Forget sales technique!(On Management)

• Author: Wiesner, Pat

THIS MIGHT BE TOO STRONG A STATEMENT, but the longer I am in selling, the more convinced I have become that attitude trumps technique.

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Certain attitudes, that is.

During the first five years of my sales career I spent a lot of time learning sales technique, and I swore by it! I was well-trained, ambitious, hardworking and successful. I knew seven ways to get the prospect's attention and nine trial closes. I was a classroom expert in handling objections, having mastered techniques for flushing out the real objection, burying false objections, and I had memorized key responses to the 75 most common objections prospects had to our product. I knew the difference between the Presumptive close and the Puppy Dog close, and I knew the five great rules of selling.

I was ready!

Since those early days I have been to dozens of sales seminars, each encouraging me to learn "Six ways to do this" and "Ten ways to do that." I had a rule for how long to wait in the lobby for a customer, rules for writing follow-up letters and even a rule for how many times to take "no" for an answer before giving up. A real pro!

I knew lots of ways to handle objections. I used "feel/felt/found" every time I could ("Mr. Big, I know how you feel. So and so felt the same way until he finally used our product. He found that it worked perfectly"). I knew my product well, and objections were my friend. When one was raised, I would wade in and prove that we were right and the client had it wrong. And I sold a lot of product.

But over the years I kept running into people who were doing better than I was. What was worse, they didn't know all that stuff that I knew about the right way to sell. I wanted to know what they were doing that I wasn't.

What I found was that the people who were doing better were doing it with a better attitude rather than with irresistible technique. What made this attitude so powerful was that it was customer-centered rather than sales-centered. Dr. Benjamin Spock, who wrote the immensely popular "Baby and Child Care" many years ago, put it best when he said, "It is often better to put down the book and pick up the baby!"

Given a competitive product, what is stronger than superb sales technique is...