GUEST: I want your advice on the sales process of  moving someone who hasn’t been approached to your brand into into a sale. I started my own business and it’s an invoicing servicing company for the government down in Australia, it’s no cost to the customer.

Audio file of the post ↓

Video of the post with pictures of dogs and mind blowing special effects! ↓

 

ADAM: I have learned that well intended advice is the cause of much human misery. So, I would respectfully like to decline from that thoughtful invitation for my input. There’s so many specifics and variables and there’s just so many dynamics and the way they relate to each other. The last thing I want to do is to give you bad advice, no matter how well intended. Because once my bad advice is in your brain, it’s very difficult to get my bad advice out of your brain. And rather than trying to extricate it out, you might spend too much mental energy trying to make sense of something that is just bad advice.

GUEST: And on that note, then, if possible, this is completely up to you. I love when you go about your sales perspective in general, rather than my specific situation. And I’ll leave it there.

ADAM: Thank you so much. It’s my experience that we are all always selling ourselves.

Here’s an example: I’ve pet a lot of dogs I meet on the street. Now I’m also selling myself to the animal and to the owner.

What do I mean by that?

Well, there’s this common kind of a ritual, I suppose for me, and for others. I make eye contact with a dog to see if they want to be approached, if they’re indicating that they want that type of a touch, and then of course with the owner in a, of course, non solicitous way. I don’t want anybody to think that I’m encountering them with ulterior motives. I really just want to pet their dog.

I always put my hand down in front of the dog and I say, “may I say hello to your dog, may I pet your dog?” 99 times out of a hundred, they’ll accept my request.

So now let’s kind of break down what’s happened.

• I’ve made eye contact with the dog to see if the dog is receptive, an invitation, if there’s an opportunity for me to come and pet the  dog
• Are they agitated?
• Are they shying away?
• Did I catch the dog at a bad moment?

That’s a sale. I’m allowing the dog the opportunity to say no, allowing the dog the opportunity to say yes, and allowing the dog to kind of preserve its own identity and feel comfortable that I’m just not some person on the street who’s going to molest it and, you know, and, and treat it unpleasantly. So I’m actually even giving that dog the opportunity to say no and preserve its own feeling of control.

When I ask the owner for their permission I’m selling a bit of myself. Of course I don’t want them to think I’m solicitous. So that’s got to be communicated, not just in the words but in my body language and my eye contact. When I approach a woman who’s got a dog I don’t want her to feel that I’m just using this as some type of a device to be solicitous to her, but that’s all gotta be communicated in an authentic way.

So I want her to, you know, have that feeling of security and that’s also sales, isn’t it? I have an awareness of it, of myself, and I also have an awareness of that person, and their identity. Of who their identity is.

A person wants to keep their identity intact.

• How they perceive themselves.
• How they want other people to perceive them.
• How they want to be perceived by other people.

I don’t want in any way to challenge that person’s identity. So I want them to feel that they’re in control. So when I ask, they have the opportunity to say no, that’s a very important thing.

I put my hand in front of the dog so they can see it from a bit of a distance, they can come forward to it if they choose to, all of us who know dogs know that sometimes you caught a dog at the wrong time and they just don’t want to say hello. That rarely happens, but, you know, whatever.

The dog has its own kind of comfort and it wants to feel that that’s intact. So I’m still selling myself, you know, to the dog in this, in this encounter. I’m putting my hand in front of the dog, the dog’s gonna come over, I’ll ask the owner ‘where did you get your dog from? How did you choose the breed?‘

What I’m trying to share is that that’s a sale. I’m selling myself to the dog. I’m selling myself to the dog owner. And I’m also aware that the clock is running, between two and four minutes is plenty of time. No matter how much I’m enjoying my time with the dog or, or enjoying my time speaking with the owner about how they chose that breed and blah, blah, blah, I want to make sure that I part company with them respectfully: “thank you for letting me spend time with your dog” I always kind of cup my hands in a bit of a prayer.

Then, when I leave it’s still a sale because I want them to think well of me because that’s also a part of my identity.

So, just as I was respecting the dog’s identity, it’s feeling of security and it’s kind of perimeter of safety for the dog and its owners, I have an awareness of their identity and I’m allowing them to keep it intact. And they also have a sense of my identity now, and we are kind of collaborating in this whole experience.

Sales has been important for me and I like to share my experience with other people. Not just because of how it has improved my life from being a little crazy kid, a little nuclear explosion, but how I feel others can benefit from it. I’ve known many.

A person can be a great artist, but then they’ve also got to sell it. It’s got to be a commercial enterprise, a lot of artists don’t feel comfortable about selling their own product because of the vulnerability of asking for an order. There’s a real sense of their own vulnerability, just completely exposing your own identity and allowing the person to have this kind of dominant role. 

There’s always a fraction of us that we’re giving away. But what’s also important to consider is that we’re never gonna be able to recover that fraction.

I was asked a question earlier and I bowed out respectfully from any type of prescriptive answer, because in that type of an exchange, can I say it was a sales, no, but what I can definitely say is I was communicating my identity to the person and a person was thoughtful enough to receive my identity and to allow it to go unchallenged.

So was that a sale? Well, there wasn’t any type of transaction or commerce that occurred. But it was a sale in kind of my identity, how I want to perceive of my own identity, which is an honest person, right? I was honest. I didn’t offer something that was bad advice. I don’t want to misrepresent that I can be of help. So I wanted to kind of establish myself, ‘who I am‘.

That’s even a sale to myself, because that’s my identity. So if I contemplate who my identity is, I’m going to say my identity is an honest person, I’m actually selling myself to myself, the way I’m going to perceive myself, and the way I’ve reiterated it in this type of a very brief conversation that I had with this person was, I’m honest.

I value other people. I want other people to value me. I want them to perceive me as honest. I want them to think of me as a person who, if they don’t know the answer, they’ll say, “I don’t know the answer” and won’t concoct some type of a crazy diversionary tactic of answering things that are not only wrong, but are even structurally wrong.

The mind time travels right? It visits the past meetings we’ve had, future plans and meetings, conversations we will have and that we have just had, when I do this I’ll wonder did I handle myself correctly? Did I say the right thing that I wanted to say? Was I responsive to their question? Did I misrepresent myself? Was there any delusion on my part that I just couldn’t stop myself from going on?

A delusion would be trying to answer a question where I’m not qualified to answer the question. Happens all the time. Not, except not to me, or at least in a minimum because I try and keep aware of it. So, again, sales isn’t just  transactional, or cause and effect, or ‘if this, then that‘ sequence.

We are always selling a little bit of ourselves we are always selling a fraction of ourselves even to ourselves. A lot of people feel very uncomfortable about perceiving of themselves as a salesperson.

I can’t say that that’s “sales“, but I also can’t really say what “sales” is.