This word cloud, a linguistic MRI of our brains contemplating sales, captures a common view. Selling makes many of us uncomfortable and even a bit disgusted.
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Similarityâthe genuine, not the manufactured, varietyâis a key form of human connection.
As a result, framing a sale in experiential terms is more likely to lead to satisfied customers and repeat business. So if youâre selling a car, go easy on emphasizing the rich Corinthian leather on the seats. Instead, point out what the car will allow the buyer to doâsee new places, visit old friends, and add to a book of memories.
Sales and theater have much in common. Both take guts. Salespeople pick up the phone and call strangers; actors walk onto the stage in front of them.
Every circumstance in which we try to move others by definition involves another human being. Yet in the name of professionalism, we often neglect the human element and adopt a stance thatâs abstract and distant. Instead, we should recalibrate our approach so that itâs concrete and personalâand not for softhearted reasons but for hardheaded ones.
Reading a CT scan alone in a room is abstract and distant. Reading a CT scan when a photograph of the patient is staring back at you makes it concrete and personal. In both traditional sales and non-sales selling, we do better when we move beyond solving a puzzle to serving a person.
But the value of making it personal has two sides. One is recognizing the person youâre trying to serve, as in remembering the individual human being behind the CT scan. The other is putting yourself personally behind whatever it is that youâre trying to sell.