People Buy You

The Real Secret to what Matters Most in Business

Jeb Blount

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470646823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Vertrieb

The ultimate guide to relationships, influence and persuasion in 21 st century business.

What is most important to your success as a sales or business professional? Is it education, experience, product knowledge, job title, territory, or business dress? Is it your company's reputation, product, price, marketing collateral, delivery lead times, in stock ratios, service guarantees, management strength, or warehouse location? Is it testimonials, the latest Forbes write up, or brand awareness? Is it the investment in the latest CRM software, business 2.0 tools, or social media strategy?

You could hire a fancy consulting firm, make the list longer, add some bullet points, put it into a PowerPoint presentation, and go through the whole dog and pony show. But at the end of the day there will be only one conclusion… None of the above! You see, the most important competitive edge for today's business professionals cannot be found on this list, your resume, or in any of your company's marketing brochures.

If you want to know the real secret to what matters most in business, just look in the mirror. That's right, it's YOU. Do these other things matter? Of course they do, but when all things are equal (and in the competitive world we live in today, things almost always are) People Buy You.

Your ability to build lasting business relationships that allow you to close more deals, retain clients, increase your income, and advance your career to rise the top of your company or industry, depends on your skills for getting other people to like you, trust you, and BUY YOU.

This break-through book pushes past the typical focus on mechanics and stale processes found in so many of today's sales and business books, and goes right to the heart of what matters most in 21 st century business. Offering a straight forward, actionable formula for creating instant connections with prospects and customers, People Buy You will enable you to achieve a whole new level of success in your sales and business career. You'll discover:

• Three relationship myths that are holding you back
• Five levers that open the door to stronger relationships that quickly increase sales, improve retention, increase profits and advance your career
• The real secret to making instant emotional connections that eliminate objections and move buyers to reveal their real problems and needs
• How to anchor your business relationships and create loyal customers who will never leave you for a competitor
• How to build your personal brand to improve your professional presence and stand-out in the market place

People Buy You is the new standard in the art of influence and persuasion. Few books have tackled the subject of interpersonal relationships in the business world in such a practical and down-to-earth manner, breaking what many perceive as a complex and frustrating process into easy, actionable steps that anyone can follow.

1

From Information to Empathy

What is most important to your success as a sales or business professional? Is it education, experience, product knowledge, job title, territory, or business dress? Is it your company’s reputation, product, price, marketing collateral, delivery lead times, in stock ratios, service guarantees, management strength, or warehouse location? Is it testimonials, the latest Forbes write up, or brand awareness? Is it the investment in the latest CRM software, business 2.0 tools, or social media strategy? Is it your education, experience, work ethic, geography, business-card color, or connections?

You could hire a fancy consulting firm, make the list longer, add some bullet points, put it into a Power-Point presentation, and go through the whole dog and pony show. But at the end of the day there will be only one conclusion . . . None of the above! You see, the most important competitive edge for today’s business professionals cannot be found on this list, your resume, or in any of your company’s marketing brochures.

If you want to know what your single most powerful competitive edge is, just look in the mirror. That’s right, it’s you. Do these other things matter? Of course they do, but these are just tickets that give you access to the game. When all things are equal—and in the competitive world we live in today they almost always are—people buy you. Your ability to build lasting business relationships that allow you to close more deals, retain clients, increase your income, and advance your career to rise to the top of your company or industry, depends on your skills for getting other people to like you, trust you, and BUY YOU.

When you fully accept and adopt the People Buy You philosophy, your confidence will go up and you will perform at a higher level. You realize how very powerful you can be as a business and sales professional because, for the first time, you will understand just how much you are in control of your destiny. You are no longer tied to old paradigms. Things that you once believed important are pushed to the wayside. Now you know what really matters most in business is how well you do in getting others to like you, trust you, and believe in you. Once you wake up to the reality that people buy you, real success and achievement are within your grasp.

The Light Bulb Goes Off

I first sketched the outline for this book on a napkin while having lunch with a friend in San Francisco. We’d been discussing how utterly complicated most sales books and training had become over the past decade. As students of the sales profession, my friend and I had read hundreds of books on sales and business. As the publisher of the most visited sales web site on the planet, SalesGravy.com, I receive several new business books to review each week. It seems to me that each author tries to one-up the last with a new approach for sales and business success. I am continually amazed at the plethora of sales books, systems, and programs that claim to be the newest and greatest at helping sales professionals close more business, small business people reach nirvana by becoming big business people, leaders develop winning teams, and individuals build better careers. It is astonishing how confusing some of these books have made the process of doing business. The myriad new schemes more often than not ignore the basic principles of human interaction that drive everything in our lives.

My first sales manager taught me that selling is governed by basic rules and principles. While we worked together on complex, multi-million dollar deals, he coached me to focus intently on these basics at all times. Our closing percentage was among the highest in our industry, because we stuck to the basics. Over my 20 years as a sales professional, I have rarely strayed from these basics. Whenever I did, I was quickly reminded, by the gravitational force of failure, not to do it again. I know from experience as a sales professional, sales manager, and senior executive that it is enticing to think there is a magic pill solution to success. However, in business, it takes a keen and unwavering focus on the basics to sustain success year in and year out.

Twenty-First Century Trends

Some of the complexity and one-upmanship is being driven by three major trends: technology, communication, and specialization. Technology and communication have transformed and streamlined organizations, especially in larger companies. The art of business known to yesterday’s generations is rapidly being replaced by a sleek process and system-driven science. Technology, communication, and specialization have forever altered the speed of business.

However, the major problem facing businesses today is that the pendulum of focus has swung too far toward technology, process, and systems, and too far away from the interpersonal skills. Many organizations have jettisoned the basics in favor of fads or focused so much on process and systems they have forgotten that, at the core, business is just one person helping to solve another person’s problem. The irony is that huge investments have been made in technology, communication, and systems for the express purpose of giving their sales professionals and frontline employees more time with customers, their support staff more time to spend collaborating with each other, and their leaders more time to spend with employees. It seems counterintuitive to me that companies would invest to give their people more time to spend with other people while turning their backs on teaching the basics of interpersonal relationships.

The trend toward specialization also got my attention. Today more than ever, business professionals have become specialists in their fields and industries. Although there is still crossover, there is much less than in the past. For example, it is very difficult for someone in software sales to move into medical-device sales on a whim. With the trend toward specialization, business professionals have to rely more on their personal brands and relationships than at any other time in recent history. Their ability to rise, and stay at the top of their industry and specialization will depend on their flexibility to grow and adjust with industry changes, to embrace technology and process, and, most importantly, to build lasting relationships. Building, fostering, and tapping into your network, or who, to achieve your career goal is one of the foundational themes in Bob Beaudine’s ground-breaking book, The Power of Who. With training organizations focused so completely on systems and process, who will teach the next generation of business people how to connect relationship skills to business process?

Meet Tim Sanders

Then I met Tim Sanders, the author of The Likeability Factor. I had the unique opportunity to listen to his dynamic and engaging speech about likeability. It moved me to action. Tim had it right! The more likable you are, the greater the probability that you will be happier, healthier, and have more friends and success. As a sales professional, I instantly began considering how his L-Factor could be applied to the business of getting and keeping customers. What was the implication to twenty-first century sales professionals? And, for that matter, what was the implication for all business professionals?

I believe at the granular day-to-day level, business is just one person solving another person’s problems. Those one-on-one interactions repeated millions of times, at all levels, each day are the gears that drive business and the economy. Nowhere is this concept more important than in sales. Sales is pretty simple: solve your customer’s problem and they will buy your solution.

Thinking about business in this light was the tipping point for the People Buy You project. I realized that in the twenty-first century, interpersonal relationships are more important than at any other time in our history. The paradox of technology is that it has removed barriers that for so long made communication slow, cumbersome, and expensive, while it has erected barriers that inhibit interpersonal interaction. In many ways we have moved into an era of instant communication and delayed response. Technology has removed the need to actually speak to other people or even meet with others face to face. These changes in the way we communicate have made it necessary for business professionals to learn and adopt new skills for building relationships, and they have placed more value on traditional relationship-building strategies.

A New Paradigm—from Information to Empathy

From the moment we entered the Information Age in the 1980s, process has been valued over people. The Internet and its accompanying technology wrung productivity out of every business process and system. As productivity per worker increased, so did our prosperity. As barriers to communication improved, we were then able to move the repetitive tasks that could be systematized overseas, where low wages helped boost profits even more. In less than two decades we removed human interaction from many of our day-to-day activities! Just consider how online banking and stock trading have changed the way we interact with our financial institutions. Along the way, customer service deteriorated at many companies as the service functions were moved online or overseas. You only need to reach a customer-service representative in another country who reads preapproved copy, like a robot, from her computer screen instead of actually helping you, to know how far the pendulum has swung.

Daniel Pink points out this phenomenon in his bestselling book, A Brand New Mind. He makes the case that workers who have the ability to be empathetic and interact with others will have the competitive and economic edge in the coming decades. Like Sanders and Beaudine, Pink makes us aware of the value of human interaction to our own success in both business and life.

We know intuitively that pendulums swing. Once the pendulum reaches its apex on one side, it stalls and rapidly gains momentum toward the other side. Now that the pendulum has reached its apex on the process side, human interaction, empathy, and interpersonal skills (previously devalued) are the new competitive edge for business and sales professionals. Jobs that can be boiled down to process have been shipped to other countries where cheap labor and technology do the work at a lower cost. The jobs that are left require human interaction and empathy. This is one of the reasons I continue to believe that sales is the most recession-proof and lucrative profession on earth.

What’s the Point?

The objective of this book is simple. I want you to understand how important your ability to get others to like you, trust you, and buy you is to your future. Understand, though, that People Buy You is not about selling yourself. That is an old cliché, which, unless you are in the sex trade, is virtually meaningless. People Buy You is about interacting with others in a way that helps them get what they want so that you get what you want. It is about connecting with others for the express purpose of uncovering and solving their problems.

In this book you will not find long diatribes about human psychology and behavior. There won’t be lessons on neuro-linguistic programming or understanding the intricacies of body language and facial expressions. I won’t be quoting from textbooks about the studies of famous scientists. I will not provide tricks for manipulating others. This book is about action. It is about reality and the real world. People Buy You is a practical guide that will teach you easy, no nonsense steps that will instantly change how you are perceived by others, help you to develop lasting relationships, become more influential and persuasive, and ultimately allow you to gain the business success you deserve.

2

Friends Buy from Friends and Other Urban Myths

In sales and business there are a number of beliefs and clichés about relationships that are simply hyperbole. Trainers, sales managers, speakers, and authors love to use these sayings because they sound good and have been widely accepted as truth. As I explained in the first chapter, People Buy You is based on reality. The skills, concepts, and techniques taught in this book are actionable and can be employed immediately. No fluff. No feel good concepts that can’t be executed in the real world. So before going further, I want to dispel three common relationship myths that are pervasive in sales and business and may be holding you back.

Myth #1: Friends Buy from Friends

In my early 20s I was hired by a company to be a sales representative. It was a commission only, business-to-consumer sales job that had very high turnover. But I was young, eager, and broke, so as I sat in the training room with the other new recruits, I couldn’t wait to get started. Besides, because I was working my way through college, a sales job that allowed me to set my own hours and earn unlimited income seemed like a dream come true.

Our trainer was a guy named Jerry. He was fun and energetic. His job was to teach us the company’s sales system, get us fired up, and send us out to sell. Within 30 days, the vast majority of our group would grow tired of the rejection, hit the wall, and quit. Jerry didn’t tell us this fact. He told us that if we followed the system he taught us, we would soon be printing money.

Toward the end of our training, Jerry announced that we would have a special guest. The number one sales guy of all time was making a special trip to our class to share his secrets. All the young faces around me lit up. We all sat up in our seats and grabbed pen and paper. We were ready for the secrets to success.

Herb was a short, pudgy man who wore a cheap gray suit with brown scuffed-up shoes. To a 20-year-old, he looked ancient. He stood before our class and looked us over for a few minutes and said nothing. We were in awe. There before us was the man who, according to Jerry, had broken every company record for sales. Herb delivered pleasantries: the best looking class of new salespeople he had seen in a long time, good to have us in the company, we would all do well. Then a serious look crossed his face and with a deep southern drawl he said, “Boys (there were no women dumb enough to sign up for this job), people often ask me why I’m so successful. I always tell them two things and you can take this to the bank. First, you’ve got to work hard. If you don’t work hard you ain’t gonna make any money. Second, and this is important (he paused for effect), friends buy from friends.” And that was it. Herb’s secret to success for selling replacement windows and siding was to work hard and sell to your friends.

The next day Jerry officially graduated us from sales training class. We all hit the streets looking for prospects. I remembered what Herb said so I called my friends and my parents’ friends. A week later I was out of friends. It turned out none of them needed replacement windows or siding. I learned the lesson that countless real-estate agents, insurance agents, stock brokers, and network marketers have learned: only sometimes do friends buy from friends. Most times they do not, and it sure is easy to run out of friends or, more likely, watch them run from you.

Now some sales trainers say, “You just have to go out and make more friends.” Well, I’ve got news for you, making new friends is not easy. It is inefficient and, frankly, you can only manage a finite number of friends in your life. Though it is true that your friends can and will help you get what you want, the vast majority of people you deal with in business will not, and never will be, your friends. If you want to succeed in business, you have to get the people who are not your friends to buy from you, too.

Myth #2: People Buy from People They Like

Several years later I attended a sales training class with a new company. I had just been hired as a sales representative selling business-to-business services. Our trainer stood before the class and exclaimed, “Just remember, people buy from people they like!” I wrote that down on an index card and taped it over my desk in the sales bullpen. Several weeks later a large prospect with whom I had developed a good relationship informed me that I...