{"id":10537,"date":"2017-01-26T14:19:23","date_gmt":"2017-01-26T14:19:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sandler.dsstaging2.com\/case-study\/are-you-willing-change-your-selling-behaviors\/"},"modified":"2022-10-18T16:03:16","modified_gmt":"2022-10-18T16:03:16","slug":"are-you-willing-change-your-selling-behaviors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sandler.com\/blog\/are-you-willing-change-your-selling-behaviors\/","title":{"rendered":"Are You Willing to Change Your Selling Behaviors?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In his recent book, Change or Die, author Alan Deutschman claims that although we have the ability to change our behavior, we rarely do.  In fact, the odds are nine-to-one that when faced with a dire need to change, we won\u2019t.  Most smokers who are presented with a wealth of scientific data on the dangers of tobacco do not quit smoking.  Our beliefs are what we feel in our gut and those beliefs are hard to change; we spent a lifetime developing and defending them.  This explains why providing information rarely changes how people think or act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This also explains why your best presentation may have absolutely no positive effect on your prospect\u2019s desire to buy.  And finally, this phenomenon explains why most salespeople keep shoveling information, features, benefits, and fancy presentations at prospects, even though those tactics don\u2019t cause people to buy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Albert Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge because people see the world through their imagination, not through facts and figures.  Deutschman says the same thing in a different way, using terms like ideologies, conceptual frameworks, and belief systems.  Whatever you call them, these are the mental structures that shape how we view the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somewhere along the way, early in our sales careers, we come to view the selling world as a place where we must convince buyers to love our stuff by providing them with information, facts, figures, and compelling reasons to buy.  Traditional sales training reinforces this notion by emphasizing the presentation as the most important step in the sales process.  Somehow we forget that WE never bought anything based on a presentation; we buy things because we want them or need them, not because a sales person tells us they\u2019re great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would you like to make more sales?  Try to make this change to your selling behavior: STOP talking about your features and benefits and STOP dumping extraneous information, brochures, and fancy PowerPoints on prospects.  Wait as long as you can to tell the prospect anything about your company, your product, or your service.  Spend the first fifteen minutes talking about the prospect.  Find out his problems, concerns, fears, and desires.  Make your process about your prospect, not about you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now the problem with that is what we\u2019ve already said, it\u2019s not easy to change ingrained habits.  First of all, it\u2019s hard to resist the temptation to impress our prospects with our knowledge, even though we know, intellectually, that people are not impressed with knowledge.  Secondly, when a prospect asks a question, we believe that it\u2019s our duty to provide an immediate, detailed answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deutschman\u2019s answer to making a difficult behavioral change is a three-fold process:<\/p>\n\n\n\n