339 Prediction Ability In The Sales Call

<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" xml:lang= "EN-US">Salespeople are constantly talking to clients, but if you think about it, clients don’t have that many conversations in a year with salespeople, so there is a massive power imbalance in play.  That imbalance is in favour of the salesperson, if they know what they are doing.  Humans have survived on the basis of many factors, physical and mental and certainly pattern recognition is one of those crucial skills we have accumulated.  When we encounter any situation we search our memory for our experiences of a similar situation, as a guide to what are some of the possibilities available to us.  This applies to sales as well.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" xml:lang="EN-US">When the client says a certain thing, we have a huge database of other sales conversations and outcomes to draw upon, to filter what we are hearing and to also prompt us to do what we did last time, which worked out well and we got the deal done.  We are searching for patterns to recognise to assist us with marshalling our response.</span><span lang="EN-US" xml:lang= "EN-US"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" xml:lang="EN-US">The problem though is a lot of this is just left to memory and as we know, the faintest ink is more reliable and superior to the best memory.  In other words, we need to capture this information, so that we can remind ourselves of the patterns we have encountered.  We work in teams and across the sales team, there is a tremendous resource base of patterns and experiences, but it is rare that sales teams will capture these gems.  Every salesperson is an island and this is especially the case if there is an individual sales commission remuneration system in place.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US" xml:lang="EN-US">The better approach would be to get everyone together and share their experiences and patterns. For example, Japanese buyers think they are GOD and they don’t brook insolent salespeople asking them questions.