Have you ever lost your objectivity with a prospect or customer?
- Don't get emotionally involved.
- Do maintain your objectivity.
- Do understand, and plan for, the human dynamics you will encounter.
Buying is inevitably an emotional experience for the prospect. And selling is, all to often, an even more emotional experience for the salesperson.
Why can emotion be such a problem for the salesperson? Because getting emotionally involved in a selling situation can cloud your thinking. Here's how it starts: You begin to believe you are moving toward the close. Then you feel exhilarated. Then you get careless. Then you miss something. And somehow the sale slips away. Unfortunately, this is not at all an unusual chain of events!
To get an idea of the importance of keeping your composure and maintaining your objectivity, consider the relationship between a psychiatrist and his patient. During a session, the patient suddenly leaps to his feet, grabs a letter opener from the psychiatrist desk, and screams, "I'm going to kill you!"
Faced with this situation, the good psychiatrist does not cry out, in response, "Why me?"
Instead, he maintains an objective view of the situation, and asks himself, "Now, why is this person acting this way?" He then responds, "Tom, you're obviously upset. Before you lunge at me and do something you're sure to regret, can we talk about what's upsetting you? Perhaps there's a better way to deal with whatever you're feeling. Are you open to finding out?"
The "Why me?" response is in fact the most likely to get the psychiatrist killed. The objective response is the most likely to save his life.
You, too, must keep maintaining an objective view of the selling situation. Save your emotional enthusiasm for after the sale. During the selling process, take a "third-party" position. Look at what is going on as though you were an observer at the selling event. The buyer (your prospect) and the seller (you) are the players. You are the director!
Guide your own behavior
To be an effective professional seller, you must have an understanding of human dynamics, and you must learn to use that understanding to guide your own behavior and actions toward the best possible outcome for yourself and your prospect. That may require you to act differently with a prospect than you normally would. Again: Give the prospect any personality he or she wants! (See also Rule #41, There Are No Bad Prospects, Only Bad Salespeople.)
If you are working with a "big picture" person - you will have to focus on the grand vision, just as your prospect does, and you will have to make sure that high-level issues are given prominence over procedural details that you know this person will be bored with (and end up handing off to others). On the other hand, if you are working with a perpetual "fact-checker," you will want to "play the part" of the salesperson who knows how to dot every "i" and cross every "t."
Your interaction with the prospect - from the moment you say "hello" to the moment the contract is signed, and in all the moments that follow - will inevitably be governed by certain "rules of engagement." It is your job to discover the rules, which will be unique to each relationship. Think of the job of identifying and following those rules they way you would think of the job of giving a great performance in a Broadway play - a performance where you, the leading actor, happen to have all the knowledge, credentials, and experience, of a great psychiatrist. That background could come in handy if your costar should ever start behaving erratically.
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