One of the more challenging aspects of being a successful sales professional is finding the balance between being persistent and being perceptive. If you are too quick to accept no’s, you’ll miss some genuine opportunities, but if you are too persistent, you’ll waste time and energy and create some genuinely negative reactions.
This challenge comes from one fundamental mistake in how we perceive our prospect’s needs. We fail to differentiate between the absence of pain, and the awareness of pain. Pain, as the obvious motivator of any action (in this case, buying) has to be present for us to be a sales professional and not a hustler. However, just because pain exists, doesn’t mean the prospect is aware of it, and even if they are aware of it, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are aware of how poignant it is. This is because our thoughts dictate our reality, and not the other way around.
A Tony Robbins event I attended a long time ago taught me this in a very clear way, based on a simple exercise. He recently re-did this on the Theo Vaughn podcast. Let’s try this together.
The simple premise is this: The unconscious brain is so bombarded by information, it has to prioritize, sort, or edit what it allows through to the conscious brain. If it didn’t, your conscious brain would be paralyzed from the obscene amount of information it had to handle. This edit becomes what we THINK, and what we think becomes our reality.
Try this exercise. Before reading further down, take 30 seconds and look around the room you are in and take note of anything that is brown. Ready, go……
Now close your eyes and list out all the brown things you saw. Now scroll down a bit…….
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OK, now, WITHOUT looking around, list out all the things in the room that are red.
Now look around and look for red things in the room. Likely, you now see way more red things that you missed before. Why? Because you were not looking for red. Your unconscious brain was basically focusing on the brown objects. Brown was the mission, red was not. Your brain edited out, or deleted out anything that wasn’t brown, and your reality became brown focused as a result. That is an example of how what you think affects what you perceive.
Want me to really blow your mind on this? Your mind also adds things that are not there. It cheats because it wants a win. When you were looking around for brown objects, how many beige objects did you count, because you wanted a high score? When you looked the second time for red objects, how many burgundy or pink objects did you count for the same reason?
Back to client conversations. Just because the issue or challenge you can solve exists, doesn’t mean the client sees it. If they had no solution to the challenge, no way of getting past it or fixing it, their mind blocked it out, because the mind doesn’t want to focus on something negative.
Sales professionals don’t ask questions to discover pain. They ask questions to help their prospects discover pain, and to realize the full impact of that unsolved pain. They don’t change the situation, they change how their prospect’s think about the situation.
I’ll wrap it up with this thought. You’re job as a sales professional is to determine which of the following statements reflect the reality of your prospect:
1- They have no pain
2- They don’t realize they have pain
3- They realize they have pain, but they don’t realize how powerful that pain is on them (or on their team).
The rest is just choosing the right action based on the situation.