Archives for February 2011

How easily are we swayed by others? In sales, we try to influence or persuade our customers to use our products. Yet we often encounter misperceptions and misunderstandings, either about our products or our competition in the mind of our customers. It’s been said that our customer’s perception is their reality. I recently read about a study done in the 1950s that showed how powerful those perceptions can be. Dr. Solomon Asch did ...

It’s been said that business success is 75% people skills and 25% technical skills. Nowhere is this more evident than in sales. However, few if any sales reps receive training on how to build business relationships with those people with whom they do not naturally connect. If people skills are so important, why aren’t more companies providing this kind of critical training for their sales reps when we know we don’t naturally connect with but 25% of the people we meet?

We are just beginning to realize how powerful story telling can be. Most of us probably are not consciously aware that the majority of our conversations could be classified as sharing stories. Think about what you do when you get together with friends. You listen to them tell you about an experience they had or what happened to them when…basically you are listening to stories. Telling stories is the best way to engage us—to capture ...

“There is a big difference between a green sofa and an overstuffed chair with arms that come up to your ears when you sink into it with a child in your lap.” [Dave Lakhani. Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want]. Yes, there is a big difference between forming a mental image in your brain about this comfortable chair and paying no attention at all to the ‘green sofa’. Yet in selling, it seems we often forget the power of w...