Hello from salespeople. Today's module is about the basic structure of your entire sales approach, or so with this little vignette. Let's suppose you're sitting in your office or at home and the phone rings, you pick it up and as a salesperson, how soon did you know it was a salesperson? And the answer I always get when I ask groups is that they know right away, they know within seconds that it's a salesperson, even before they know what they're selling. They know it's a salesperson. And then my next question is, as soon as you know it's a salesperson, what do you do next?

And the answer I always get is that one of two things either hang up or they immediately get defensive and try to figure out how am I going to get rid of this person on the phone so this is the arena that we as salespeople working as soon as we start to do our stuff prospects figured out right away as soon as they know what we're doing, they immediately try to get rid of us. So how did we get into this mess? We got in because most sales regimen system beginning of time have been what I call me centered, it's all about me and my product or my service. And, and it turns out that the prospect really doesn't care about you and your product or your service. You know, me centered selling approaches are characterized by, you know, people who want to get a half an hour meeting with a with a prospect, and immediately they show up with 15 or 20, PowerPoint slides and a subject matter expert and so to because we only have a short amount of time to make as many points as we can possibly make, and that's really not what we want.

What we want to do. What we want to do is, is be focused on them and what their problem is, prospects have seen this all before. They want to control the process they don't want to be sold to. So that's why they try to control it. And, and they, they're guarded, so they won't tell you what their true motivation is. They'll ask questions and try to control everything and you're the job of the salesperson To break through that, and so the only way you can do that is to be prospect centered and not it's not about you look, here's the difference between the center and prospect center in the principal activity to me centered selling processes is self promotion the principal activity in a prospect centered selling process is, is managing a conversation and the discussion in a me centered selling process.

The person doing the talking is Guess who be in a prospect center. It's them we want it to be about two thirds of the time prospect speaking. Where's the focus looking at me centered selling situation the focus is on It's on me as a person. It's on my company, it's on my product or service. Where do we want the focus to be in a prospect centered selling situation we want a we want to focus on them and their their problems and You know, their decision process and their situation, I'm saying that, you know, you tell more about what you know by the questions, you ask them by the statements you make. So as long as we keep the focus on the prospect and keep them talking, we'll find out a lot more information, we'll be able to determine whether it makes any sense for us to continue.

So who's the person in control in the center selling situation is you might think it's you that's in control, but in reality, it's the prospect is in control. So where does it affect us the most in from cold calls or, you know, you know, if you're using a me centered approach, if you're calling up and you you're, you get a person on the phone, and just quickly as possible me centered sellers try to get as much information out as possible thinking if they can just get the features out there, then that'll hook the prospect and it does a lousy job of doing that because like I said, in the beginning, you recognize right away and you're not even listening. You're just trying to get rid of them. If you don't hang up. In networking events, you'll see people who are missing They go there and meet people and start talking about their own company because they want to get that information out there in reality you need to meet people and find out from them if they have a problem and what their situation is when you get an appointment like a first appointment.

Me center sellers show up with all these PowerPoint slides and and subject matter experts. And what we really want to do is have a discussion. When do we get the talk? Remember, it's a discussion and you do get to talk in that discussion. We just want the ratio to be about two thirds prospect and one third, you you know, when if you have a conversation like that the prospect is going to think that at least two thirds of what God said was really was really good because after all, they said it so when you're when you're in the in the diagnosis phase, you want to be asking questions you want to be seeking to understand and after you understand then you can be understood we need to be more like a doctor. The doctor believes that prescription without diagnosis is now Practice.

So they spent a lot of time up front, you know, getting information from the patient. sales people generally believe that by just prescribe enough stuff to enough people over a long enough period of time, eventually somebody someplace is going to buy something. Okay? So we need, we need to be more like a doctor focus upfront and get the information. And once we completely understand the problem, then we can start to prescribe or to talk about what we might be able to do. You'll see when we get to the sales process that when we get to the formal present, there's there is a stage in the process for us to talk.

But the first part of it is us getting information from them. So in summary, it's not about not talking, right. It's not about listening. Those are both important things, but that's not what it's about. What it is about, is seeking first to be on first to understand about the prospect and then to be understood about what we can possibly do for them. So that's what we want to have a prospect centered selling process