By Troy Harrison – Sales Navigator
I’m going to give you a quick peek behind the curtain of sales training. Here’s what (smart) sales trainers do: They attempt to predict buyer behavior patterns, and then create techniques designed to work with those buyer behavior patterns in order to move the buyer toward a positive buying decision. They then teach salespeople how to use these techniques.
But – what if buyer behavior patterns change? This is the problem facing many people in the sales profession right now. I’ve been saying it for a while, and it bears repeating. Today’s buyers are getting younger, they’re more empowered and informed, and they have different wants and needs from salespeople than the buyers of years past had. That’s changing the foundational assumptions upon which many sales techniques are built – which makes those techniques obsolete. I heard a story a few days ago that positively blew up one of the oldest and most foundational assumptions of sales, and we’ll unpack it here and talk about what it means.
I was talking to a production manager for a manufacturing company. He sees salespeople all the time, of course, and he was telling me about one particular visit that he’d had. He’s 37 years old, which becomes very germane to the story. A salesman came in for his first visit with the production manager. As he did, the salesman took a quick look around the office. As we’ll see, he was doing a quick scan for pictures, mounted fish on the wall, trophies, or anything else that would give an indication of the buyer’s personal interests.