1
The harsh reality facing sales professionals
Selling has always been a challenging profession. In sales your success, or lack thereof, is always obvious. Either you succeed in bringing in the business and hit your target or quota â or you donât.
It is easier to measure and manage the performance of people in sales than in any other profession. If you arenât making your numbers you feel the heat!
We live and work within a capitalist system. Competitive markets are one of the key components of capitalism. In a capitalist society competition in business is a fact of life, and history shows that competition tends to increase and get more intense. For those of us in the sales profession, an increasingly challenging commercial environment is the reality we have to live with.
And then there are other factors that are adding to the challenge that sales professionals face:
- Economic downturns have hit businesses hard. The effects of recessions last long after an economy starts to recover. Businesses that have become more financially cautious as a result of tough economic times do not always release the purse strings. Many learn to manage with less expenditure than they did previously and decide to keep it that way.
- The rise of globalization with the economic growth of countries such as Brazil, Russia, India and China has introduced new competition into Western markets.
- Products (and companies) are constantly being replaced by more effective or cheaper alternatives. Economist Joseph Schumpeter (1950) referred to this as a process of âcreative destructionâ and described it as âthe essential fact of capitalismâ.
- Product margins decrease as a result of increased competition, rising production costs and more aggressive and professional procurement practices. Over time these factors will erode the profitability of every product or innovation. An ongoing trend towards commoditization exists in many markets.
- The amount of buyer time allocated to sales professionals is declining (for example caused by downsizing of procurement departments), driving a need for sales professionals to be able to maximize the reduced face-to-face sales time they do manage to secure.
- An ongoing trend towards a more participative style of management has led to a greater empowerment of employees, with greater levels of personal accountability and a sharing of corporate goals. This helps to develop pride in expertise and emphasis on quality and doing a good job. This has led to buyers who take a strong personal interest in driving a hard bargain!
- The growing availability of information via internet-based research is increasingly leading to buyers who are better informed, and therefore possess greater levels of market knowledge or expertise than previously. An added complication is that as a result of their research many buyers are more likely to be misinformed (a little knowledge can be dangerous after all!), placing an additional demand on sales professionals to develop the ability to sensitively re-educate buyers.
- In order to maintain margins many industries are shifting their marketing and sales focus from product to services and solutions. This has created a demand for sales professionals who can make the transition from a transactional âbox-shiftingâ approach to a consultative âvalue-addedâ approach. Many transactional salespeople are struggling to make this transition.
- Cost of sales is becoming a major concern for many organizations. Personal selling is the most expensive method of transferring goods and services from manufacturer to customer and according to research is responsible for up to 55 per cent of total sales and marketing costs. Surveys show that some traditional sales methods (such as cold calling) are becoming less effective (and therefore more expensive) than they used to be.
As a result of the many challenges mentioned above, companies are striving to maximize the performance of their existing sales force, and sales professionals are feeling the pressure. Therefore sales professionals need an edge â the latest neuroscience research is that edge.
In this book you will learn about âbrain-friendly sellingâ that will make the whole process easier for everyone involved. We can now ensure that our sales messages are brain-friendly and appeal to the parts of the brain (both conscious and unconscious) involved in decision making.
Sales professionals are a vital component of a capitalist society â every sale âis capitalism writ smallâ (Knight, 2008). Without sales professionals businesses would fail.
As I am fond of saying in my keynote speeches, âIn business nothing happens until someone sells something!â Selling is one of the most important jobs (if not the most important!) in the commercial world. My hope is that what you learn from this book will make that important job just a little easier and bring you greater levels of success and achievement.
I believe the future of your sales success, and indeed the future of selling, lies within the three pounds or so of brain cells contained inside your customerâs head. The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe, so let us begin by exploring it and understanding it.
2
The background to neuroscience and how it applies to selling
The human brain is widely acknowledged as the most complex, flexible, best-organized, highest-functioning system in the known universe.
Our brains control nearly everything we do. The brain appears to be a relatively small part of the human body â weighing about 3 pounds and making up about only 2 per cent of our body weight. However, it is estimated that the human brain contains 100 million nerve cells known as neurons and uses 20 per cent of the oxygen we breathe and 20 per cent of the energy we consume. The enormous consumption of oxygen and energy is required to fuel the many thousands of chemical reactions that take place in the brain every second. These chemical reactions underpin our actions and behaviours. This theory is, however, complicated by many facts: different levels of these chemicals can produce different effects. These substances do different things in different brain parts. Each interacts with others in different ways under different circumstances. Each harmonizes with many other bodily systems and brain circuits, setting up complex chain reactions.
It should be pointed out that neuroscience is the scientific study of not just the brain but the rest of the nervous system too. The brain is the central part of the nervous system. The nervous system allows us to respond to what we experience in the world around us.
The nervous system has two main divisions. The central nervous system is made up of the brain and the spinal cord. The nerve fibres that branch out into the body from the central nervous system form the peripheral nervous system. The peripheral nerves are constantly sending information to the central nervous system, which processes it and then sends signals back to the peripheral nervous system.
This book explores how we can apply knowledge gained from neuroscience research about how the brain and the rest of the nervous system operate to gain an advantage in persuading other people to make decisions that benefit themselves and us as sales professionals as a result.
For the sake of reading ease I shall refer to âthe brainâ in its widest sense as an integral part of the wider nervous system. So unless specific reference is made to a specific part of the nervous system or brain you can assume I am referring to the wider nervous system.
For decades neuroscientists and neuropsychologists have been researching and studying the human brain to better understand how it functions and what brain processes influence our behaviours and actions. Knowledge and understanding about the brain are growing rapidly, with the vast majority of major discoveries and knowledge about the brain having been made in the last 10 to 15 years. More research has been conducted and more published on the brain in this time period than in the whole of human history.
One of the reasons for this acceleration of knowledge is the availability of brain-scanning technology such as electroencephalography (EEG), which uses sensors to capture the tiny electrical signals that brain activity produces. Other technology includes functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures the increase in oxygen levels in the flow of blood in the brain. This indicates when activity in specific parts of the brain increases. In short, EEG is good for knowing when activity happens in the brain and fMRI is good for knowing where in the brain activity happens.
As a result of such research we are starting to get a deeper understanding of how the brain functions when it is making decisions. This is an area of great interest to sales professionals, because our job is to influence people and persuade them to make decisions and take action. The better able we are to understand how the brain functions when making decisions to take action, the better able we are to understand how to tailor our sales approach, messages and behaviour to achieve the results we want for our clients and ourselves.
We may think that our clients and prospective customers are intelligent, rational individuals who make well-considered and logical decisions. We may think that they go through some process of contemplating and considering the features and benefits of the product or service on offer and process this information in a logical manner in order to arrive at the decision to proceed. When our clients and prospective customers donât make the decision we want them to make we may consider them to be mistaken and foolish! We know full well what we would have done in their situation. The answer was obvious â if only they were as considered and rational as we so obviously are!
However, neuroscience research sheds new light on to how people actually make decisions, and the truth may shock you:
According to cognitive neuroscientists, we are conscious of only about 5 per cent of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depends on the 95 per cent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness.
(Szegedy-Maszak, 2005)
The vast majority of human thinking (including decision making) takes place below the level of conscious and controlled awareness â in our unconscious (or as it is sometimes referred to our subconscious) mind.
Let us define what is meant by the conscious and unconscious mind. Your conscious mind is your reasoning, objective level of mind. It is the mind you are aware of when you are fully awake. It is the mind that you consciously âthinkâ with â you are aware of your cognitive (thinking) processes. The unconscious mind consists of the processes that occur automatically and are not usually available to self-examination or meta-cognition (âcognition about cognitionâ or âknowing about knowingâ or âthinking about thinkingâ) of our thinking processes. These can include thought processes, memory and motivation. Your unconscious mind is your automatic, subjective level of mind. It operates below your level of conscious awareness. It is a mixture of thoughts, emotions, feelings, memories and other cognitive processes that we are not aware of and can probably not explain or articulate. You may at times be vaguely aware of this mental activity that exists outside your conscious awareness. A hunch or intuition that you struggle to articulate would be an example. And it is such hunches that may make the difference between customers saying yes or saying no to your sales proposal.
In this book the unconscious mind, or rather more accurately the cognitive unconscious, is defined as all of the mental processes that operate outside of conscious awareness.
To illustrate how the conscious and unconscious mind operate, our senses are receiving and taking in over 10 million bits of information every second! Our conscious brain can process only 40 bits of information per second. The rest has to be processed unconsciously. The unconscious mind will rapidly process these using an instinctive good/bad short cut interpretation that allows it to pay attention if required to anything that might threaten or assist survival and well-being.
This unconscious processing influences feelings, decision making, behaviour and actions, indeed the vast majority of thoughts and feelings that influence your customerâs behaviour, and decisions about whether to purchase your product or service occur in the unconscious mind:
At least 95 per cent of all cognition occurs below awareness in the shadows of the mind while, at most, only 5 per cent occurs in high-order consciousness.
(Zaltman, 2003)
In addition, emotions are an integral part of peopleâs decision-making process. As we will see in the next chapter, although different areas of the brain are largely responsible for processing emotions and more logical information, these area...
