Jack Malcolm

f you believe the customer is always right, then sales can be pretty easy. Simply ask them what they want and match your offering to that as closely as possible. It’s easy because the customer does all the work.

But just imagine if parents worked that way. “Hey Dad, Spike and the boys want me to hang out with them Saturday night. Can I have the keys to the liquor cabinet and borrow your Harley?”

Or doctors: “Hey Doc, I’ve had this pain in my chest for the past couple of days, and I feel short of breath. It must be my work stress, so could you prescribe me a few anxiety pills?”

Any doctor that would not probe further and try to get to the root cause of the pain, or did not overrule her patient, would be guilty of malpractice, yet that’s the approach that so many salespeople are taught.

The essence of professionalism is the application of specialized knowledge in the interests of the client.  There are times when the customer does not have the same level...

As an avid reader of military history, I’m very aware of the saying that: “Amateurs study strategy; professionals study logistics.” What this means is that it’s very easy to get caught up in the fun and interesting stuff, but if you want to really get things done, you have to master the detail and the boring day to day stuff such as processes, measurements and structures.

It’s the same with sales. Amateurs concentrate on the interesting stuff such as motivation, mental attitude and messaging. These are all important, but the reason we never run out of things to say about them is that the basic, boring stuff is being ignored.

Dan McDade is a professional. His book, ...

The three most important persuasion tools any speaker or salesperson can use are stories, questions and visuals. Imagine the power if you could put those three together?

Last September I wrote an article about how to use questions to get the buyer to tell you their story. It works great during a sales call because it guides the listener to tell you a compelling story that makes your solution their idea. In effect, it gets your listeners to tell you what you want them to hear.

In this article, we’ll take it to another level by adding the third tool—visuals.

You can put all three tools together into an irresistible combination by using a whiteboard or flipchart to create the visuals in real time during your presentation. If you do it right, you can get the customer to show you what you want them to see.

At their best, slides are wonderful for conveying visuals, and can also be used...

I’ve worked with thousands of bright and articulate people in my twenty plus years of training, people who are justly confident of their ability to rise to the occasion and think fast on their feet, whether it is in a sales call, an important presentation to their boss, or the give-and-take of internal meetings.

That confidence is usually an asset, but it often veers dangerously into overconfidence which leaves them vulnerable to error and discourages the preparation that could make them even better than they already are.

Here’s just one example. In teaching sales call planning I have salespeople list the top objections they expect to hear from their customers during the call, and next to it, jot down the key points they would use to answer the objection. Most salespeople find the first step easy to do, because they’ve heard some of the same objections over and over hundreds of times. Yet, because they’ve heard them so often, they usually resist writing...