Here’s a fun activity for your next Southwestern Advantage campus meeting: grab a friend and tell them that no matter what, they cannot smile. Next, sit across from them and smile. See how long they can last without smiling back. Most people last less than a minute before breaking into a grin. And all you did is smile at them!
In the book “Social Intelligence,” psychologist Daniel Goleman, Ph. D. describes how the human brain is truly a social organism. When we see an emotion on someone else’s face, our own faces naturally begin to mimic that expression and we actually begin to internalize that emotion ourselves. That’s why we cry at sad movies, and why laughter can be contagious. Goleman calls this synchronization of emotion and expression between two people “rapport.”
But wait—isn’t establishing rapport the first part of the introduction in the Southwestern Advantage sales cycle?
It sure is! Students in the Southwestern Advantage summer program learn that the first step in making a sale is to find a connection with their prospect. So how can we use this idea of rapport as emotional synchronization to help improve our ability to connect with Mrs. Jones?
It’s pretty simple, actually. Most of us are guilty, at some point or another, of assuming that just because we drop a few names, our current prospect feels connected to us. And then we end up confused when the prospect doesn’t buy our product! The problem is that simply telling Mrs. Jones who else has bought your books doesn’t establish any sort of emotional connection. All it does is let her know that you’ve been trained in sales. To truly establish rapport through using names, we need to emotionally connect with our prospects.
The best way to do this is by telling stories about your customers that elicit a shared emotional response. For example, if you know that Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Smith both have kids on the soccer team, sharing a story with Mrs. Jones about how frustrated Mrs. Smith was with long practices on a school night can remind her of her own frustration. (But remember to be ethical: only share true stories!) Because you are now both sharing the emotional experience of long practices, Mrs. Jones begins to feel connected to you. You have successfully created “rapport.”
So for those of you frustrated with your attempts to establish a connection with your prospects, try creating that emotional synchronization. Hey, you could even ask them to try as hard as they can not to smile…
Aside from using names during the summer more effectively, how else could you use the “emotional synchronization” understanding of rapport, either while selling or recruiting? Feel free to share in the comments section below!
For more information on Daniel Goleman and Social Intelligence, visit danielgoleman.info, or pick up the book from your local library!
I had the chance to share some ideas recently at Southwestern’s Great Recruiters Seminar, specifically in a workshop on communication strategies. One of the points I stressed to student managers was to teach new team members how to treat you, from the start.
First impressions are tricky. People make rapid assumptions about new acquaintances. Oftentimes, you can be mistaken about what you see and hear from a Southwestern candidate or a recruit.
If you’re going to be working with someone you don’t know well, you need to manage the budding relationship, not just the first impression.
Let’s explore an example. If you’re following up with a new Southwestern team member and they show up late for the meeting, you have several options:
1) ignore the fact they’re 15 minutes late and proceed
2) when (if) they apologize, say, “Oh, it’s no big deal.”
3) Confront them politely.
Early on in my Southwestern recruiting career, I would have opted for #2. I valued the team member liking me above our business relationship. If you pursue ignoring or excusing behavior you don’t appreciate, expect more of it. When I said, “Don’t worry, it’s no big deal,” I was teaching that person how to treat me in the future. I was unconsciously teaching them my time was not valuable. Once I chose this interpersonal route, I couldn’t then be upset if they showed up late for other follow-ups.
Option 3 might sound like this: “Jennifer, it’d be great for you to be on time when we meet again. When you show up late, I feel like you don’t value my time…. I’m meeting with a bunch of students today, and it throws everyone off. But I still like you! I just wanted to let you know how I felt.” Be sure to pause and let them feel a smidge uncomfortable.
(Use judgment! If they’re just totaled their car and they’re bleeding, or if there’s been some calamity, you can cut them some slack. If they overslept, see above.)
If you choose to let people know how you feel when they’ve violated one of your rules (in this case, punctuality), they will normally make adjustments. If they are tardy again, you need to amp up the message, making it more uncomfortable.
Punctuality is one example. Teach people how to treat you in other areas: turning in completed reports, returning calls, responding to texts—there are many ways to let new team members know what behavior you want. Feel free to comment! Can you give me other examples—Southwestern or not—where this would be useful?
It’s the mantra of almost every top Southwestern salesperson out there. We’ve all been told that to reach our goals, we can’t make any excuses—we have to be unconditionally committed. But I AM unconditionally committed, you say. I don’t make excuses, but I still haven’t reached my goals. What gives? The answer is pretty simple: human beings are far too reasonable.
Let me give you an example: let’s say you’re a student in the Southwestern Advantage summer program, and you have a goal of hitting President’s Club in personal sales. It’s 9:36 on Saturday night, and you’re one sale away from reaching your goal, but you have no good prospects in your area who have lights on. In fact, the closest prospect lives a ten-minute drive away, and they might not be up, either. After all, you didn’t set up an appointment with them. What do you do? The reasonable Southwestern salesperson looks at their watch and calls it a day. They didn’t hit their goal, but they had a good reason for not hitting it. I don’t want to make these people mad at me! That could give me really bad PR, and I might get kicked out of my turf. And they’ll probably buy if I stop in at a better time, but there’s no way they’ll buy if I wake them up. What else can I do? And they rationalize away their failure to hit their goal.
That, my friends, it what it means to be reasonable. It means granting a good reason for failure permission to be a suitable substitute for success. Being reasonable is the number one cause of our failure to reach our true potential in work and in life.
And there is a cure. But like most cures, it’s not pleasant—it’s not comfortable. If we really want to succeed, we must embrace the concept of being UNreasonable. To be UNreasonable is to refuse to let a good reason for failure prevent us from achieving success.
So looking at our previous Southwestern example, we saw that the reasonable thing to do is to end the week, failing to hit our goal. What’s the UNreasonable course of action? Well, this is where it gets fun! There are lots of UNreasonable things we can do. One is to go knock on a dark door. Another is to drive to that next prospect ten minutes away. They may not be up, but maybe their neighbors are. We could go to a new area of our Southwestern sales locality and find a family who’s awake. What about going to a convenience store and selling a set of books to the clerk on night shift? Or, we could plan ahead and make sure we have lots of late night appointments, so there’s always someone to go talk to after dark (the best choice!) The possibilities are endless!
If you ever find yourself caught in a situation where the only way out seems to be reasonable, check yourself. Is the reason really valid? Are there any UNreasonable solutions you could try? And don’t forget to fall back on your emotional purpose: is the reason for failing to hit your goal really bigger than your desire to make your purpose a reality? If it’s not, then it’s time to get UNreasonable.
And now for a departure from my normal sales blog for a chance political encouner: I was running a Leadership Retreat for Southwestern student managers in Des Moines, IA last week. As we wrapped up lunch and were heading into the conference room, one of the managers remarked, “Rick Perry is in the restaurant.” Didn’t register. I was busy getting the projector ready, messing with the PowerPoint. Then I got a text: “Rick Perry in restaurant.” It dawned on me that this was no joke, since there was a debate that night in town! We suspended the meeting and I headed over to meet one of our alums, now Republican presidential candidate.
A cluster of student managers encircled Gov. Perry. I naturally pushed them aside and shook hands. It was a nice encounter–the restaurant had emptied–and there were a couple bodyguards on the periphery. Perry seemed interested in the Southwestern students, and his body language gave no indication he was in a hurry to exit. We chatted about Southwestern, who we knew, and asked him about that night’s debate. His ”Gold Seal Gold” election schedule sounded daunting, and we were glad to be able to spend a few minutes with him.
Overall, Perry made a good impression (would you expect any less?). He was warm, friendly, interested in us and what we were doing. Obviously, photos were in order so we fell in and took a few shots. As we broke up, we asked him if he would mind saying a few words about his Southwestern experience on video. Perry told us that he could not endorse a product or company, but he did say we could quote him: “Southwestern’s the best thing I ever did.”
Last blog, we were discussing how to break out of the state of being stuck mentally in a Southwestern context. We talked about using the phrase, “What would it be like if I could ________ (insert impossible thing)?” By pretending you have the skill or ability which you currently believe you lack, your brain opens up to possibilities. You automatically imagine what it would be like.
Dealing with stuckness during a Southwestern summer.
I travel to many weekend meetings during the summer. On Sundays, I always meet with Southwestern students–many of whom are struggling–with their self-imposed limitations, with their belief levels in selling, with feelings of frustration because they’re not hitting their goals. Invariably, they’re in a mental “death-loop”: their self-talk is negative, which leads to a mental image of what they don’t want, which leads to an outcome or action that confirms their self-talk! A self-fulfilling sales prophecy that is limiting.
We’ve all done this in some way if we’ve sold with Southwestern: You look at a house and think to yourself: “I know I’m not going to get in.” You form a mental picture of this negative outcome. You muster up the courage anyway, knock and shock–you didn’t get in; then you tell yourself: “See! I knew that wouldn’t work.” We don’t get what we want; we get what we picture.
So my PC (personal conference) might sound like this:
Me: “Tell me what’s happening.”
Student: “I just can’t get in doors. People don’t let me in. Ever.”
Me: “Really. No one ever lets you in.”"
Student: “Well…some do.”
Me: “Tell me more.”
They go on to describe their stuckness in great detail. Using all kinds of universal statements, like “everyone”, “no one”, “always” and “never”. First person, present tense, with emotion. All their assertions reinforce what they don’t want!
I finally counter with a key question: “What do you want to happen?”
This usually brings an abrupt halt to their sad monologue. Southwestern students who are locked into their mental morass are not often looking for solutions, and the new question interrupts their train of thought. They are wallowing in self-pity and a vicious self-defeating cycle. After I ask, “What do you want to happen?” they typically give their right answer. Example: “I want to get in doors so I can make a sale.”
My reply? “Great, let’s talk about how to do that.” A how-to question allows us both to explore options and think about what the Southwestern student can do differently to reach a different outcome. Most people who are suffering from stuckness are in the “why-question” mode: “why is this happening to me?” or “why can’t I get in doors?” Breaking their state a bit with an entirely new question–”what do you want to happen?”–can launch the conversation into a much more useful area: the how-to-fix-this area.
If you’re selling (or studying or working out or feeling bad about yourself) and you’re mentally stuck, you don’t need me to PC you. Ask yourself, “What do I want to happen?” or “How do I want to feel?” Your brain will begin to give new & improved answers. Thoughts? Comments? Southwestern veterans, chime in and let me know if this makes sense!
Many of you Southwestern managers may have already seen this if you’re paying attention to youtube…Kenny Brooks, a self-styled comedian who uses a barrage of funny one-liners to sell his cleaning product, has gone viral. Kenny’s sales technique is caught on camera by a prospect. From the looks of this, he didn’t attend a conventional sales school of any kind, but he does have a planned presentation!
Kenny is engaging, warm, funny, self-deprecating and persistent. He hi-fives his prospect (physical involvement), deflects questions about the price (the inquiry came during the “demo”), and closes repeatedly. On the less admirable side, Kenny makes appeals to buying out of sympathy (a little) and not solely out of service. Yet on the positive side, he wears an ID badge! Well done. His entire approach/demo is performed (I chose that word carefully) at the door—quite the door demo! Kenny does reference neighbors, but doesn’t use any names.
Kenny says he is working to become a TV comedian, and his door to door selling is merely a “stepping stone” to greater fame and fortune. What are your thoughts on his technique? Would you consider him effective or off-putting? Watch this 7:00 minute clip, and you decide whether this guy will make it big. (Why didn’t anyone approach him for Southwestern?)
Hey Southwestern friends! Have you ever been selling or recruiting and gotten stuck mentally? In other words, you thought: “This can’t be done.” Or “Hitting that sales level is impossible.” Or “I could never approach that person for my team.” Of course you have. We all tend to limit ourselves at times–we get stuck in a sales comfort zone.
Here’s a principle of human nature that can be useful in these moments. NLP shows us that questions are the answer. When our brain hears a question, no matter how unthinkable, it automatically imagines an answer. Try it for yourself — pick something you don’t think you can do, or do well. Then, ask yourself this question: “What would it be like if I could do _________ really well?” Example: “What would it be like if I could sell really well?” Or “What would it be like if I were really bold when it came to building a team?”
Your brain automatically imagines what it would be like — it can’t help it. It’s automatic. And it moves your mind from the frozen position of “impossible” to one of, “what would it be like if…?” and that’s a much more resourceful state to be in. Belief is a funny thing. Our brain always looks for evidence to support our thoughts. We must be careful what we think about our sales ability or our ability to build a Southwestern team. When we make statements to ourselves, like “I could never sell like _________” (insert name of top producer), we tend to believe it. To ask, “What would it be like if I could sell like ______?” At once our brain shifts from “stuckness” to “unstuckness.” We imagine answers rather than limits.
After you begin to imagine what it would be like if you did have that skill or ability, then it might be useful to ask, “And how would I do that?” Hmmm. More potential answers and useful thoughts! You might decide to phone up that top producer and ask them how they do it. You might ask to follow them on the field for a day and model their behavior and/or attitude. You might ask them what they think about all day long and compare it to what you normally ponder. Once you get unstuck with the “what would it be like if I…” question, you can switch to “how” questions.
You can use this rut-breaking question in all areas of life. What would it be like if you could really be focused when you study? What would it be like if you could play Call of Duty 3 really well? How about the realm of dating: what would it be like if you were really confident about asking cool people out? Think about it. What works for you? Send me a comment! Southwestern is not the only context where this mental agility applies.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been guilty of talking to yourself. Out loud. If you’re selling with Southwestern and your hand isn’t up, you are costing yourself some serious cash. Why? Allow me to explain.
Before my first summer with Southwestern, my manager Jake trained me on the principle of self-talk. Self-talk is prevalent throughout the culture of Southwestern, and it’s a very simple idea. We all have a natural tendency as human beings to think negative thoughts: “This family will probably blow me off, too.” “They probably won’t need the books, either.” “Nobody in my turf has any money.” In a cold-calling sales job, the negative thoughts can get especially ugly: “Why are so many people telling me no? What’s wrong with me?” “I suck at this and I suck at life. I should just give up.”
If we don’t do something to control this kind of negative thinking, we end up hurting our sales and ourselves. The way we are taught in Southwestern to control this is with positive self-talk: saying positive words and phrases OUT LOUD. Why? Because it’s impossible to think something negative while at the same time saying something positive, and for some reason, our brain is more likely to believe something we say than something we think. (Positive action precedes positive thinking.)
But despite the major benefits of self-talk, few people actually use it. Many feel awkward talking to themselves in public, and others have tried but have found it to be unsuccessful. Surprisingly, the answer to both objections is the same.
Self conversation is the key to Southwestern sales success.
Here’s the key to making self-talk work: self-conversation. No, that doesn’t mean having a two-part conversation where you play both the lead and supporting actor (though you could, if that’s what floats your boat). It means not preaching to yourself, but actually believing what you say and simply explaining it to yourself. Let me give you an example.
My worst summer in sales, I used self-talk every single day. I said things like, “It works if I’m working, and I’m working, so it’ll work.” “I do everything right.” “People like me, they like my books, and they buy them.” Contrast that with my best summer, where I used self-conversation every day. I said things like, “It works if I’m working, and I’m working, so it’ll work.” “I do everything right.” “People like me, they like my books, and they buy them.”
Now, this is hard to convey via the written word, so bear with me and use your imagination. My tone of voice when uttering these phrases during my worst summer was often similar to the tone one hears from a father severely disciplining a delinquent child. The implication was, “Jaselyn, you’re so dumb, why do I have to remind you of this stuff? Quit trying and start doing, you idiot!” Other times it had a sense of desperation, as if by saying these words enough times, I could magically force people to start buying my books. The result was people uninterested in spending time with someone who didn’t even want to spend time with herself, and a frustratingly low volume of sales and high volume of cancellations.
The difference during my best summer was that rather than lecturing myself or pleading in desperation for a sale, I was simply stating a fact. I was simply reminding myself every now and then of how things are. And the strange part is I felt a lot less awkward saying the phrases. They seemed natural and normal because I believed what I was saying. As a result, every approach felt natural and relaxed, and I had a lot of fun with each family I met, whether they bought or not. But most of them did.
So how do you use self-talk effectively? By making it conversational and believing what you are saying.
So, for your own sake, use some positive self-conversation. Have fun with yourself and your customers, and keep those pesky negative thoughts away.
Also, feel free to share any of your favorite positive phrases in the comments section. Thanks for reading our Southwestern sales blog!
Why is the Southwestern experience so valuable? One reason is the program gives students so many opportunities to fail. Yes, fail. There is value is stumbling! Failing can be useful long term. I ran across this bNet blog from Suzanne Lucas, entitled “Why Failure is the Secret of Your Success”. Here are the main bits below; as you read it, think about the value of the many struggles students encounter during their Southwestern careers:
“What does it take to succeed? Apparently a whole lot of failure. Paul Tough, in the New York Times, reports educational leaders who believe that knowing how to fail is the secret to success. Dominic Randolph, who leads an expensive, top ranked private school in New York City, is concerned about students that have known nothing but success. He states:
Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southernItaly, there was this idea inAmericathat if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful. Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.
These kids don’t know how to fail because they’ve never done it. Therefore, when things get outside their comfort zone, or they first encounter people more capable than they are, they have no skills for dealing with it. We talk a lot about hard work, but school grading generally ends up being based on how well you did on the test, not about how much effort it took to get there or how persistent someone was.
But wait, don’t we want to hire those people who are naturally brilliant and don’t need a lot of hard work to be successful? Well, sure, except that if they don’t know how to fail they are going to be awfully difficult to work with. We hear this complaint from those who employ Generation Y. Many of their parents (and their schools) saw to it that failure wasn’t an option. Everything was fixed or extra credit given or forgotten lunches brought to school.
The ability to bounce back from failure is a key point. But, what if you’ve never failed? What if your parents fix every problem you ever have? What if you never gain this valuable skill? Then you’re far less likely to have true success. If you’ve never had to try again and again, are you going to assume that the problem is unsolvable if you fail the first time?
Lots of people live charmed lives as long as their parents are pulling the strings or they put themselves in places where success is almost guaranteed. Except that anyone in the working world today knows that failure is not only a possibility it’s a high probability. Businesses fail. Entire divisions get laid off, regardless of how brilliant any individual employee was. Sometimes it’s just a matter of trying to figure out what the problem in the darn code is. If you’re a one try and you’re finished type of person, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, you won’t succeed.
And what happens if you’re one of those people who has never failed? Never had to face disappointment and pick yourself up by your own bootstraps? It can be disastrous. But, to succeed you must be able to fail and recover from failure.”
I think of the many college students I interviewed over the years who never sold with Southwestern–it was sad their parents ran interference for them. Even more sad, these same students who were “protected” from Southwestern summer setbacks, were often shell-shocked when they hit their first career. I welcome your thoughts and experiences! I am thankful my parents allowed me the opportunity to fail that first summer with Southwestern.
I ran across an interesting sales blog in bNet from Geoffrey James. He calls it, “Why Sales Scripts are a Waste of Time”. It definitely runs counter to what we teach and use at Southwestern! I’ve reprinted it almost in its entirety (I added the nifty photos). Any thoughts or comments are welcome–especially if you cut your sales teeth at Southwestern, where we rely on sales scripts to train people. Here it is:
“I just heard an interesting horror story from a seasoned sales professional. She was presenting to a prospect, the prospect interrupted her and said: “you must have been a real star at your Sandler training.” In other words, the customer not only knew he was being “sold” but could identify the sales training firm that had trained the sales rep to sell.
This is not a good thing to happen, but it happens more than you think. The reason is that many sales training firms continue to be invested in the mistaken notion that successful selling behavior is as reproducible as an assembly line. As a result, they promote a set of highly ritualized behaviors that are supposed to work, but which often just make the sales rep look silly.
The concept of scripted “ritual selling” goes back to the 1930s. Early sales training (particularly in the automobile industry) was designed to ensure that everyone on the sales team spoke, acted, looked and even moved in the exact same manner, in the mistaken belief that customers would react identically to the same stimuli. Sales reps were even told how to hold the pen when they handed it to the customer to sign on the dotted line.
Sales rituals (i.e. sales scripts) are mostly absurd.
They’re not based upon any real research but rather upon speculation about what “ought” to work or what worked for the individual who’s selling the training. As such, they’re a crap shoot anyway. To make matters worse, most prospects and customer see sales rituals as fakey, manipulative, sleazy and unethical.
…One of the unintentional byproducts of these rituals is to the public at large a career in sales has often been considered futile and depressing, as in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Death of a Salesman,” which holds suicide as a better fate than being a salesman.
And, in fact, sales rituals ARE depressing, because they inevitably create massive amounts of rejection. I suspect that primary reason that motivational training has become part of the sales training regimen is simply that sales rituals create so much failure, producing an almost infinite need to “cheer up” the sales force.
Another byproduct of sales rituals is the injection of magical thinking into the mix.
Since sales professionals are being asked, from the start, to take a leap of faith that sales rituals will work, it’s not surprising that some expect divine intervention as well. You see this tendency towards the supernatural in the motivational writings Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and Norman Vincent Peale.
Finally, sales rituals have resulted in a certain amount of employee abuse. I’ve heard sales trainers — big names, mind you — explain that the reason their rituals weren’t working was that the sales reps were “stupid” and “lazy.” Sales managers pick up this way of thinking, needless to say.
In the 1992 movie of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross, a hot-shot sales trainer (memorably played by Alec Baldwin) is brought in by top management to “motivate” the discouraged troops.
In a much-quoted speech, the character provides both the ritualized bromides (e.g. “A.B.C. – Always Be Closing”) along with crude and abusive motivational training (e.g. “Coffee is for closers!”) The film admirably illustrates the insanity of this kind of training.
More importantly, the movie illustrates the exact tendency of customers to get wise to the ritual scripts, as when the character played by Jack Lemmon finds that his smooth patter, once effective, no longer works.
What’s the alternative to sales rituals? Well, you can start by throwing out the “sales scripts” you’ve been using. About the only time a sales script works is in cold-calling situations, where you’re playing a numbers game. The rest of the time, the scripts are probably getting in your way.
For almost all sales situations, you’re much better off entering into a real conversation and behaving like a genuine human being rather than a devotee of some sales religion who’s determined to follow a ritualized script.
This requires knowing what your selling, understanding the customer’s business model, and actually caring about them as something more than somebody who’s supposed to play their role in some weird little play that you’re trying to create.”
Well, there you have it. Mr. James finds sales talks off-putting at their best, and destructive to sales at their worst. What are your thoughts? If you sold with Southwestern, is it time to change our sales strategy, or is James off the mark? He does say, “About the only time a sales script works is in cold-calling situations, where you’re playing a numbers game.” Southwestern seems to have done well with sales talks over the past 150+ years.
see and hear from a Southwestern candidate or a recruit. 
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