After years of working as a sales director and closing some landmark deals, I always wanted to put together a sales course that can make a real difference. Off course after studying the full circle experience, one realize that there are ways that achieve short term goals at a long term cost – and then there are ways that are beneficial both in terms of immediate results as well as long term shareholder value and reputation – and that is precisely what I wanted to focus on.
Considering today’s environment where factors such as hyper-competitiveness, cross-cultural awareness and reverse psychology are increasingly present. Therefore, I teamed up with Francesca Stregapede, who studied neuroscience and psychology in Oxford. This enalbed me to focus on practical elements such as deal psychology, negotiation and reputation, whereas Francesca addressed the corse issues of the buying brain. In the videos below we discuss the course in more detail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdUnszPyLeM&feature=youtu.be
Discussion:
Sales Training: The art of selling to intelligent people is an advanced sales training course that will lead you deeper into the Neuroscience of sales with some valuable insights that will increase your ability to influence people’s buying decisions and your sales effectiveness as a consequence.
What are the core issues we address in the course?
To be honest, I am not amused when senior management want me to coach their staff in the direction of “You should work 10X or 100X harder if at first it did not work” This is because there is proof that we need to take matters back to the drawing board – and adress our competency first. Things such as “persuasion or pushing to close the sale” is simply no longer valid in a modern society where we interact with inteligent beings. I will explain more shortly.
Sales people often think: If I’m hard-working and honest with my customers, why do I need a better understanding of things like “neuroscience”, “the psychology of trust” and “reverse psychology”? The answer is simple: there are some truly amazing sales people, who go the extra mile to collect their customers at the airport, entertain them at restaurants, tell funny jokes on LinkedIn and then after doing all these things to impress customers, they find out that the customer bought from their competitor who did not do any of these things to impress them. Sometimes the customer can even perceive dedicated sales consultants as being desperate, causing them to lose the deal.
Other sales people still attempt to use mental strategies to persuade their customers to buy their products or services and by doing so they seem to forget that resistance to persuasion is a common reaction in all human beings. This results in salespeople failing to close straightforward sales that should have been very easy to close.
This is precisely why salespeople need a deeper understanding of how customers think, whom they trust, and why they decide to buy. Appreciating these concepts will give you a real edge as a salesperson: you will gain the confidence and proficiency to take your sales performance to the highest level. All the techniques found in this book focus on smarter sales, not harder sales. Hopefully, by the end of this book you will have understood that sales success does not depend on your desire to sell or on how hard you try. Rather, it depends on your ability to understand the mechanisms that underlie the buying process. You will learn to be a smarter salesperson, who is confident and relaxed and can dextrously use a handful of strategies leading to success.
Certainly not the dark side of sales and marketing:
Now let’s be clear about something: some people think that the course or the book is about the dark side of sales. However, this is not the case. Au contraire, if you are stuck in a pattern where you are currently using questionable sales techniques that are making good money but is bad for your reputation, you’re about to learn new methods that are more effective and will give you an excellent reputation instead. The methods described in this book are insightful rather than dubious
Who will benefit the most from the sales training?
Whether you are a real estate agent, aviation sales specialist, medical consultant – or an investment adviser, your area of expertise is not relevant at this stage. There are three groups of people who will benefit tremendously from reading this book. Firstly, if you already work in sales and perform well, but somehow find that over time your reputation is suffering in the process. Secondly, if you are totally new to sales and would like to get it right from the start, with this book you can learn to master the psychology of selling so that you never struggle in this profession. Thirdly, if you work in sales, have a good reputation, but you need to increase your conversion rate to see better performance, this book will allow you to fine-tune your selling approach.
I am constantly soliciting feedback from a wide range of sources – you can be certain that periodic updates will occur. Therefore once you enrol in the course, you will be part of a “CPD club” that will be updated in years to come.