After more than 4,300 shows in 25 years Oprah Winfrey’s final show aired recently.
She mentioned that of more than 30,000 people she had interviewed all had one thing in common – the need to be validated. Oprah claims the common three questions they needed answered were:
Do you see me? Do you hear me? Does what I say matter to you?
I propose that those questions are at the heart of 21st Century selling – the principle of exchange of value. How well a salesperson validates their clients and prospects through skills such as listening, questioning and verifying are key to their success. How good does it feel when someone really listens to you and understands you? Just great!
Usually when in sales training or coaching mode I find myself doing most of the validating.
But the other day was an exception. I received a delightful surprise from a guest after speaking about high impact selling at a Women’s Network Australia luncheon. Sandy McDonald, a specialist in social media, sent me the following article validating me and the Barrett message. Here’s her take on “everybody lives by selling something”.
Sandy writes: What do the words selling or sales or sales person conjure up for you?
Is your first thought negative? Do you shy away from it? Or do you imagine a poor person somewhere in Asia who has to earn a living trying to sell you something you don’t need and don’t wish to be disturbed by when you’re eating dinner?
What if I was to tell you, as I was told today, that “everybody lives by selling something”? It took awhile for me to appreciate just how profound that statement was.
Sue Barrett is among many other things a sales expert. She was the guest speaker at a Women’s Network Australia lunch today.
“Everybody lives by selling something” is her business slogan.
When I first read it on the screen behind the lectern it slid away from my eyes or maybe my eyes slid away from it.
The notion of selling causes me anxiety but after Sue finished speaking I reread it and its meaning had been transformed.
It would appear that I do sell. All the time. In fact, I am selling now. Writing this post, sending it to you, dispersing it through my social networks, commenting on forums. All that activity is about selling.
I had thought I was creating relationships, building trust, earning the right to have a dialogue, listening, giving you something of value in exchange for an opportunity to be of service to you.
As I understood it from Sue, that is selling.
She started out by explaining that there had been more changes in the past 10 years than in the past 100.
She said in the next 100 years the changes would equate to the previous 1,000.
She espoused the theory that we make the same number of decisions in one day that a person in the 14th Century might have made in their lifetime.
Our lives and how we live them have become complex so it figures that our business offerings are no longer simple.
Just before the presentation I had been discussing the role of blogging to inform and educate your community over time and about how you can help.
Few businesses can now restrict that successfully to the once trusty old DL flyer.
Sue continued with a brief history of how selling has changed since the end of World War II.
Then you produced products and had a monologue with your customer. While product features and their benefits became a focus in later decades today we stand “at the centre of a dialogue where you exchange something of value”.
What they are buying today, she explained, is your capability, your experience and your ability to facilitate a service for them.
“We don’t just sell with our heads anymore, we sell with our hearts,” she said.
It was fascinating to hear her describe the buyer’s journey today.
She explained that buyers are creating their buying journey before they approach you, that they have investigated your offer via social media.
In light of that, she asked “how are you managing your message?” How does your vision and your purpose fundamentally change their lives?
It was a women’s networking luncheon (which didn’t preclude men) but only one of the 70 attendees was a man.
Sue was not pandering to her audience when she described women as excellent sales people.
She said of the elite performers she had interviewed who were women, all displayed the same attributes – ability to engage in self-appraisal, self-aware, open to being reflective, good at orchestrating resources, able to facilitate opportunity to do the best for their clients, good at aligning customers and suppliers and capable of consultative problem solving.
Effective selling she explained is getting a balance between all of that and the more masculine approach to “getting out there”.
Finally she discussed with us what a client might want from us – to deal with a professional, to expect to be helped, to have business acumen, to display conceptual thinking.
In a previous business life we were exposed to tools to measure team engagement. One of those was a trust monitor that involved measuring your interactions with others and theirs with yours on a scale of 0-10 against transparency, inclusivity, competence and authenticity.
As Sue spoke about the need to listen to all your stakeholders, customers, employers, investors, suppliers, prospects and influencers she went on to say that you have to be genuine, authentic and to connect on a holistic level, which is exactly how you would benchmark your interactions with others against the values of the trust monitor.
Before this epiphany I had not thought that building trust, understanding and empathy were all about selling as it is manifest today.
When you truly believe in something and you take risks to put it out into the world nothing beats having someone endorse your sentiments.
There is something incredibly powerful about being validated. I encourage you all to truly see, hear and understand another person – it can make all the difference.
Remember, everybody lives by selling something.
Sue Barrett practices as a coach, advisor, speaker, facilitator, consultant and writer and works across all market segments with her skilful team at BARRETT. Sue and her team take the guess work out of selling and help people from many different careers become aware of their sales capabilities and enable them to take the steps to becoming effective and productive when it comes to selling, sales coaching or sales leadership.To hone your sales skills or learn how to sell go to www.barrett.com.au.
Smart Company is the leading online publication in Australia for free news, information and resources catering to Australia’s entrepreneurs, small and medium business owners and business managers.
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