The Gist of Selling

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The Gist of SellingHow I learned not to be a salesperson

and became a valued Solution Provider instead

By: Michael A. LeBrun2012

Michael A. LeBrun The Gist of Selling 2012

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The Gist of Selling Michael A. LeBrun

Chapters

Introduction1. Selling Comes Naturally. . .or Maybe Not2. WIIFM3. Just a Dash of Sales Theory4. It May Have Killed The Cat but It’s Great for Salespeople5. PIG6. The Importance of Knowing 7. It All Adds Up8. Helping Prospects Make Sound Business Decisions9. How To Get Referrals10. A Place Where Problems are Opportunities11. Odds and Ends – Proverbs and Platitudes12. The Mental Game13. Exercising Your Sales Muscles


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Introduction

I never intended to write a book. Of course, you’ll probably figure that out when, upon reading the first couple of chapters, it becomes evident a great deal of the material comes from the 1980’s. Now at that point of your study you might figure that three-decades-old-material has got to be stale so why bother? After all, the world has changed a lot since then! You surmise that you just wasted a whole chunk of your life reading about something that is akin to studying “the possibility of landing on the moon.” We are already well past that now aren’t we? Doesn’t today’s social media and information access mean that there’s a new paradigm to selling and anything else is so last millennium? So the bottom line if you are on this path of deduction is “why bother?”

That reasoning is precisely why I felt compelled to write this missive. The way I see it, there’s a whole bunch of snake oil salespeople out there today that are peddling a miracle elixir that will solve all a company’s marketing and sales challenges. Of course, they are happy to sell you their secrets for a princely sum. When you crack open the bottle, you find out it’s all this new paradigm of fancy Internet strategies, search engine optimization, networking tactics, et al. Now I’m not here to tell you that all of these techniques are hogwash. Indeed, some of them no doubt possess effectiveness. But that does not mean that tried and true methods that have been proven over hundreds if not thousands of years are suddenly no longer valid. How so? It’s because while technology has irrevocably changed the way we live, there is no doubt that human nature has remained the same. People still have needs and desires and these drive behavior and thus, decision-making. But how do we uncover these drivers? If we can figure out a way to learn what’s inside a prospect’s head, we can meet that need and make a sale. But how?

So here I am, writing. I suppose I got tired of everyone in business telling me that personal selling is dead. I heard that companies really don’t want or need salespeople anymore – way too much trouble and overhead. Why bother with an anachronistic marketing methodology like salespeople?

Such reasoning misses the point completely. People still do business with people. If you are ignoring this fact, you are missing out on the majority of the marketing power that your business possesses.

Now, I am not a Luddite. I believe in technology and some of it has made personal salesmanship simultaneously easier and more challenging. I’ve worked with and for companies that believed technology had no business in their sales and marketing. I used to term this as a “Men Still Wear Hats Syndrome.” That company believed that we were locked in the year 1956 and all business was done over a desk or at a three martini lunch. Meanwhile, I’ve also been associated with organizations that believed that people were archaic, a messy, unnecessary expense. Of course, I discovered that the real truth is somewhere in between these points of view.

The point I’m trying to make in this book is not only that salespeople are necessary, but also that they can be easily trained to be effective. Each one of us is a salesperson and we sell all day long -


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whether you know it or not. So our quest is to harness this in-born selling ability. My hope is that this book and our journey together thereby, reach that goal.


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Chapter 1 – Selling Comes Naturally . . . or Maybe Not

A well-dressed salesman stopped a man in the street and asked, “Sir, would you like to buy a bottle of this mouthwash for $200?”

The man said, "Are you nuts? That’s robbery!"

The salesman seemed hurt and then tried again. “Sir, since you are a bit irate, I'll sell it to you at half price - $100?”

Yet again, the man replies frankly, “You must be crazy pal, now go away!”

The salesman then reaches into his suitcase, takes out two cakes, and begins to eat one of them. He tells the annoyed guy, “Sir, please let me give you one of my cakes since I have irritated you so much.”

Unwrapping the cake, the guy takes a bite; he gags and rapidly spits the bite out. “Hey,” he snarled, “this cake tastes like crap!”

“It is,” the salesman responded. “Wanna buy some mouthwash?”

So, you’ve had a long and distinguished career in sales. You’ve got a “Love Me Wall” in your office that is covered with plaques and awards. Quite simply, it appears that you know everything there is about selling. If this description fits you, then I offer you my most sincere congratulations. Because of your high standing, you can pretend you’ve read this book and tell your supervisor that “it was good, but I already know everything.” Then again, because you are a true, sales professional, you realize that “knowing everything” is impossible and that every one learns something new every day. Thus, you’ll devour this book and even write your own notes in the margin.

On the other hand, perhaps the only sales experience you’ve had was when you dressed up in a Girl/Boy/Cub Scout uniform and you sold cookies or popcorn. You might have been a real childhood entrepreneur, locating your enterprise on a busy street corner near your childhood home where you sold lemonade. Or maybe you have been making a serious attempt to begin a career in sales. You’ve read a few books, been to a few training courses, and really desire to find a way to be a success. If one of these descriptions fits you, and no matter how much experience you have or don’t have, there is one absolute truth that you are facing:


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Selling is scary.

Upon reading this statement, most of you are nodding your head in agreement. The rest of you are in denial. The act of selling and for some, the mere thought of having to go forth and sell, is a frightening proposition. The reasons are easy to understand. Selling puts us in situations that are uniformly disliked by all normal human beings – what I call the “Great Sales Fears:” fear of public speaking, fear of strangers, fear of strange places, fear of embarrassment, fear of rejection, and fear of failure. There are probably more fears to add the list, like fear of wearing a tie or fear of closed toe pumps, but I digress. For most folks in the world, they’d be very happy to avoid selling anything from this point onward. These people don’t just come right out and say that they are scared of selling. Instead, they’ll disguise their feelings by usually using one of the following statements or something similar:

“I’m just not cut out to be a salesperson.”

“I’m not pushy enough to be in sales.”

“I don’t like imposing on people to get them to buy something.”

“I don’t like salespeople.”

Guess what? I understand when people say such things and I agree with all of these statements exactly. You know why? Because they’re true! I didn’t want to be “pushy” and I don’t like people who are, so if being pushy is a prerequisite for being a salesperson, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. If you have to pushy to be in the sales, then the profession will be only be left to megalomaniacs and the people devoid of a soul. The rest of us won’t have to worry much about those folks because they’ll be easy to avoid, just like meteorites and beriberi.

There is a problem with this general dislike of selling of course –

Nothing happens until someone sells something.

One of my first “real” jobs out of undergraduate school was selling lumber over the phone for a large manufacturer of wood products. I’ll never forget that the company had this big sign stretched over the main hallway of the sales department that proclaimed the above statement in big bold letters. As a budding sales professional, that sign’s message helped me overcome the Great Sales Fears and heightened the importance I felt of being a small but important cog in the giant wheel of commerce. It was much later that I realized that the sign was wrong. What it should have said was –

Nothing happens until someone helps someone else buy something.


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I came up with this reconfigured saying when, after years of sales mediocrity and even failure, I finally figured it all out. The reason why I didn’t like salespeople, the reason why I thought that salespeople tend to be pushy, and the reason that I didn’t think I was cut out to be a salesperson was because I envisioned salespeople as folks who try to bend others to their will, forcing them to do things that they actually don’t want to do. I wanted to be liked, not loathed, and so therefore I had no desire to have to pin people down in a proverbial headlock to get them to do what I want them to do. If this was what was being a sales professional was all about, then I would never like it and I would never be good at it. Thankfully, I discovered that being a successful salesperson did not mean I had to be a championship wrestler too.

What I figured out was that it was not a requirement that successful sales professionals foist themselves upon an innocent and defenseless public. Instead, real sales pros help a prospect discover their own needs and desires and then, quite logically, the pro helps the prospect by fulfilling those needs and desires. Now, I admit that I am not saying that the science and art of selling does not possesses an important component of creating dynamic tension that compels the prospect to act. We’ll describe how a sales professional uses this tension positively and constructively later in this book, but suffice it to say, helping a person make a decision that is good for them is never wrong.

So how did I discover the difference between selling be a necessary and healthy part of business relationships and disliking sales and all salespeople? How did I become successful in sales beyond just sucking it up and do what I didn’t want to do? It started with a shifting of perspective – enhancing the importance of selling and making it an admirable calling, while amputating all the undesirable slimy sales stuff. What I figured out was:

I never sell anything. Instead I help people find solutions which they gladly purchase.

The way that I personalize this statement is that “I’ve never sold anything to anyone. Rather, I’ve helped people buy millions of dollars worth of product and service solutions that have positively benefited them.” When you look at it that way, selling becomes a noble calling and not just a way to get in someone’s pocket.

So there it is – the “secret.” You can stop reading now and live a nice peaceful life right? Umm, no. As they say, the devil is in the details, and it is “how” to do this is what this book is all about.

Now before I go on, I’d like to return to the very first line of this book. You might be that person who has been in sales for eons and again think “I already know everything there is to know about selling. I’ve been selling for years. I’ll just skip all of this, take a good mental nap, answer some email, check out the sports scores, or read my magazine. No need to trouble myself with this, because I AM A SALES PROFESSIONAL.” To you, I offer the following anecdote:


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If you follow sports at all, you’d probably agree that Tiger Woods is one of the greatest golfers of all time. He has dominated his sport as few others ever have. He is known for long drives, imaginative play, clutch putting, and an iron-will mental game. Yet he still has to have a swing coach. You would think that he would be so great that he doesn’t need coaching. But yet, Tiger, like all great athletes, still has coaches to help them achieve. In fact, Peyton Manning, Kobe Bryant, Sidney Crosby, Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Serena Williams, etc, etc all have coaches. You would think their greatness would be beyond anyone’s helpful coaching but you’d be wrong.

The point is obvious. Even if you have more sales career in your rear-view mirror as opposed to your windshield, you can still learn to sale better. I invite you to add what you learn here to your personal sales weapons arsenal. If you are like me, you might find that you’ve been doing it the hard way all along. You might even find sales easier, more enjoyable and far more rewarding by learning the easy and logical concepts that I’ll put forth here.

Is “Sales” a Science and or is it an Art?

The noted sales trainer Dave Stein discussed the above question in his blog and I can do no better with my own analysis so I’ll just use his.

“I define science (in this application of the word) as the ability and willingness of a person to follow a set of processes in order to carry on the business of day-to-day selling. Examples would be formal planning, the use of checklists, dependence upon research, vigilant qualification, etc. Traditionally, people who demonstrated such behavior have been labeled left-brained.

With that in mind, then art (again, as applied to selling) is the ability to excel at such things as interpreting nuances in a customer’s behavior, effectively responding to a question with relevant examples (and diagrams), making decisions based upon gut feel, counting on instinct and acting upon hunches as a critical success factor. That’s typical right-brained behavior.

In my experience, and in the opinion of many sales experts I trust, successful business to business sales people depend on 80 to 90% science and only 10 to 20% art.

Too Much Left Brain

You might observe a person with a 95% bent toward science as being too mechanized and showing a lack of situational awareness and EQ in sales campaigns. They don’t really know what’s going on. They may also be less able to build relationships than their right-brained counterparts. Their inability to pick up on non-verbal cues or come up with creative ways to solve a customer’s


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problem would prevent them from being consistently effective. Too much left-brained behavior inhibits effective selling.

Too Much Right Brain

Someone with only 60 or 70% (or much less in many cases) of the science component is someone who is probably right-brained, and depends on spontaneous creativity, perhaps using anecdotes and diagrams to paint the vision of a solution for their prospects. They process information randomly, often with the result being the inability to prioritize.

These people would generally feel burdened by discipline and process. We’ve all heard the phrase, “Salespeople are born, not made.” The kind of person to which that characterization would apply would generally not have the level of ability and degree of credibility required to provide a reasonable degree of detail, such as quantified business benefits resulting from their product or service to a finance executive, or technical capabilities to an engineer. (Right-brainers would much prefer to improvise and summarize, leaving the details to sales engineers.)”1

As I noted above, I do agree with Mr. Stein, though not completely. I agree with his definitions and descriptions, but I disagree with the percentages and the conclusions. I’ve had successful salespeople who were wonderfully creative and disorganized slobs and there have been some who were technical geeks who knew every bolt and wire in the product. Furthermore, I have salespeople who could move a sales call along with perfect sales synchronicity, taking the client through the sales process step-by-sales step from opening to closing with such robotic precision that you would have guessed that they were reading from some “How To Sell” cookbook. So I don’t think that there is a standard percentage of science and art in selling, rather it is an individual’s own combination of intellect and panache that makes them effective. There is simply no one perfect style to get become great in sales. If this were so, someone would have bottled it, we’d all be drinking it, and getting rich selling things to each other. But you can bet that successful salespeople do some things the same way and many of those things I think you will find here.

Are successful salespeople born or made? I say both and neither. What I’m implying by this apparent contradiction is that having certain human attributes certainly helps one become a good salesperson but does not guarantee it. Of course, having an outgoing personality helps, though I’ve known reserved salespeople who did very well. Personal bravery helps conquer the Great Sales Fears, but then again, you could just learn to ignore the fears or be so compelled by need that you have to forget about them. 1 Stein, Dave, “Commentary on Sales Leadership,” http://davesteinsblog.esresearch.com/2008/06/13/sales-art-or-science/


http://davesteinsblog.esresearch.com/2008/06/13/sales-art-or-science/

http://davesteinsblog.esresearch.com/2008/06/13/sales-art-or-science/

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I contend that sales skills can be learned, otherwise why would anyone read this book or pay to attend a sales training? So for both of our sakes, I trust that practically anyone can be taught to be a good salesperson. Now, can everyone be a superstar salesperson? No and anyone telling you such is trying to sell you something! (By the way, salespeople make the best prospects because they understand buying and always put themselves into the buying mode. Unfortunately most sales targets are not sales folks). Superstardom is reserved for the bold and the fortunate, with the emphasis on the latter. In sales, it is better to be lucky than good, but best if you are both. Now this doesn’t mean you can’t make a living selling and it certainly doesn’t mean that you can’t learn to be comfortable in a sales role. Becoming comfortable with selling is important for everyone, whether you realize it or not. Here’s why.

Achieving competency in sales is a valuable attribute even if you think that you aren’t a salesperson (and instead, you are a teacher, a CPA, a homemaker, or a student) because whether you know it or not, you sell all day long, every single day, from the day you were born until the moment you leave this gigantic blue marketplace. You are forever trying to get someone to do something, so why not hone this necessary skill? This book is to help you reach a comfort zone with this part of your humanity by presenting a simple way to sell. Using what I present here will always be as comfortable as an old pair of slippers because the techniques simply reiterate skills that each of us already innately have. Thus, our goal here is to make you a competent salesperson and even a better and happier person. I hope this slim volume and the ideas shared here achieve such for you.


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Chapter 2 – WIIFM

The Five Stages of Innovation

People deny that the innovation is required. People deny that the innovation is effective. People deny that the innovation is important. People deny that the innovation will justify the effort required to adopt it. People accept and adopt the innovation, enjoy its benefits, attribute it to people

other than the innovator, and deny the existence of stages 1 to 4.

Bill Bryson, inspired by Alexander von Humboldt’s “Three Stages of Scientific Discovery.”

You have probably heard the term “WIIFM.” If so, you know that the word is an acronym and stands for “What’s In It For Me.” Today, it is a widely recognized sales maxim. I just Googled it and the search returned 47,800 results. What you didn’t know is that I invented it. Kind of amazing – me, just a normal guy, invents a term that is now used around the world. Here are the facts that support my claim to fame. Please read it and then you can decide if what I am claiming is legitimate.

In 1984, I was working for AT&T as an Account Executive. I was blowing my numbers out after doing the same the prior year. It was such a good year that I had retired my yearly quota by the end of the first quarter. Thus, this was not just a “good” year but one of those “stars-are-all-in-a-line” and a gravity-has-been-repealed kind of year. As a result of my good fortune, and because I dreamed of doing big things, I finagled a promotion to become an instructor at the company’s sales training school. In those days, the AT&T National Sales School in Aurora, Colorado was one of the corporate world’s premier training facilities. It was housed in a sleek, black glass building that seemed to spring out of the Great Plains before it slams into the Front Range. The physical place was both impressive and ominous. The former for the scholarship, the latter for the atmosphere. The sales school was very formal. For example, as part of the staff I was not allowed to leave my cubicle and walk the halls without first putting on my suit jacket. Imagine, you’re working in cubicle world in your shirt sleeves, need to go to the bathroom, but before you go (literally) you have to put on your coat on. To become an instructor was akin to Top Gun School for naval aviator – you were the best of the best. (Okay, maybe I was or maybe I wasn’t but I was there. So, if Woody Allen is right and 80% of success is just showing up, then I can count this as one of my life’s major triumphs deserved or not).


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The student instruction at the National Sales School was dead serious. Before I arrived as an instructor, I had attended the school as a student. At that time, the instructor staff had the ability to “wash out” a new sales recruit, thus ending a trainee’s career right then and there. During my matriculation, my class and I came back from lunch one day to discover one of our classmates’ possessions removed from her desk and her name card gone. She did not return to class and our instructors never mentioned her name again. It was almost as if she had never existed. I recall that my classmates and I whispered in hush tones during the break of what might have become of her, but dared not ask the instructor’s about her fate. We knew. (Imagine, you are a hiring manager, having spent many hours of interview time with your potential sales people, narrowing down the candidate field, negotiating and making the winning candidate an offer, and finally getting the new hire on board only to have a sales instructor in Colorado fire the person before they produced a single sale). So, you can imagine the atmosphere was as taut as a piano string and one could literally feel the force of the building when you entered it. No wonder the widely circulated nickname for the school was Darth Vader University, which we respectfully shortened to “DVU. “

When I arrived at DVU, the school’s primary curriculum consisted of a course for new Account Executives that lasted 10 weeks. Can you imagine! The cost must have been staggering to just have folks stay in a hotel (which was just down the street) for 10 straight weeks, not to mention the sales down time. The initial assignment I was tasked with was to develop a brand new curriculum for new hires who were selling primarily to small and medium sized businesses, what AT&T called “General Business.” The course could only last three weeks. I didn’t have the luxury of even just taking the old 10 week course and cutting it to shreds. Instead, I had to start from scratch.


This picture of DVU does not do justice to just how scary the place was to a new salesperson.

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Now if you had the challenge of emptying your all your knowledge on some subject into someone else’s head, how would you do it? Where would you begin? I remember sitting in my cubicle, staring out at snow-covered Pike’s Peak far to the south and wondering how I would surmount this mountain in front of me.

I made an easy decision – I would take what was a complex process and make it as simple as possible. For me, it was what I always did – try to simplify as much as possible. I had the advantage of having been through some of the greatest sales training classes the business world had to offer. Of course, I had been through “this-makes-hell-look-like-a-Caribbean-vacation” meat grinder of DVU as a student. I had attended the Xerox Training Center in Leesburg, VA (now called The National Training Center – a wondrous complex) where I got SPIN trained (Situation, Problem, Implication, Needs payoff – wow, it’s been 30 years since I learned that and still remember it), as well as receiving Professional Selling Skills (PSS) training. Not to mention that I had attended a passel of other sales training courses without cool names (or with names that I now don’t remember) and I had a half-dozen years of on-the-job, feet-on-the-street sales experience. I was also well-read. As sales professional I had inhaled a plethora of books about selling including all the classics – Napoleon Hill, Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, and many, many more. I had even read a lot of Norman Vincent Peale (who as a minister had a great product to sell) to get my brain tuned to Positive Thinking (which, by the way, works and we’ll incorporate a little of it here). So as I developed my new course, I wasn’t operating without some inkling of what I believed was valuable and effective. Still, I wasn’t content with just regurgitating information to my students that I had been taught in some other training course, or some book. Indeed, I had a grand vision – I really wanted to do something BIG. I wanted to give these newly minted salespeople something that was different than anything else than they had ever or would ever read or learn. I also wanted it to be more effective than any training course they would ever attend. What I really desired, above all else, was to instruct my students in a sales process that not only made sense, but would really work in the real world.

Wow! Wanting something to make sense and work doesn’t seem so revolutionary. Doesn’t all such training attempt to be logical? One would think so, but too often the motivation for sales training is really warped. Unfortunately, too many times the author or trainer of sales training is trying to do sell you something – their course, their book, or themselves. Because my job was to develop monster sales people, my intentions were very honest and pure. Besides, I had discovered some things in all my research in the sales laboratory in my head and I was determined to share it.

To start with, a great deal of the sales training that I had received before was rote, reactionary, and robotic: you say this, the prospect replies like this; then you then say the following and the prospect replies in kind etc, etc. They all made it sound like a Shakespearean


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play – “to be or not to be, that is the question. . . .” There was an obvious problem with such approaches and course work: the prospect refused to follow the script. I’d say my line just as I had been taught and the prospect wouldn’t respond the way that I expected. This meant that I could never move to the next topic and the whole process would get thrown out of kilter. I’ve always formulated the way to fix this sales course conundrum was to send the prospects through the training so they can learn how to answer the questions “correctly.” The problem was as if the prospect and I had agreed to sing a Christmas Carol and I’m singing “Silent Night” while they are singing “Jingle Bells.” Turns into a lot of useless noise.

I thought about it: “What really works when a rep is on a sales call? “ I knew an old adage that said that people will think you are a great conversationalist if you get them talking, especially about themselves or their company. Could this factoid be useful? If I could just figure out how to train salespeople to be good conversationalists and to focus the client to talk about things that our product and service might be able to positively effect. . .then we’d be onto something. So I took out a fresh, clean sheet of paper and began by outlining my new curriculum, entitling it as “General (Business) Initial Sales Training” or GIST for short. GIST had three key concepts that I thereafter began to define and refine: WIIFM, curiosity, and sales call management. We’ll take on each of these concepts in order in this and succeeding chapters.

[Note: From this point on, we are co-opting the acronym “GIST,” adapting it for our use here, and turning it into General Information Sales Technique. It’s okay because I made up the original term anyway so I’m really just borrowing from myself. This new title is more indicative of how it is being presented in this book. While the name has changed, the concepts are still the same and totally applicable].

The first, WIIFM, was the all-encompassing ideal. The theory goes well beyond simply learning the old fashioned “Can I tell you about what my product will do for you?” method of selling. WIIFM is more psychology than selling for it attempts to interpret and understand basic human motivation. When I dreamed up the concept (or so I now claim), I had just finished the book Looking Out for Number One, by Robert Ringer. It was very popular in the late 70’s and early 80’s and I remember that a story in the book resonated with me so deeply that it led me to develop WIIFM.

If I recall, the story that Mr. Ringer gave was something like this: suppose you are walking along a pathway next to a body of water – a lake or a river. A young child is playing by the water’s edge. This child is a stranger, no different than any of the myriad people that you see every day – young, old, tall, short, or small. You are alone, simply enjoying the sunshine and seemingly not possessing a care in the world. You are the only person that is near and within clear sight of the child who has slipped away from his adult supervision unnoticed.


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All of a sudden, the child loses his footing and crashes into the water. It is obvious that the water is too deep for him to touch bottom and by his thrashing, you can tell that he cannot swim. Mr. Ringer then rhetorically asked his reader “what would you do?”

The answer I gave is probably the same as yours – I’d dive in and rescue the child. You’d do it without premeditation, thought, or hesitation. We’d all do that of course!

But there is an ominous explanation for why practically everyone would react in such a way, saving this young lad. You see, according to Mr. Ringer’s hypothesis, we wouldn’t rescue the child because it was the right thing to do. We wouldn’t be jumping into the river with thoughts of heroism or unselfishness. On the contrary, Mr. Ringer pointed out, the reason we would all try to save the drowning child is because we are selfish and are thinking of ourselves! You see we aren’t saving the dying boy because it was the right thing to do. We’d save him because we wouldn’t be able to stand ourselves if we didn’t try!

To prove my point, what if you didn’t try to save the child? For some inexplicable reason, you stand there watching the drowning without getting wet. Can you imagine how many times that child falling into the water would play over and over in your mind? For even the hardest-hearted person, I think the images would dog them the rest of their lives. To avoid this insanity, we’d reactively dive right in. Only our fast processing subconscious would know that by doing this, we are not saving the child, but rather we are saving ourselves.

I sat in DVU imagining how I could incorporate Mr. Ringer’s theory into sales training. The light bulb went on – I would help teach sales people on how to get inside the prospect’s head and discover what motivates them. We would find a way to discover what the prospect was thinking when we gave our sales pitch. We would find their viewpoint, their opinion, and what mattered to them. This would arm the salesperson with the answer to the question that the prospect was asking even if that prospect wasn’t aware they were even asking it: What’s In It For Me? WIIFM.

(The final argument to my claim of authorship is that I worked for a company – AT&T – that was an acronym and believed everything else should be an acronym too. We had scads of acronyms! So it made sense to have a catchy acronym for the course that I was building and a memorable acronym for the overriding concept that the course presented).

I rest my case. I contend that I had never seen the acronym WIIFM in all the sales material that I had consumed previous to 1984. So I claim discovery. History class is now over.

“So what,” you might be thinking, “the guy invented WIIFM, didn’t trademark the term, and therefore didn’t make a dime. So what does that have to do with me?” The answer is simple: not a darn thing . . . but you just proved my point. By such a thought process, you


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conclusively demonstrated that what your really care about is you, your time, your money, your attention! (You selfish creep). WIIFM is human nature and reeks from our every pore. We are absorbed by our own self-interest and from such we cannot escape.

Now I had to figure out how to harness this innate selfishness and use it in developing sales strategy and tactics. But how? The first step was “discovering” WIIFM. The next steps then fell into place.


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Chapter 3 – A Dash of Sales Theory

The report of my death has been greatly exaggerated. Mark Twain

Every moment of our lives we are either growing or dying . . . Robert Cooper

Selling Is Dead was the title of a 2005 book by Marc Miller and Jason Sinkovitz. While the title is certainly sensational, the authors go on to point out that the truth is, in fact, contrary to the book’s title. In fact, they write, “effective and efficient selling is needed more now than ever before . . . but traditional selling strategies and roles have lost their relevance in today’s marketplace.”2 Indeed, virtual retail, in the guise of websites and therefore “virtual storefronts, has made ecommerce more popular than ever.3 Some businesses, which were amazingly successful in the “bricks-and-mortar” world, have found that their business model has been completely overhauled by competitors who utilize contemporary distribution which is unencumbered by real estate and location staffing expenses. A prime example of this is Blockbuster, which only two decades ago was a its industry bellwether, but today has been overhauled by Netflix, which uses mail and Internet streaming, and Redbox, which utilizes stand-alone, and unmanned, kiosks.4

Yet, for all the hoopla about the online revolution in selling and the demise of the personal salesperson that has always been ubiquitous, the truth is that ecommerce, while growing faster than traditional sales distribution, is hardly dominant. Illustrative of this is the 2010 Christmas purchasing season. “Cyber Monday,” which is the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday (and is thus after “Black Friday” which, as the day after the actual holiday, has been the traditional beginning of the Christmas season) in 2010 set a record for a cumulative, one-day, online sales receipts that equaled an impressive $1.028 billion.5 Yet, as a comparison, the retail giant Wal-Mart has average daily sales of $1.12 billion every day. When viewed from this angle, ecommerce’s double digit growth will take awhile to overhaul the traditional marketplace.

2 Miller, Marc T. and Sinkovitz, Jason, Selling is Dead. Wiley Publishing, 2005; pg 6. 3 O’Neill, Megan, “Facebook Ecommerce On the Rise As Social Shopping Demand Booms,” Social Times, February 25, 2011. http://www.socialtimes.com/2011/02/facebook-ecommerce/4 Chabot, Jeff, “Blockbuster brick and mortar biz dead?” hdreport, July 9, 2010. http://www.hd-report.com/2010/07/09/blockbuster-brick-and-mortar-biz-dead/5 McIntyre, Douglas, “Why E-Commerce Still Doesn’t Count,” 24/7 Wall Street, December 8, 2010. http://247wallst.com/2010/12/08/why-e-commerce-still-doesnt-count/


http://247wallst.com/2010/12/08/why-e-commerce-still-doesnt-count/

http://www.hd-report.com/2010/07/09/blockbuster-brick-and-mortar-biz-dead/

http://www.socialtimes.com/2011/02/facebook-ecommerce/

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There are many reasons why this is so: tradition dies hard, businesses who are utilizing both online and traditional sales distribution methods, and the dominant generation is not as technically savvy as their children. Still, I think that there is another reason why the era of personal selling has not ended. I call it Standard Sales Theory (or SST).

According to SST, the world of sales prospects, which is every known person in the universe, is divided into four distinct and definable groups. The reason why every person is a “prospect” is because everyone has unmet needs or unsatisfied desires, even if they are not aware of them. It’s kind of like saying everyone needs oxygen, even if we are not aware that oxygen is everywhere are that we are even breathing.

These prospect categories are reached by, and react to, marketing efforts in a certain way and thus, businesses trying to reach them must be adaptable in their methodologies. Without further ado, the SST prospect categories are:

1. Demand – This category of prospects is aware that they have a problem, challenge, need, or especially, a desire and they know, for the most part, where and how to scratch this itch. They simply pick up the phone and call you, they go online and place an order, or walk into your store and make a purchase. This reaction can be as a result of advertising or other effective marketing, out of necessity because of obsolescence, the product they use now breaks or wears out, their current provider is no longer available, or a myriad other reasons or combination thereof. This category of consumer reacts well to retail strategies because they just have to find your store, whether be real or virtual. Having solid brand awareness is also a big plus. While no one product or service will dominate here, the major players will get the lion’s share. The unfortunate thing about Demand clients is that it is a huge minority of the population. On any given day, Demand might equal to 5% of the prospect population.

2. Seeking – These are folks who know they have a problem, concern, or need but they are not sure where to find the solution. The denizens of this category will typically have a EUREKA! Moment where they realize they have indeed found what they need. This incidence of this minute of perfect lucidity might occur because of advertising (they are reading a magazine and see an ad or even just reading an article), word-of-mouth (in a conversation, someone mentions that they are using some service), trade shows, seminars, or simply browsing your store, catalog, or website when the light bulb comes on. This category tends to be dominated by the more well-known companies because of the resources they have to put into marketing. But Seekers, at best, are 15% of the population.


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3. Unaware – One of the two largest groups, this prospect truly has a need but doesn’t know it. Thus, she isn’t looking for anything because, in her mind, she doesn’t need anything! No solution has value because there is no problem that needs a solution. At least as far as the prospect is aware. In this category of prospect though, there really is a problem. Most of the time, the challenge is disguised as “just the way we do business.” The company had always done things this way or simply doesn’t realize that there is another, more efficient and totally beneficial way of doing things. Thus, the solution provider – typically a salesperson – has to educate the prospect on both the needs (and all the trouble it’s causing) and the solution (and all that good that it will do). Effective salesmanship dominates this prospect category which is approximately 35% of the population.

4. Later – This prospect really, truly has no immediate needs today. However, no one stays in this category forever because the world is always evolving. Most of the time, this is the largest category at any one, particular moment in time, roughly 45% of the marketplace. In other words, most of the time, nearly half of the market is at rest! Yet, we shouldn’t ignore these prospects just because they can’t make a buying decision today. Instead, this is where business development is most effective.

(Just a note about “business development.” I always thought that “sales” and business development” were exactly the same thing. It was only after I had a job that was truly BD that I realized the differences between the two, which is primarily the depth of scope and the range of timing. BD, for the most part, encompasses more account planning and the time frame is long-range. The way I always think about it now is that sales activity is concerned with the “here and now” while BD is more interested in the “today and tomorrow”).

I developed SST after a great deal of thought and time in the field. Why, I wondered, are some prospect amenable to me and why do potential clients seem to have some “decision timing” mechanism? I think SST explains it pretty well. While every product or service may adjust the percentages for each category, I truly believe the standards that I set out here are true for most products and services most of the time. If SST is valid, that means that “virtual retail,” that which operates without any or minimal salesperson involvement, can only address 1/5 of the market. Otherwise, you are asking the prospect to educate themselves to the development of the markets. Interestingly, they have no impetus to undertake such a quest for information because they either, in fact, don’t need anything or don’t understand that they do in fact have a need. It takes an effective salesperson to show them the way.


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Chapter 4 - It May Have Killed the Cat but It’s Great for Salespeople

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes, that way when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes. Jack Handey

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. Albert Einstein

As stated earlier, as I developed GIST, I determined that I wanted it to be “real.” I wanted my new training course to be logical, memorable, easy for anyone to learn, master-able with practice, and more than anything, effective in real life situations. The training also had to be “natural,” meaning it is an ability, or “muscle,” that we all have (but which might be weak or not used very well). This is contrary to so many other training courses that I had attended before – they all seemed great in the classroom but once you put them on the road, you quickly figured out that you had to abandon them pretty quickly. Most sales techniques that you learn feel foreign or they simply didn’t work very well. So my intention for this natural or “simple” selling technique was ambitious to say the least.

Now I mentioned SPIN before. SPIN is a world famous training technique, and thousands have used it effectively. It was developed by Neil Rackham, who also founded the sales training company Huthwaite, Inc. as a result of research done on successful selling and sales effectiveness. Though no one told me during my training (and in fact, I didn’t know until just now), was that one of the conclusions derived from this research was that most successful sales calls have a certain quality – the prospect does much of the talking. When I was SPIN-trained, no one told us why we were learning what we were learning, they only gave us the how. Discovering the outcome of this huge research project makes me feel even more confident about the principals of Natural Selling because I can say without any hesitation that this technique does have some SPIN attributes. Yet it is also different in a number of ways which will become self-evident.

“SPIN” stands for “Situation, Problem, Implication, and Needs Payoff.” For the most part, these are stages of a sales call and guide your questioning of the prospect. Ah, questioning – get that prospect talking and as much as possible! Here are short descriptions of each stage with an example.

Situation questions mostly pertain to background and what the client is doing. o Can you tell me a little about your company?o Who is your target customer market?


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o What type of software do you run for accounting?

Problem inquiries are about customer difficulties and dissatisfactions. o Do you ever have problems with customer service calls being answered quickly?o Is it frustrating to lose customers to your competition, XYZ Co.?o How easy is it to use Zazubar products?

Implication queries are the direct consequences or effects of the problems. These are important because it creates “sting,” making the prospect understand the damage and hurt that the problems are causing?

o Because you say that you cannot get to calls quickly enough, how many call abandons do you get? How many lost sales do you think that are in all those hang-ups?

o How many customers do you think you lose to XYZ?o Because Zazubar Alpha needs more preparation time, how much technician

efficiency is lost?

Needs-Payoff questions (and statements) are where the prospect perceives the usefulness and value of the solutions that we have to offer.

o How would it help if you were able to answer your customer calls more efficiently?

o If you were able to be more competitive with XYZ, how would that affect your top line sales number?

o If you found a product that would do more for your techs than the Zazubar-brand product, would you see any value in it?

I like and admire SPIN and believe that it is a technique worth studying. Furthermore, GIST certainly springs from the same basic tenet that SPIN comes from, that is, that getting the client to talk about what interests them (WIIFM) gives you the best chance to sell your product or service. Or rather, getting this client interaction means that you’ll have the best chance of having the client buy your product.

But, there were things that I don’t like about SPIN and I think I corrected in Natural Selling. Primarily, I found SPIN a tad too reliant on scripting, a bit contrived, and somewhat confrontational. Here’s what I mean.

First let’s start with scripting a call. I think planning for a sales call is de rigueur. Boy Scouts and salespeople should always be prepared. So most of the time, you already know something about the business you are visiting. If you just walked in off the street and didn’t


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have time to research formally, you should spend a second asking the receptionist or other office personnel about the business before you light up the Executive office with your presence. I was even taught to not things by the mere surroundings – the furniture, the wall coverings and displays, and the equipment that you can spy. Anyway, you walk into the decision maker’s office and you launch the Situation phase of the call. This part of SPIN I practically took whole-cloth in Natural Selling. I call this “Positioning” and we’ll compare this phase to SPIN’s Situation phase in the next chapter.

Now I can chit chat with practically anyone and I found this part of the SPIN sales call pretty easy to do. It was from this point that I ran into problems.

For me, the problem with SPIN was the “Problem” phase. There are certain expectations built in. What I mean is that in the Situation phase of the call, you are gathering information that you can convert to the Problem phase. Your knowledge and command of competitive offerings and how your (and the competitor’s) product or service is used in the prospect’s business sets up the Problems that they are having. In other words, you know that they have certain problems because anyone who does things the way that the prospect just described must have those problems. In fact, they have to have them! Here’s what I mean:

Say we are selling Apex-brand gewgaws (a fictional product . . . probably) which are characteristically red and are made of titanium. The prospect uses Zub gewgaws which are blue and are made of stainless steel. Now I know that steel gewgaws don’t tolerate the machinery heat very well and because of this, they warp. A Zub gewgaw user has to change them out (Problem) and that means downtime (Implication) and lost productivity (more Implication). Changing to Apex gewgaws will give the user back that lost productivity (Needs-Payoff) and more money to the bottom-line (more Needs-Payoff). Of course, I know about Zub’s gewgaws because Apex gives me a whole lot of competitive information for ammunition in order to displace Zub’s products, which by the way are cheaper than Apex’s gewgaws. But ours are worth the extra money. So it would seem that we are loaded for bear on this sales call and SPIN will make it all brutally apparent. Maybe.

After a nice conversation during the Situation phase of the call, I transition to the Problem phase.

Me: “So, Ms. Permutter, you tell me that you use Zub gewgaws out on the production line?”

Ms. Permutter: “That’s right. We’ve been using Zub brand as long as I can remember. We’ve always had a good relationship with Zub.”

Me: “Is that so? Do you ever have a problem with your gewgaws warping?”


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Now I know that I absolutely have her. The competitive info that I’ve read told me about the warping. Everyone knows that steel gewgaws warp. Therefore, I know she has to agree and then we’ll be talking about how much money it costs her. After that, I’ll tell her how wonderful Alpha gewgaws can fix this problem any we will be on our way to doing business.

Ms. Permutter: “No, I don’t think we ever have a problem with those blue gewgaws. They just keep on working.”

Screeching halt! Wait a second. This can’t be right because those doggone cheap Zub gewgaws do warp. I saw them in the Alpha lab and they weren’t bent like a paperclip. There must be a mistake.

Me: “Are you sure? Other clients of ours have told us that the stainless steel gewgaws warp because of the heat of the machinery and then they have to stop production to change them out.”

Ms. Permutter: “I don’t think that we’ve had the problem. If we do, it sure isn’t something that’s a big problem for us.”

One difficulty I had with SPIN was that the prospect won’t follow the script.

Next, I sometimes SPIN was a bit contrived. What I mean by that was that at times, I felt that the prospect might just lean across the table and slap me as I led them down the path of business. For example, let’s say that in the above instance that Ms. Permutter had experienced some warping. Bingo. We are now moving to the Implication stage where I might just get thrown out of the office.

Ms. Permutter: “You know, we have had Zud gewgaws warp at times.”

Me: “What happens when the warping occurs?”

Ms. Permutter: “We have to take the machine down to change them out.”

Me: “Does taking them down mean that you lose productivity?”

Ms. Permutter: “You aren’t very smart are you?”

Okay, maybe she didn’t say the last sentence. Instead she’d just look at me like I have three heads and answer yes. Then I’ll really hammer that point further by asking her how much productivity she loses and what that costs her. These are valid Implication questions no doubt. But SPIN seemed to be built for people without a brain or willing to take lots of little tiny bites out of the prospect. Of course, taking a machine apart might hurt productivity. It certainly isn’t a good thing, so don’t be so obtuse.


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Finally, I found SPIN techniques at times somewhat confrontational. Let’s take up our example again. Imagine that you walk into a Ms. Permutter’s office for the first time. You exchange pleasantries (Situation) and for the most part, that’s fine. You discover that the prospect’s grandfather started the company 75 years ago and she’s worked there 20+ years which is most of her working career. You transition to “Problem” questions as illustrated above and you start fishing for problems that are common among companies in the industry that use Zud gewgaws. You start using the word “problem” in the questions (they are “Problem” questions after all) and there lies the problem. The prospect darn well knows what you are doing and very possibly takes some offense from it. Hey, she’s worked there two decades and hasn’t “fixed” these “problems” yet in all that time. You on the other hand have been here twenty minutes and you are going to make everything that’s been wrong with the business right. You must be some kind of genius.

In conclusion, I like SPIN and there is little doubt that I learned from it – how it was taught to me and how I applied that learning in the field. Even as a field sales rep, I started utilizing and discarding different characteristics of that training yet understood that it represented a sound foundation even though it was not my style and was not textbook effective for me. There is no doubt that Natural Selling has some SPIN spun into it.

While SPIN was definitely important as I developed Natural Selling, I also tried to correct the problems that I saw in it. For example, I like Situation questions phase and formalized it into the training, helping the rep use it to focus the sales call. I then ripped out some of the formality of SPIN and other sales training that I had gotten and instead, presented more of a guideline. The difference is this: formality is strict scripting – you say this and they’ll say that. Guidelines give a framework but not the words that you parrot in the give and take of the sales call. With a very few exceptions, Natural Selling challenges the practitioner, letting their mind go free inside the framework of the technique. That framework was held together by a single, human characteristic – curiosity.

When you call on someone, aren’t you curious about who they are and what they do? Maybe you’d like to know how they do things, why they do things that way, and what their goals and struggles are in performing work they way they do. Of course, the reason you are there as a salesperson is to find out what would make them change their business. In addition, if you could find a reason for them to change – WIIFM – what would the timing and circumstances be in making such a change. See there’s the difference between Natural Selling and a lot of other selling concepts. I’m not suggesting that you learn how to corner and catch a prospect, and certainly not how you spew on and on about your superior product or service (which is how a lot of us try to sell things. Just because the raisin cookies you’re selling have more plump raisins in it may not be a good thing for me because I might be allergic to raisins.


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Thus that feature that you think so much of might actually kill me). The reason why people dislike sales is just because of these shop-worn techniques and I suggest you drop them off in the nearest garbage can.

Instead, all of this focused curiosity, which is satisfied by questioning, allows you to discover the prospect’s WIIFM and transforms the Natural Selling user from suspected pushy salesperson to and honest-to-goodness valuable resource. To do this we need to free your curiosity and get you asking questions.

“Wait just a minute,” you say. “I already ask a lot of questions the way I sell now.”

That’s probably true. Practically every sales training system has at least a component of questioning in them. The problem is that most of the questions you have been taught entail “steering” your prospect toward a product or service-oriented presentation. In other words, your questions are filled with “what competing product do you use now” or “how much do you spend on doing such-and-such?” The prospect does not see these inquiries as good faith questions. Rather, your potential buyer will see this as a method of manipulation and as such, will rise up to defeat you in the game of sales. If they give you any information as a result of this type of questioning, it will be reluctantly and furthermore, you’ll just be creating a relationship that both of the parties see as an attempt to get into the buyer’s pocketbook. Not good.

GIST is different. The sales experience should include a “me versus them” mentality. The practitioner shouldn’t feel that way and neither should the prospect. Imagine instead that GIST is creating an atmosphere whereby you remove the “desk boundary” between you and your prospect and that you are now sitting next to them, truly helping them! Yes, you are asking questions alright, but these may not, seemingly, have anything to do with your product or service capabilities. The line of questioning is therefore based on your own innate human curiosity. This curiousness leads to the questions – lots and lots of questions.

Remember how a young child questions everything about their world? “What is that?” “Why does it work that way?” “How does it do that?” It is said that children make good salespeople because they wear you down and refuse to take no for an answer. It may also be true that they would make good salespeople because they ask a lot of questions. GIST flashes you back to your childhood abilities.

An example,

Me: Ms. Permutter, how long have you been running Permutter Printing?


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Ms. P: Nearly 20 years. My husband and I started this company together. He passed away a couple of years ago and I’ve run it ever since.

Me: I wonder how long I’d last working with my wife (sighing)?

Ms P: (Laughing), it wasn’t always easy!

Me: Being in business for 20 years, how do you acquire new customers?

Ms P: Well, having been around as long as we have, our clients trust us with their business and recommend their friends to use us too. We also have two sales people who service our current clients and prospect for new ones.

Me: What would be your average time to complete an order?

Ms P: Depends what it is. We can turn most jobs in a couple of days if we have the stock to produce it. If an order has something special in it, it might take as long as two weeks.

Me: Do you ever get rush orders?

Ms P: Of course. We do the best we can with those of course.

Me: Do you ever have to say “no” to business?

Ms P: From time to time. Not very often though.

Me: You know other printing firms that I’ve dealt with have said the same thing. They always point to the need to reset equipment and scheduled maintenance as the thing that stretches delivery times. Is that true for you?

Ms P: Of course. We can’t do everything for everyone. But we try our best.

Me: I’ve been told that switching gewgaws out is a time consuming maintenance project. How does that work for Permutter?

Ms P: Well we do have some problems with them from time to time.

Me: I understand that steel gewgaws can sometimes warp.

Ms. P: They do and that causes downtime. We do the best we can to schedule that maintenance in off-hours.


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As you can see from the exchange above, I simply was curious about the business and how they acquired customers. We might have gone in all types of directions within this scenario. As it played out, I could go in a number of different ways:

1. I could ask her to estimate how much business she might not get because of gewgaw downtime (this is what is called “making it really hurt”), or

2. I could ask her if she knew anything about titanium gewgaws; or3. Or I could explain the advantage of titanium gewgaws and then ask if she sees

any value in them (this is called “testing feasibility” which we will discuss further).

Did I know where I was going when I started the line of questioning? Well, I knew where I wanted to go, but didn’t really care how I got there. Believe it or not, having a destination without a map will still get you where you want to go.

Could I have waltzed in, just asked her if she use Zud gewgaws and gave her the pitch on how much money she is losing by doing so? Wouldn’t that be just getting to the point? After all, anyone who uses Zud is a damn fool and is losing money. So she has to have Apex-brand! She has to buy. It only makes sense.

The answer to that of course is yes, you could do that. Many sales folks work just that way (or a tamer version which includes exchange pleasantries and then getting to the point). This technique would certainly be quicker and actually might work . . . sometimes. Then again, you might end up putting Ms. Permutter on the defensive and losing what should be an easy sell. The difference is that when you take the shortcut, you are selling. When I’m using GIST, I am being providing benefits. I’m not selling anything; instead the prospect is buying something.

I admit that this freeform nature is the strength and the weakness of GIST. The pwer of the technique is in its total flexibility. The sales/buying experience becomes collaborative between the salesperson and the prospect. When two folks are working toward the same goal – the exploration of value – then a true win-win proposition is established.

Of course, the weaknesses of this flowing nature are also many, but primarily it is this: free-flowing information exchange can meander with no real direction and thus the parties get mired minutia. The parties never discover value because they can’t even figure out what they just spoke about. So, to combat this, many salespeople will listen to the seductive call of what is disingenuously called the “shortcut” or simply reversion back to “I got a product here and here’s why you should buy it.” Yes, a weakness of GIST is that you, as a practitioner, decide that you’ve heard enough from the prospect and that now they are primed and ready to be “sold.” It is then that the sales rep believes that it is high time that you stop beating around the bush! Buy my stuff! “Besides,” the rep thinks, “all this questioning demands just too much attention,


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is confusing, takes too long, and besides, is hard work. “ Thus, the sales rep takes a shortcut, after all, the prospect is telling you what they want and you can fill this need. Just tell them “you got just what they need” and sling the paperwork across the table.

Don’t do it!

When one caves in and takes the shortcut, that person transforms from a value-adding resource to a mere salesperson, like every other Tom, Dick, and Jane. A traditional salesperson’s purpose being present is not only self evident, but the prospect and everyone else know it: you are here to sell something. You are not a partner and you are no longer a consultant. You are just there, either to take and order or to get into someone’s pocket.

Now you might ask, “what’s so bad about that? I have to make a living!” Practically every salesperson from time immemorial has done it just that way. It’s a game that we all play, the “selling game,” where the rep is the hunter and the prospect is the prey. Sometimes the hunter wins, sometimes the deal gets away. Right?

But what if I told you that using GIST makes selling more fun? With GIST, you learn and care about your prospects, and because they sense that you are not stalking them but instead, that you have their best interest at heart, they’ll start caring about you too. Indeed, using GIST means that you can actually have a longer and broader relationship with your clients and doing business with you becomes a pleasure, not a contest. With the techniques learned here and through practice and study, you become a true resource – someone that gets more business, is more successful, and someone that your client’s recommend to others.

So the choice is – learn GIST and thrive or sell the old way and maybe you’ll have dinner tonight. Which will it be?


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Chapter 5 - PIG

The secret to success is being sincere; and once you learn to fake sincerity, you got it made. Jean Giraudoux

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Ronald Reagan

An inquiry is any process that has the aim of augmenting knowledge, resolving doubt, or solving a problem.6 Sounds like an excellent way to motivate someone to buy something from you.

In the last chapter, I gave you an overview of GIST - that its general purpose is to harness your genuine interest in the needs of the prospect, which are discovered by asking questions (and harnessing your natural curiosity), and then creating value by applying what you learn about the prospect’s business and relating it back to your product or service. Whew. Well that sounds pretty darn easy so good luck with all that.

Of course, it’s not easy otherwise everyone would be doing it this way. As stated earlier, a weakness of GIST is that all those questions and all those answers which lead to more questions, etc. In order to keep track of all this shared information, there has to be some type of framework, some guide that keeps the whole sales call on track. There’s good news, I have just the thing for you. You have to utilize PIG.

PIG stands for Positioning and Information Gathering and, quite simply, it is the sales call structure that a GIST-using value-added representative uses. C’mon, you have to use something. You didn’t think that you could just show up and starting spouting off a ton of questions. They’ll think you’ve lost your mind. So before you haul off doing your best imitation of a trial attorney, you have to learn how to bring the pork.

A note before we begin. The PIG sales call structure is adaptable, just like the whole GIST concept. Now let’s think about all that wonderful sales theory that we addressed in an earlier chapter. Obviously, if the prospect has called us to come over and talk to him about our product or service (“Demand”), the PIG call will look differently than if the prospect was nice enough to see us but doesn’t think that there is a problem that we can address (“Unaware”). We’ll address some of the different permutations here but leave it up to you on how to craft the PIG call to meet the particular situation you are in.

6 Wikipedia


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A. Positioning

First off all “positioning” is the introduction to the sales visit whereupon the sales professional explains the reason why they are filling the prospects time and just as importantly, why the prospect should be happy to invest such. This part of the sales call can easily be rehearsed and most sales people use a variation of positioning today in what is commonly called “the elevator speech” or “elevator pitch.” This speech comprises a brief description of one’s product or service and the value that the prospect would find in it. We’ll delve deeper into the pitch in a moment. Suffice it to say that positioning goes beyond simply a short attention-grabbing repartee, and instead it is a combination of impression, interest-generating and insightful remarks, and the beginning of the value-added exercise that encompasses GIST. The elevator speech is just a part of it.

Of course, even before you start downloading your elevator pitch, you have to make a good first impression. Studies have shown that a positive impression has to be accomplished in just seven seconds.7 How fast is seven seconds? The world record for the 100 meter dash is just over nine and a half seconds so your first impression is sitting at the finish line waiting for those guys. So because time is so fleeting, we need to be very careful with it. Dress appropriately for the meeting, with the rule being to dress “one notch” above how your target prospect dresses. Examples: if the prospect wears jeans, where an open-collar dress shirt and nice pants; if they were such business casual, you wear a tie and no jacket. (Similarly, if you are a woman, please follow the same rule appropriately). Be neatly groomed and avoid anything about you that stands out above what you are there to talk about. In other words, don’t wear wild jewelry, don’t go for a crazy hair styles or unorthodox hair color, and don’t wear revealing clothing. This, you might be thinking, sounds preposterous. “Why can’t I maintain my individual style,” you might be mumbling to yourself. “I can only be who I really am.” The reason that you might not be able to utilize your distinct sense of style is because your prospect will be distracted by these things and not listen what you are there to say. She’ll be thinking “hey I like those earrings” or “why did he get so many tattoos?” You can be who you want to be all day on your off hours. If you want to make a living in sales, you have to work it. You wouldn’t want to become a skydiver who refuses to wear a parachute because it’s not the canopy color clashes with your jumpsuit do you?

In fact, I was even taught to avoid fragrances. I don’t want to have the prospect thinking about my scent. Besides what if he or she is allergic to my aftershave? There goes that prospect. Also, use good posture, introduce yourself clearly and use the prospect’s name in a sentence as soon as possible so you’ll remember it. Bottom line – present yourself as a total professional and don’t do anything to distract from your message.7 Patrick Dorsey, “Get A Job”, quoting a New York University’s Stern Graduate School of Business study. http://getajob-tips-for-getting-hired.blogspot.com/2011/04/7-seconds-to-stronger-first-impression.html


http://getajob-tips-for-getting-hired.blogspot.com/2011/04/7-seconds-to-stronger-first-impression.html

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Next, we are about to speak and we say something cogent. The first words out are – surprise – chit chat.

That’s right, just happy banter. So we’ve worked our magic to get this small slice of time with someone we hope to do business with, we’ve dressed in clothes that are not all about style, and like a kitty, we don’t smell at all. Now we are going to talk about what, the weather? Well maybe, it all depends. If within those first seconds you recognize you are in the midst of a pleasant person, then, by all means engage them. Such shows that you are human. Talk about one of their pictures on the wall, their autographed baseball, the traffic, the weather, the offices, or anything at all. But warning – this should be natural. When I first started teaching this concept, I used the idea of a mythical mounted trophy fish to start a conversation. Then, when we started practicing, everyone started with a query about the fish. Ugh! So, the rule in this first part of positioning, where you break the ice with friendly chat, is not to make it too “fishy.”

Next, why should this person listen to you? If you are from a recognizable company, this task is much easier. For example, if you work for a Fortune 500 company, the prospect will probably already be familiar with your company and what you do, at least in general terms. If you not from such a firm, you’ll want to give this person a quick outline on your company. No more than a couple of sentences – a half a minute in real time.


Documents

The Gist of Selling