Don’t Gamble With Your Company’s Future

Without realising it, many sales professional and trainers are playing a lottery with their organisations’ future and getting set on a losing streak with the way they interact with prospects and customers. In this article, I’ll describe this gambling addiction and show you how to cure it. Your comments and questions are very welcome.

Most business owners and sales professionals would bristle at the idea that they routinely and repeatedly place such a poor bet on the primary revenue generation activity of their enterprise, such that the very future of their organisation is unwittingly put at grave risk! In fact, they would most likely vehemently insist that they couldn’t possibly do such a thing.

Yet that is what they do all the time, because they don’t make the effort to do all of the following:

1. Properly understand the buying behaviour of their prospects and customers before trying to sell to them.
2. Grasp the established fact that there are four main temperaments and that every prospect or customer has a dominant temperament. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, laid the foundation for this out almost 2,500 years ago when he classified his patients into the four temperaments.
3. Understand that the core values associated with each temperament are the primary drivers of the buying behaviour of each prospect or customer, rather than the personality of the sales person. For example, a prospect or customer with a dominant personality is more easily moved to buy a product or service when she is convinced that it enhances her image and/or her enjoyment of life. In such a situation, the personality of the sales person is irrelevant to the buying outcome seen.
4. Accurately tailor the sales or advertising message to the value sets of the target audience.

You see, Tony Robbins was spot on when he said “Let your prospect determine your presentation”. He was in effect saying that you must first fully appreciate what is important to your prospect or customer before you can know how best to present your offer(s) to them. There is absolutely no benefit in trying to pressure, persuade, confuse or confound the audience. These underhand tactics didn’t work well in the past and what is worse, they no longer work at all these days!

Just look at these odds:

• Since everyone alive (including the sales person) will have one dominant temperament (out of a pool of four possibilities), and each individual communicates in their “native mode” (i.e. in line with their own temperament), it means that at any point in time the sales person is only effectively getting across to and connecting with people of their kind, i.e. one in four people.
• This means that the sales person is not really getting through to three out of every four prospects. To put this another way, the odds of not communicating effectively with prospects is three to one (3 : 1) against! Not a good (or responsible) bet at all!!
• But it gets much worse! Consider that although each person has a dominant temperament, we nevertheless all have the full complement of the four temperaments, the varying degrees of which form a unique code for each person.
• There are therefore twenty-four possible code-combinations and each individual, without the necessary in-depth training, can only effectively connect with those of their kind; you can therefore easily see how the extremely long odds of twenty-three to one (23: 1) against becomes a reckless gamble with the future of the enterprise!

By the time you then add on top another layer of the 360 “conversational and behavioural trip-wires” (i.e. dos and don’ts) formed by the combined value sets of the 24 code-combinations, the terrain becomes mind-bogglingly complex. And as with a mine-field in situations of military conflict, it is suicidal to attempt to jog through it without the help and guidance of a seasoned expert.

For example

• Does your customer lose interest once you start giving a lot of detail?
• Does she cringe at the mention of money in a business deal?
• Is she more interested in the ethics of your company and the integrity of its top management?
• Do you find that prospects are requesting much more information and time than usual to weigh their options before they can decide what to do?

So isn’t it time you stopped gambling with your company’s future? Get the help you need today and the first thing you’ll notice is that the odds will become significantly shorter and in your favour, ensuring that you will no longer have to “leave so much money on the table”!