Book recap: “To sell is human” and advice from Matt Mayfield

We are all in the business of sales even if we are not classic salesmen. And since that is the case, it would be beneficial to know the new ABCs of sales.

In the old days the seller was in the position of more information and he could trick people into buying the product. This is mostly no longer the case and shouldn’t be.

In the new world of sales empathy is the most important: “What would I as a seller do if I would be helping my mom?” The new sales method is to understand the problem and help solve it using your product (if it can actually help).

The death of ABC as you know it

The new ABC of sales are Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity so let’s look at what these words actually mean.

Attunement means being able to take a different perspective. Not being in a position of power over the other person will enable you to put yourself in their shoes better. No need to feel empathy, but just think from the other person's perspective. Not feeling but thinking makes sure you consider both sides. Feeling could put your own interest on the lower end and limit finding creative solutions.

Some skills and resources to help you get better at this:

• Social cartography — establishing a mental map on how are people connected.
• Strategic mimicking — helps as long as it is not obvious. Try to here and there mimic some subtle moves of the other person with a delay.
• Being extroverted or introverted doesn't make you a better salesperson. Best is if you are in the middle between extraverted and introverted.
• Read book “Good to great”.
• “Where are you from?” is a great conversation opening question.
• Jeff Bezos sets an empty chair on the meetings to remind everyone about the most important person in the room. The customer.
• Conversation with a time traveler - gather a few people and split them into two groups. One group will be presenting modern day products to the other group that represents a person from year 1700 that doesn’t know what this would be. Eg. Big Mac from a drive through would require explaining a car, building as drive through, big piece of meat uncommon for those days and so on.
• Map the meeting mood — at multiple points during the meeting write down a number from 1 to 10 where 1 is negative and 10 very positive mood.
• Find things you have all in common— another group game where you set a timer and try to find what the whole group has in common. This is very good for forming connections.
• “Yes, and…” game — create a story with a friend. First person starts with a sentence and the other person continues with “Yes, and…” And then try same starting sentence with “Yes, but…” or combine it. Eg. Let’s organise a party. Yes, and we’ll have it at the new bar across the street.” Yes, but they are closed that day.

Buoyancy means staying afloat among all the rejection. Some advice to help with that:

• Tell yourself you can do it and set unshakable belief. Tell it to yourself every morning. (I personally have post it notes on my bathroom miror to look at every morning. The one I love the most “Are you enjoying the path through your life?” — if not you should change what’s not working)
• Interrogative self talk— Interrogative self talk is even better, because it shifts linguistic perspective. Eg. “Can I succeed in pitching this to the investor? I think I will. I trained it, I researched what this investor is looking at and I know he will ask for…”
• Visualise yourself in the future — We consider ourselves in the future as stranger. Visualising yourself helps making better long term decisions. Pro tip: Make a printout of your future self that is where you want to be. Studies showed that people who saw edited older image of themselves next to the slider to set monthly retirement saving amount, defined that number as higher.

Clarity is about helping people see problems they didn’t realise they had. Good sales people are problem solvers. The best know that finding the right problems to solve is more important than just solving problems.

• Clarity depends on (emotional) contrast — we understand our problem better when we see it in comparison to something else. In the book there is a story how homeless man got more money after sales guy changed his sign from “I am blind” to “It is springtime and I am blind” — People seeing the sign compared their reality to homeless man’s and better understood his struggle.
• The paradox of choice — Another story was about a booth with 24 and 6 tastes of jam for testing. Booth with less jams to taste had less visitors but had better sales results.
• Adding free item to the product can diminish the value of the product.
• Purchasing experiences is more satisfactory than buying things. When selling product emphasise experiences user will be able to have while using it.
• Labeling can influence decision making — Renaming prisoners dilemma into community game or wall street game changed the end results. Telling kids they are neat was better than telling them they should be neat.
• Adding mild negative on the end or stating future potencial will also provide needed comparison.
• It is important to have precise instructions on what to do in case customer decides to buy. Make it straight forward and effortless.
• Irrational questions motivate people better. Eg. Something to use on you teenage kid “On a scale of 1 to 10 how ready are you to study?” then ask “Why didn’t you pick a lower number?” with that answer they state their motivations and their why. Basically they convince themselves.
• Try something new to gain clarity of that thing.
• Make better questions by creating closed and open ended version for each question. www.rightquestion.org
• Ask the 5 whys. When someone has the problem ask why on Every answer to get to the core.

The pitch

Practice, practice, practice your pitch (in front of your cat/dog at least). Pitch can come in different shapes for different occasions/goals:

• The one Word pitch - write 50 words, scale down to 25 words and then to 6 words. One of them is your one Word.
• The question pitch - interrogative questions - outperform statements because you need to think about the thing. Tip: Use if good arguments.
• The riming pitch - pitch that rimes is usually more successful. Because we process it and remember it more easily. Rimezone.com
• The subject line pitch - utility (useful) and curiosity are the main guidelines. People with a lot of email need utility otherwise use curiosity. Rewrite your past subject lines as an exercise.
• The Twitter pitch - include question, useful information, link. Tip: limit to 120 char instead of 150.
• The pixar pitch - “Once upon a time… Every day… One day… Because of that… Because of that… until finally…” Tip: stick to the format.

Practice all six pitches to learn them (http://danpink.com/pitch). Here are some other tips to improve your pitching:

• What is your why? Clarify your purpose:
  What do you want them to know?
  What do you wamt them to feel?
  What do you want them to do?
• Keep a pitch notebook and write down interesting ones you hear in day to day.
• Record your pitches and listen.
• Add a visual aid, picture is worth a 1000 words. It’s called aid so it should add to what you are talking about, not repeat it.
• Short video messages are more personal than long ones.
• Pachathca - 20 slides x 20 seconds/slide x automatic forwarding of slides.
• Pay attention to sequence and numbers. Go first if you are incumbent or last if you are a challenger. Middle is worst as you are not remembered that well. Also granular numbers are better Eg. 1h is worse than 60 min.
• What am I, my company or product about? Ask this multiple people and look for patterns.

Improvise

Improvisation is the key when encountering unpredictable situations. They will be happening all the time and you should learn how to handle them:

• Read a book on improvisational acting
• Listen while shutting up, then after the other person ends wait 15s until you respond without breaking eye contact.
• Use "Yes, and…" instead of “Yes, but…”.
• Serve customer first then sell. Have win-win mentality.
• Behave as the person buying from you is doing you a favour. Treat everyone as your grandma.
• If the person agrees to buy, will his life improve? When interaction is over will world be a better place? If either is no you are doing something wrong.

Books on the topic

• Influence: Science and Practice - Robert B. Cialdini
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die - Chip and Dan Heath
• Switch: How to change things when change is hard - Dan Heath (Short summary)
• Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think — Brian Wansink
• Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness - Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

Bonus: Conversation with Matt Mayfield on sales

A few months ago I asked Matt for advice on how to approach sales on my experimental projects since I’m lacking on that front.

His proposed in general to tackle sales in the following steps:

1. Problem — Is there a problem to be solved for the customer?
2. Need — Is the problem painful enough that the customer is willing to pay for it?
3. Perfect world — What would be this customer’s perfect world?
4. Our offer — Well our solution is not perfect but it’s close.
5. Close — Do you want to buy?

Besides that he emphasised the importance of a conversion funnel and content/medium related to it, that addresses different steps in Customers Journey:

1. Content/Native — Awareness during research
2. Social/Video — Interest
3. Website — Consideration
4. Shopping cart — Purchase
5. Customer Lifetime Value — Loyalty

Matt’s sketch

Here are some online resources he proposed:

• www.hubspot.com/
• www.saleshacker.com/
• www.saastr.com/

Bonus: Sales/comfort challenges

• Ask for 10% discount at your next drink, meal or some random place. Get comfortable with uncomfortable (here is one of my 3 successful attempts).
• How much water can you sell? Challenge in selling something we all need.
• Go on a meetup and get 10 contacts. This is a challenge Tilen Travnik gave me a while back when I was just starting at D.Labs.
• List of a few other challenges.

Do you have any other challenge ideas? Have you completed any of these? Let me know in the comments!

If you learned something from this recap pleas hit Clap button and Follow for some interesting upcoming topics like:

• First principles thinking —Established by Aristotle in philosophy, embraced and honed by scientist through history, applied to business by Elon Musk and many others
• The Golden circle, Leadership and Endless games — Preached by Simon Sinek as the future of fulfillment and success at work
• How our brain works and mental biases — To become better thinkers, for better life while avoiding biases from our evolutionary past.
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