Sell!

The Way Your Customers Want to Buy

Dale Carnegie & Associates

• Publisher: G&D Media
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781722510107
• eBook ISBN: 9781722521165
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Customer Relations
• Index: Business

What do How to Win Friends and Influence People and Sell! have in common (other than Dale Carnegie)?

They're both based on the premise that RELATIONSHIPS are what matter. In this age, where media is social and funding is raised by crowds, the sales cycle has permanently changed. It's no longer enough to know your product, nor always appropriate to challenge your customer's thinking based on your online research.

In Sell!: The Way Your Customers Want to Buy, Dale Carnegie & Associates reveal the REAL modern sales cycle. It's one that depends on your ability to influence more than just one buyer, understand what today's customers want from you (and don't want), and use time-tested human relations principles that will help you strengthen relationships anywhere in the global economy.

Readers will learn the five stages to master in the modern selling process, and learn from real sales examples told by top performing salespeople and veteran sales trainers from the U.S. to Europe, the Middle East, India, Japan and points in between.

This book combines insightful new research, a modern sales process and timeless, powerful human relations principles. It's a fresh take on what works today to grow sales.

• Learn the two traits customers want most from their salespeople
• Which types of questions are rarely asked by all but top salespeople?
• When will customers be willing to pay more for your solution or product?
• How what you think about can matter to customers and change your results?
• And get access to online training resources that come with this book!

"A familiar but wide-ranging guide to applying Carnegie's up-close-and-personal principles to selling." -KIRKUS Reviews

Part One

Know Thyself

1. WHAT ARE YOU SELLING?

Mike Peters was dejected by the time he got back to his car. What am I doing wrong? he wondered. He’d thought he’d done all the right things to make the sale. It’s not as if he was new at the sales game. He’d been doing it for twenty years. But more and more often lately, Mike had been going back to his car at the end of the sales call with the “We’ll think about it and get back to you” refrain that he knew to be the kiss of death to closing the sale.

Starting the car, he mentally went over the meeting. He’d built rapport by talking about the things he’d seen in the prospect’s office and on his LinkedIn profile. He’d asked questions to reveal the prospect’s goals and challenges and asked more questions to guide him to feeling the need to make a change. He’d presented his product as the solution to the prospect’s problem, overcome objections, explained the features of the product, and tied them to each of the prospect’s pain points. Then, when he felt the time was right, he’d asked for the sale. That was the way he’d been taught, and it was the way he’d made sales consistently throughout his modestly successful career.

Getting on the highway back to the office, Mike already knew how it was going to play out. He’d follow up with the prospect, thanking him for his time and offering to answer any questions. But by the time he’d gotten to the car, he knew that the sale was lost. The guy was probably on the Internet right now, looking for a cheaper, faster solution than the one Mike had offered.

Shaking his head in frustration, Mike said aloud, to no one in the car, “I hope you’re happy, random Amazon seller. I did all the hard work for you, and you’re the one who will get the sale.”

Now you’re probably reading this and going over in your mind what you might have done differently. You might be thinking, “I’d have sent the follow-up while I was still in the car.” Or “He must have rushed the process. It’s about developing a relationship.”

You might be right. In fact, you are right. But that’s not why Mike lost the sale. Mike lost the sale because he forgot what he was truly selling. What are you really selling?

Is it a product or service?

Is it a solution to your customer’s problems? Is it a relationship?

We believe the answer is no. You may end up selling those things. But the underlying thing that you are selling—the thing that can differentiate you from every other salesperson on the planet—is trust.

“Oh, yeah. I’ve heard this before. Trust sells. I get that.” Let’s dig deeper, though. What does it mean to say you trust someone? And what are you trusting them to do? Think about it in your own personal life. Who are the people you trust? You most likely have a high level of trust in your intimate relationships, with your mate, your children, and your family. But what does it really mean when you say, “I trust you”? Trust means that you believe that the other person is going to tell you the truth, even if it doesn’t benefit them. It means that you can count on them to do what they say they are going to do, when they are going to do it, and in the manner they said they would. Ask the long-standing top salesperson in your organization, and they will tell you they pass up on customers who don’t truly need what they’re selling. Their reputation is more important than a quick sale that creates problems for a customer.

What Exactly Is Trust?

At Dale Carnegie Training, we asked customers around the world how they would describe trust in their salesperson, and their responses overwhelmingly validate what we’ve said above. The top two answers to our open-ended question, “How would you define trust?” centered on two themes: “I can believe them; they are honest, credible and knowledgeable” (50 percent) and “They are looking out for my best interest and providing value” (25 percent).

Customers gave salespeople clear-cut advice in this latest research. When asked about the important behaviors that drive trust, more than 85 percent of customers in the study said that among a salesperson’s most important behaviors for building trust are:

1. “Providing honest and complete information.”

2. “Doing what’s right for me rather than trying to make the sale.”

3. “Keeping their promises.”

As one survey respondent put it, trust in a salesperson “means I can count on them to give me straightforward answers, even if they may lose the sale because of it.”

Mayer et al.* defined trust as “the willingness of a party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party based on the expectation that the other will perform a particular action important to the trustor, irrespective of the ability to monitor or control that other party.”

This is just a formal way of saying what we said in the beginning. Customers want to know that they can trust you to be honest about what you can (and cannot) do, then to actually do it, in the way you said you would, and to have their best interest at heart when you do it.

So what are you selling when you get a prospect to trust you? You’re selling yourself. You’re conveying authenticity and transparency. You are a person whose job it is to solve problems, and what makes you unique are the solutions you come up with.

The Know Thyself Self-Appraisal

Try this exercise. Get out a piece of paper, or open a new document on your computer, and set a timer for five minutes. In five minutes, write down every answer you can think of to the question, “Why should anyone trust me?” Don’t just skip over this exercise to get to what everyone else said. Really do it. OK—go.

Need some help? We’ll give you some prompts. Here is “The Know Thyself Self-Appraisal.” These questions can help you write your answers.

Interaction with Others

• Are you a naturally reserved person, who prefers to let others take the conversational lead?

• Are you more outgoing and accessible?

• Are you an analytic, logical thinker?

• Do you like to tell stories and anecdotes to get your ideas across?

Physical Appearance

• Are you a large, gregarious person in body and in voice?

• Are you someone who doesn’t immediately attract a lot of notice?

Since this is a chapter on trust, we are obviously trusting that you did the exercise. Five minutes was a long time, wasn’t it?

What did you discover? If you’re like most people, the exercise started out with the kinds of answers that come easily. “People should trust me because I am honest. I believe in my product and that it’s the best one on the market.” (More later on what to do if you don’t really believe in what you’re selling.)

But after a couple of minutes, you probably ran out of ideas. That’s when the real answers start to come out. “People should trust me because I have always been a trustworthy person. Even as a child, I was the one my parents could count on to take care of my little brother. Taking care of other people is important to me. When someone trusts you to do something, that’s the most important thing they can give you.”

This exercise can really help you uncover your core values as they relate to trust. Maybe you were let down by someone else, and so you don’t believe that trust is ever really possible. Or maybe it made you more determined to be trustworthy. Or did you learn to trust again?

Maybe you realized you haven’t always been the most trustworthy person. “Honestly? People shouldn’t trust me. I’ve been known to lie at times to get what I want.” It’s OK if you wrote stuff like that, because it means you’re getting real. It means you’re being honest with yourself about where you can improve, and that’s a good thing. This is the no-judgment zone here.

Whatever you wrote and discovered about yourself as a trustworthy person, that’s your foundation. That is the groundwork for everything you do in sales and in life. You have to trust yourself before anyone else will trust you.

The Way You Do One Thing Is the Way You Do Everything

We all benefit by asking ourselves this question: Do we value being a person who is worthy of other people’s trust? We might think, “Of course!” But do we act like it? There’s an old saying: “The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.” So ask yourself: Do you behave in a trustworthy manner all day, or only when you’re trying to make a sale? If you see $20 lying on the ground, do you pocket it or do you try and find its owner? If you say, “I’ll call you tomorrow,” do you? Or do you make excuses for why you didn’t call?

Trust is, at its core, a matter of integrity. Sales is often perceived as a sleazy business because salespeople are at times perceived as having a lack of integrity. “She’ll promise anything to make the sale.” “When I walk onto a car lot, the salesperson isn’t trying to sell me the car that’s best for me; he’s trying to sell the car that most needs to be sold.” That’s the perception that we at Dale Carnegie Training have been working to overcome for more than 100 years.

Let’s look at two scenarios, one where trust is at the foundation of the sale and one where it isn’t.

Karen lost her husband of twenty years to cancer two years ago. She and her kids moved from the family home to a beautiful condo by the beach. It was soothing to her soul to see the ocean waves lapping ashore as she sat on her deck every morning. The family dog, Salty, would lie at her feet as she watched the cruise ships go by. One thing she had talked about with her husband was taking a cruise among the Hawaiian Islands. Karen obviously couldn’t take the trip with her husband, but she could still make incredible memories with her kids. So she booked a twenty-one-day cruise. Her kids were so excited! “But who is going to watch Salty and my fish?” her daughter asked. “Are you really going to trust a stranger to come into our home?” her son questioned. Salty was thirteen years old and needed her kidney medicine twice a day. She had to be fed a special diet and to be let outside on a specific schedule. Karen clearly needed to find someone she could trust to care for her animals and her home.

The first person she interviewed was Casey. She was a twenty-one-year-old college student whom Karen had found on a pet-sitting site. Walking in and seeing the 180-degree ocean view, Casey said, “Wow, this is quite a view. You must have some killer parties here.” When Salty came up and licked her, she bent down and pet her, but her eyes kept looking around at the condo. The whole time Casey was there, she kept thinking about how great it would be to stay there: I can have coffee on the deck every morning. Maybe do some yoga. “You are really lucky to live here,” she said. As Karen was explaining the tasks involved, she wondered if Casey was even listening. She just kept walking from room to room, looking at the view. As the interview ended, Karen told Casey she was interviewing several others and would get back to her. The fact was, while Casey looked fine on paper, there was something missing.

The second person Karen interviewed was Olivia. She was a fifty-year-old woman whose own kids had gone to visit their father over spring break, and she’d wanted to get out of her own home to distract herself. As she walked in, the first thing she did was bend down and talk to Salty. “Hi, girl. How are you?” Olivia wisely recognized that Karen’s first concern was going to be how well she bonded with Salty. She made a conscious decision not to comment on the view or the condo. She wasn’t there to admire the view or the home. She was there to solve a problem, and the problem was “What do I do about caring for my animals when I’m gone?” In order to make this sale, Olivia knew that she needed to demonstrate that she was worthy of Karen’s trust. Olivia put herself in Karen’s shoes. What would I be feeling if I had just lost my husband and I were going away from home with my kids for three weeks? What would matter to me? Karen and Olivia sat down on the couch and talked. Olivia asked questions about the trip, about how to care for Salty, and about the fish. Her whole focus was on helping Karen to see that she could trust her. Whether or not she could have coffee or do yoga on the deck was secondary.

It’s pretty clear from these scenarios which woman got the job. Was it because Olivia was more qualified? No: Casey had come highly recommended on the pet-sitting site. She was a college student, had shown up to the interview on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Dale Carnegie: The New Generation (And Why You Should Read This Book!)
• Five Things This Book Will Help You Achieve (That Aren’t About Sales)
• Dale Carnegie’s Thirty Principles
• How to Get the Most out of This Book
• Part One: Know Thyself
• PART TWO: The Dale Carnegie Sales Process
• PART THREE: Winning the Mental Game of Sales
• PART FOUR: Bonus Material
• Index