By Trevor Wilkins - Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Think about the last time you bought something important. Was it today? This week? Last month? Focus on the sequence of events leading up to that moment when you finally, irrevocably decided to buy it – was it important for you to see it, touch it, read the specifications, or maybe just hear an independent recommendation?

Everyone buys for different reasons and with different priorities. When you made that purchase, who made the final decision? Was it you, or the person selling it? Was it the words they used that pushed you into committing to the buy, or did you take the step with certainty?

Well of course, if the purchase was a good one, it was you who made that decision. You were motivated by what you wanted to take away from doing business with that person. It wasn’t the mass of reasons for buying that may have been sprayed at you by the seller. How could they have known what truly motivated your decision? Maybe what you wanted to buy was peace of mind, or a product that delivered lots of action, or to save time and money; or maybe you were investing in something that would help make you money. Whatever the case, it was the result you wanted to take away, not the specific product or service in question.

Buying without remorse

And what about when it wasn’t such a good purchase? Have you ever experienced “Buyer’s Remorse?” Have you ever said, “I didn’t really want it but I was pressured into buying it.” How did you feel about doing business with that person the next time? If you’re like most of us, it wasn’t a good start to a long-term relationship. As a consumer, being pushed into the wrong buying decision may result in lost money or inconvenience. As a business, it can result in a poor, perhaps fatal, return on investment that means money wasted and productivity lost.

But what about when you experience a “Good Buy?” When you’re with a good salesperson or with someone who’s a great influencer, it all seems to go so well – they don’t seem to pressure you at all. It’s just a pleasant conversation that ends in a desire on your part to buy their offering, or to accept their ideas. Sometimes they even seem to accurately know what you need better than you do. Occasionally you’ll even end up buying something completely different from what you had intended, but you’re actually much happier with the result. Do you go back to that person the next time? Do you recommend them to other people? If they ask you for a reference, do you give it to them? Well of course you do.

If a seller is well prepared and professional, they might even be able to give you evidence that their offering can actually do what they claim it can. You can feel this “locking you in” to believing in, and championing, them long after you met or discussed it.

Why do we make selling so hard?

Well, it’s probably no surprise to you now, but when you are selling something – whether it’s goods or services, or maybe just an idea, the person on the other side of the table is no different from you when you are buying something. They have their own unique way of making buying decisions; they have their own list of what, in the longer term, they want to get out of the transaction; they don’t like being sprayed with annoying or irrelevant information; and most of all, they won’t come back if you tick them off.

So where’s the problem? If we’ve all experienced being the target of both good and bad selling, why do so many of us do it so badly ourselves? We do it over and over again … and we make it SO hard!

Why do we become different, and far less effective, than we normally are? Isn’t it much easier to turn someone into a Willing Buyer who tells you what they’d like to purchase? Then you can start discussing how they can complete that purchase and stop focusing on “Closing.”

Inevitably, we get nervous, we talk too much, and we force the prospect to go to the effort of selecting what they actually need from the mass of information that we’ve not been able to filter for them. And what’s the effect on you (especially when times are hard)? You end up stressed because you can’t measure how effective your “spraying and praying” will be or by the wasted time on lost causes that were never going to buy; then you make the oh-so-dangerous assumptions, guesses and self-delusion that can take hold when people are under pressure to close sales and create new prospects.

Wouldn’t it be just great to get rid of all that stuff and at the same time improve our use of time and our effectiveness? Maybe by an order of magnitude?

Take the pressure off

It all begins with taking the time to step back, take a deep breath and evaluate whether your communication with other people is truly Two Way, and then investing a small amount of time in making it so. In tough times, you need to give your business every chance you can. It’s no longer sufficient to simply go through the motions of “putting yourself in their shoes” to understand where they are coming from.

What truly motivates that person; how they filter any information they receive; what “model of the world” they use to make sense of what’s going on around them – these are all key things that can make your approach to “influencing people to buy” far more effective.

To make you even more productive, you can add an insight into how others observe your interaction and how other stakeholders are affected by the sale or the decision. This could include customers, colleagues, family members and competitors –  the list can be long or short, depending on the situation.

View the accompanying video for a simple yet extremely effective exercise for gaining this insight into the motivations, concerns and agendas of the individuals you are trying to influence or sell to. This exercise is a fundamental step in learning how to turn “Selling” into “Buying.”

This piece is the first in a series that will give you solid tools and insights that you can use every day to survive and thrive in today’s tough markets, and to become a far more effective and comfortable influencer, seller or business partner.

Category: Expert Advice.
Industry: Retail, Technology, Services
Functional Area: Marketing
Tags: business development, customer relations, customer service, neuro linguistic programming, NHL, Sales strategy, sales training, selling