June 18, 2009
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You Just Made That Up
Matt Nettleton
We've all graduated from the place called MSU, not Michigan State but rather, Making Stuff Up, in other words, we all talk to ourselves. We all are constantly talking to ourselves. Raise your hand if you think you talk to yourself. Now, those of you who aren't raising your hands are saying to yourself, do I talk to myself. Maybe I do, maybe I don't. But regardless of what the voices in your head are saying, I can tell you one thing – nothing that they are saying is necessarily true.
As a sales trainer, I see this from nearly all of my clients. Here's what happens. I meet with a sales person and I ask them when they feel the most stress. I get a lot of different answers – when money comes up, at the close, during prospecting, when someone asks me a question and I don't know the answer. And so I ask them the next logical question, when that happens what do you do? And they typically tell me about sales situations that end badly. In fact they can often present to me a litany of failures resulting from the specific weakness they have described. And so I am then compelled as a trainer to make suggestions about change. I will offer them a way to handle their situation differently. Invariably, after I make my suggestion, the response is fast forceful and clear. My clients will nearly always say “I can’t do that”, to which I respond “why?” Now it may not be true for you but “why?” seems to elicit a long string of stories from the people I talk to and those stories have little to do with what has happened and plenty to do with what might happen.
Now the irony of this situation is tough to take. I am talking to a salesperson who has just described to me the details of a series of failures they have achieved using what they believe to be the right techniques. Those failures are real events that they witnessed and were part of. However, when I have given them a suggestion based in a system proven to work over the past 30 years they use their imagination to describe things that may never happen and create failures that simply do not exist.
Needless to say when my clients actually get their courage up to try some of my suggestions they quickly learn that their imagination worked far differently than the real world. In other words they had just made up the knowledge that kept them doing the same thing over and over again.
For the past nine years I have watched this process work and it either keeps salespeople doing the wrong thing or they learn to overcome their imagination and do what actually works as part of a systematic approach to closing business. During this time, I have learned a lesson from these conversations. In sales what you know won’t hurt you, but what you know that just ain’t so will kill you.
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