Newly Corporate

1. Eye contact.

This seems cliche, but it has a striking impact. Eye contact is the most important non-verbal communicator. Great sales people are masters of appropriate eye contact. They stay engaged verbally and then use eye contact (and other non-verbal communicators) to establish sincerity and trust. This is what makes sales an art, not a science. Perhaps it works so well because it is rare these days. It seems to stop people in their tracks, and that provides an opening to get the conversation started.

2. People are sheep.

People don’t know what they want. People will not ask you for what they really need because they don’t know what they really need. If you want to be effective, you need to be an expert and you need to anticipate what people’s needs will be. Then you walk in and say, “I believe you want X, and we’ve got the best X in the business”. You have to keep in mind that your competitors will be doing the same thing, so again you’ll have to anticipate. Think of what they will say about you and preempt it (this is called inoculation). Once you start doing this you become a collaborator. People are more likely to buy from someone they collaborate with than someone who sells them stuff.

3. Stupid things still have strong influence on people.

This is mainly because they are sheep (as above), but let me give you an example. Consumer Reports is a reputable company that tests consumer products and then rates them or discusses them in their magazine. This is great. It popularized the concept of a seal-of-approval. Unfortunately, bad companies have bastardized this concept. For example, Gartner rates software. People in the industry consider their approval to be the gold standard. This year our company got rated very highly by Gartner and I got to see the process. It turns out, they don’t actually test your software. They send you a list of questions and you answer them. No effort is made to verify the truth of your answers. Yet for some reason, managers at big companies are willing to base million-dollar decisions on the Gartner rating. This means you can’t assume that people are smart and will disregard bad information. And this makes the job of a salesperson a very difficult one.