If a Person's Standing at the Meat Counter, What are they Fixing to Do?

http://www.crossroads.sandler.com/resources/downloads/5-mistakes-technology-sales

Sandler Trainers:  Joe Marr & Jim Stephens www.joemarr.sandler.com

Behind The Business: Karissa Patterson    Button Babes Household Services

Entrepreneur Radio: Janet Keller www.crossroads.sandler.com janet.keller@sandler.com

Part One:

Executive and sales VP for a 200 million dollar company. Joe Marr joined Sandler to help realign his values around his family and his local community. The experience with Sandler revolved around a rep rising through the ranks after being exposed to Sandler. The impression left Joe with the desire to start his relationship with franchise.

Negative-Reverse Selling is an often misunderstood tactic. It is not an inherently negative position, but rather a communication tool that psychologists use with patients. It assumes a role of humility and healthy skepticism to facilitate examining and understanding where the party is coming from to avoid being presumptuous.

Negative reverse takes the option away in order to clarify the position of the other person. By questioning questions and positions there is a fostered collaboration toward clarity which builds trust and trust allows relationships to build between buyers and sellers. The negative reverse facilitates a jump-start to relationships by implicitly building trust in order to help individuals involved in the conversation become more willing to not hold their cards to their chest.

The technique comes from bone-fishing. If you were just trying to set your hook by tugging when you felt a fish take the hook, you wouldn’t catch the fish because the mouth is so soft that the fish would break lose. We strip line off the reel to create a sense of security and safety in order to foster space that is comfortable enough to make the appropriate commitment, whether that is no or yes.

We need to strive to be in a curious and skeptical mindset. We need to be skeptical that we are reading the situation correctly and we need to tune our ears toward the qualified commitments that are made during a sales call in order to engage them and foster that sense of a safe space. We want the sales call to end with a definitive yes or a definitive no. We don’t want to sabotage our future or our prospects opportunity to work with us by looking for buying signs, instead of trying to turn the discussion back onto something pivotal, but qualified, that was said but left unheard.

Part Two:

The equivocation—the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or avoid committing oneself; prevarication—zone is a place a sales person ends up in because there is no baseline of trust in the engagement and relationship between the seller and the buyer. In sales our priority is to get to a no to a yes; to let their yes be yes and their no be no.

In Sandler, we constantly strive to create the environment and put people in the position, where they will feel the desire to be honest. When someone says, “I’ll get back to you.” They’re making a less than definitive commitment to get back to you. They could be really saying no and not want to put pressure on the engagement, or they could actually mean no and simply don’t want to hurt the feelings.

In this instance we want to be honest and engage the elephant in the room. We want to create an instance where there is a no pressure way to take the buyer off the hook and remove all the pressure to make a decision, but facilitate a conversation toward discovering interest in working together or closing the file.

All of the negative reverse moves with the pendulum are pendant on the thermometer close which engages a non-binary decision with the buyer to decode where they are in the conversation and presentation. Rather than having happy ears to hear what we want to hear as sales people, we really need to prioritize language that decodes the position of the prospect without being invasive. We don’t want to give people the sensation of having their teeth pulled: we want to leave options open until the absolute moment when a decision needs to be made.

In some ways the counter-intuitive system is unselling. If we can’t talk our prospects into not buying our product then there may be room for us to do business together. We don’t want to try to solve the problem, we want to qualify their interest to make a decision, qualify their budget and their ability to invest into the decision, and then we want to examine their decision-making process to investigate where they’re going to need support from us with making their decision.

Part Three:

If you have a client who is unhappy because something has failed in the process then there needs to be a communication exchange to diffuse a justifiably upset client. If you feel it, say it; concede the truth. If someone vehemently complains about a product or service they expect us to become defensive and explain why we have created this problem. Rather than this, Sandler suggests that we concede our mistake and make no blank promise for solvency. We must insist that we understood why they feel the way that they do and settle the conversation by engaging them with an offer to break the relationship.

In business you need to thank individuals who complain. If someone is mad then we should be thankful to them and concede our mistakes. The chances are if they’re interested in verbalizing their complaints then they do not blindly see the necessity to end the relationship or engagement. It gives us the opportunity to concede and validate the client feeling the way that they do.

If a man’s standing in front of a meat counter, what is he fixing to do? If I’m here there must be a reason that they’re investing an hour of their life to spend it with me. If they’re not comfortable to explain what they’re after then we are going to use language to open up the conversation to create trust and explore what they’re after.

Tone is the most important part of the negative reverse. We don’t want to question their intention or truthfulness. We want to sound like we are confused or mystified about what they’re expressing to us. We want to use a nurturing time and scratch our heads. Apologize for asking and then we can ask just about anything. We facilitate this by asking early on in the conversation for the permission to be blunt. It allows the negative reverse to be pre-seeded within the conversation.

We want to try and be a click more skeptical of their position in order to facilitate their exploration of the engagement by putting the onus on them to examine and explain why the conversation is taking place. We don’t want to shove people away, but we want to facilitate the conversation and become strategic partners with all the clients and collaborative individuals that we work with.