A secret about selling

Success in most fields depends on selling ability. Even if you are a nuclear physicist, you still need at least ONE person who believes in the value of your work, and is willing to back you up financially. But you've got to sell to him first.

So if success depends on selling ability, what does selling ability depend on?

An insight I just had five minutes ago, is that you've got to find out the other person's "secret numbers." Everybody has secret numbers, or "hot buttons" if you will.

If John's secret numbers are 24985, and Jane is trying to sell to him a product by repeating 39252, there is no way she will ever succeed.

Stephanie is a little smarter. She proceeds step by step. She throws all kinds of numbers at John, and somehow notices that he pays attention when she says "3", and even more when she says "2."

"Aha!" Stephanie says to herself. "I've got at least one number that gets a response from him!"

And over the course of the following get-togethers, she carefully and casually tries out several other numbers and discovers, in a similar fashion, John's other three numbers (498).

Of course, by this time, John feels that Stephanie totally understands him and cares a great deal about him, so even if she gets the last number (5) wrong, it doesn't matter. John is ready to buy whatever Stephanie is selling.

Of course, this illustration is a gross approximation of the real selling process, but it does point to the need to go about the selling process in a systematic fashion. At each step of the process, you either get it right or you get it wrong. The trick is to pay attention to the prospect's signal, which will tell you whether you're going in the right direction or not.

(Savvy readers will notice, of course, that the more expensive the item to be sold, the more numbers the seller must "decode.")