What Your Parents Never Told You

I spend quite a bit of time thinking about learning... how we learn, who chooses what we learn and how what we have learned or not learned affects us throughout our lives. Our first teachers are usually our parents, so where do I stand if they don't know very much? Will I be consigned to perpetual ignorance too? 

How will I even know I don't know very much? It would be very limiting to my potential if this were the case, after all, most learning is done before we even get to school. So what if our "teachers".... good ol' Mum and Dad, grannies & granddads, siblings, aunts and uncles, etc. just aren't up to the mark? Just because I was born into a family of under-achievers, am I forever consigned to the same fate? That's an extreme example, but how about just having a lack of understanding in certain fields? Like money.

If Mum and Dad didn't know much about money, how to use it, how to accumulate it, then how am I going to learn? Schools don’t teach this stuff so I guess I’ll just have to muddle through on my own. Will I place the same importance (or lack of it) on money as my parents do?  It's very likely I will. I'm guessing that I could educate myself later if I found some compelling reason to do so, but what pits would I have fallen into before I got the message that I needed an education about money?  

How much would it cost me in all the failures I'd encounter before I got wise, after all, sometimes it takes more than one disaster before I realise I'm short on knowledge? I might know how to make money, but obtaining it and keeping it are two entirely different things. Then you add in the complications of using it, leveraging it and putting it to work. If you haven't been taught this stuff somewhere along the line, how on earth are you ever going to find out?

The same can be said for sales. One of my favourite expressions is “You don’t know what you don’t know.”  It’s almost a mantra of mine. How do you know that you lack skills? If you’re not getting the same good results as your colleagues, are you telling yourself it’s because you’re not as good as they are, maybe you think you’re dumber or lazier, or not as attractive or sociable or all kinds of other personal failings that you can think of!  

It’s far more likely that the fault doesn’t lie in your personal short-comings, it lies in your lack of skills. What a relief! Because if you have a personal skill shortage, you simply go out and get some, don’t you?!  Aha, but wait a second, how do you know what skills you need? After all, you don’t know what you don’t know.  

You could ask your colleagues, but they might be just as unskilled as you are. You could ask your boss, but if they knew how to improve your skills, surely they would have helped you do so before now, after all it’s in their best interest to have you performing at your peak. How about attending sales training seminars? Or buy books on sales and actually read them? You could get yourself a personal coach, but that can get a bit costly, especially for the really good ones. Or you could talk to me.

Sure, you can keep on going the same way you are now and keep on getting the same tired old results and keep on beating yourself up over your failures.  Or you could take the time to figure out what’s really going on in your sales career and learn what skills you need to make yourself the best you can be. I can definitely help you with that.  So what are you waiting for?

The Old Razzle Dazzle

You’ve spent a fortune on sales courses that leave you burning with enthusiasm and raring to sell, sell, sell, but in the final analysis, you don’t seem able to add anything to your bottom line. Why? You put in all the effort. You do everything they tell you to, yet your results just don’t match the hype. If anything, your sales results have gotten worse!

It could be a mismatch in core values and you get that from trying to mix selling cultures that just don’t fit. I remember when I was a little girl and had my first sleepover at a friend’s house. I was amazed at how differently her family operated than mine. I had thought everyone was the same, that her parents would be just like my parents; that their family rituals and rules would be just the same as mine. They were nothing like my family. They talked with their mouths full. They put their elbows on the table as they ate. They hugged each other a lot. All vastly different from how things ran at my house.

The same can be said for sales. Many sales training courses in Australia and New Zealand have their basis in American systems. Some of their stuff is very powerful and works extremely well….when you’re selling to Americans. But try using this stuff on Kiwis and Aussies and it’s a huge clash of values. We don’t think like Americans, in fact, we're deeply suspicious of the American tendency to amp things up and use a lot of hyperbole.

Try selling to an Aussie or a Kiwi using these techniques and they’ll first wonder what drugs you’re on and then they’ll run a mile. They simply don’t trust this style of selling and hate the feeling of being “sold” to.  They don’t trust in the sincerity of the salesperson when they use overblown sales techniques and they show their displeasure and mistrust by not buying from you.

Keep looking for sales courses, by all means, but take from them only the bits that fit with your own culture of selling.  It’s great to inject yourself with a hefty dose of enthusiasm, just be careful how you apply it in your own selling environment. By keeping your customers in mind and always relating your sales pitch back to their needs, you really can’t go wrong.