The Desert of Arizona
Rain 44 Degrees – 7:09 a.m.
Years ago, I was walking around up in Flagstaff AZ waiting for my wife to get done with a meeting. As is often the case, I was listening to an audio recording. I might have even been talking to myself at the same time as I responded to what I was hearing.
I find that a LOT more clarity comes when I talk through things TO MYSELF out loud. I’m sure I look pretty funny.
On that day, I was listening to roleplaying recordings of sales situations by David Sandler.
You can learn this in your head and get it “logically,” but until you hear someone approach “selling” with no fear, it’s hard to truly understand what it is like to EMBODY it.
(NOTE: If you “hate selling,” please keep reading. Because you’ve been brainwashed by the crowd of average sheeple about what that word actually means.)
Whether or not your prospect buys should NOT feel like when you have a big outdoor trip planned and you are hoping the weather cooperates. If that’s how you approach selling, you are giving your power away to things outside of you. And that feeling you have betrays the upside down view you have of your own value.
Until you sever the connection between money and thinking you have to get it from John or Susie or Kathy specifically, you will have issues.
We all like money. Money is very useful in this day and age. But there’s PLENTY of it out there. And there’s no reason it has to come from the prospect with which you are speaking at any one time. It can come from anyone. Who cares who the individual is?
So that’s the work. To break that emotional attachment you have to the urge to manipulate things outside of your control.
And that brings us to the lesson I learned from David Sandler:
Inside the prospect’s heart and mind is the truth about what he wants, and if he has any plans for working with you. The more effectively you are able to get to that truth, the less time everyone wastes.
So stop “selling” and just get the truth.
But prospects are scared. They’ve been trained to be fearful. They’ve been trained to NOT be clear about what they want. In fact, they’ve even been trained to not always KNOW what they want. The result is they flat out say things that aren’t true. I like to call this lying.
Don’t get mad at them, they’re probably doing their best. But that doesn’t mean you have to suffer. Just learn to work with it.
So look at your client attraction system:
Is it optimized to “get to the truth” or is it optimized to attempt to “sell?”
You can sometimes sell without getting to the truth. But you can pretty much ALWAYS get to the truth, even if that means no sale.
And that’s much more fulfilling because it allows you to say, “OK, so we’re done here then. Good!” Then you move on and don’t look back.
What could be shifted/added/removed in your systems that would get you to the truth of the matter more effectively?