret is I didn’t want to regret it. I have a tendency to throw money at things and so I was trying to change my ways and she said, “I promise you won’t regret it.”
So this was about three years ago and I don’t regret it. My friend, Jenna, was over Monday night and she walked by the bathroom, she just stopped, looked in (and she’s been in my house 100 times) She says, “I love your bathroom so much.”
The truth is I don’t regret it. And as soon as it was done, I’m so happy and I loved it and I was so glad and I’m just so glad my mom sold me on that.
So every once in a while, while my mom will have these experiences, and then she’ll get this bug to start her own business. So she’ll do real estate. Or the most recent venture is that her friend in India is importing Saris here to American. So if she would start selling them, that sounded great, and that is her in sales. But as soon as she profit’s a penny from it or there’s any sort of a benefit to her, she freaks out and she’s like, “Well, only get it if you want to get it.” She does this unselling behavior and it ends up hurting the people that she cares about the most.
They don’t care if she makes a little bit of money while she’s helping them solve their problem. I think that a lot of people do that.
Well, I don’t think, I know 63 percent of people do that. They’ll actively unsell people. We need to not look at ourselves on as salespeople, but more as an Assistant Buyer. So I want you to think about going shopping with your friend. My friend Rachel, when we were in high school, or I think we were in college, I remember this specific story. It was hilarious. She tried on this on the skirt, she thought it was cute and she put it on and she wasn’t really sure. She comes out and she says, “Does this skirt make my butt look big?” I hesitated. So what did that hesitation mean? That hesitation meant I’m not so sure either. She says, “Wait, you think the skirt looks big? OK, forget it. I’m going to go ahead and put this away.”
Sometimes when we’re a little bit unconfident we look for a second opinion. If she would’ve come out and I would have said, “Oh no, it looks awesome.” She would’ve felt so much better, right? So sometimes when will just feel unsure about a decision, we’re 90 percent there, but there’s a little bit holding us back, we’re going to look for someone’s opinion to just reassure us to move forward. So you’re going to have customers that are going to say things like I said or the way I resisted my mom, or with the skates are, or Rachel said about the skirt. They’re going to say, “Well, what do you think? “
We can’t say, “Well, I don’t know. What do you think?”
Think about what message that makes. If you said, “Tasha, I heard your courses are great, I want to register for Your Direct Sales Foundation and said, but here’s my situation, what do you think?” If I said, “Well, I mean, I don’t know. What do you think?” “Or you know, do whatever you want to do.” “Or you can always come back and get it later.” Do you see how that shows little conviction in what it is I’m selling? If I don’t even have enough conviction to say, “I think you should get it, you won’t regret it.” Then you’re not going to buy. We have to have a consistent sales process, right? We have to stop unselling people.
I think that like half of people’s sales are lost by actively unselling. If we just got out of our own way and we just said nice things like “How are you doing?” and “How do you feel about this product?” “Do you think it would be helpful if I helped you write up that order?” or “Yes, it’s a great product. I don’t think you’re gonna regret it.”
What if we told them that? Are any of those things untrue? Of course, they’re all true and they’re all helpful and they’re all kind and gracious and what we call at Emerge – Good Human.
To just say, “You have this problem, this is the thing to solve it.” Then your customer says, “Well, OK, I’m close. Do you think this is a good idea that I get this?” That tells you that they trust you. Then what we need to respond with is, “I do think this is going to help your problem. I don’t think you’re going to regret it. Would you like me to help you help you write up that order, and let’s get that thing on the way? So that you are able to solve your problem.”
So I just want you guys to really think about, take a step back and say, “Oh gosh, am I accidentally unselling people?” Am I telling people, “Go think about it and then get back to me” and then we’re frustrated why they’re not buying? Or do we say like, “Go do some research and come back “or “Go talk to your spouse.”
What we’re doing is we’re telling them we don’t believe in this. We need to be confident. We need to ask them great questions to learn their problems. We need to connect the dots simply at the end. When it’s time to buy, we need to say something like, “I think you’re going to love it. I don’t think you’re going to regret it. Let me go ahead and write that order up for you.”
Speaking of things you will not regret, don’t forget to sign up for the true impact live event emergesalestraining.com/socalevent, it is on April 14th. If you are listening to podcast after the fact, no worries. Head on over to emergesalestraining.com/free training. We will hook you up with some good stuff. Have a great day.