Rapport is the deepest level of relationship between two individuals that involves sharing common ground, and is established when harmony and accord have been reached between both parties. This does not mean the individuals involved agree on every issue. Instead, it means they have attained a mutual respect for each other’s opinions. Developing rapport with others lowers stress within our relationships, thereby creating greater productivity.

We have established rapport with people know, like and trust

Establishing Rapport

Rapport is developed as we understand, recognize, appreciate, and adapt to the behavior and communication styles of others. Regardless of background, everyone wants to be valued, appreciated and unconditionally accepted for who they are. As a result, we tend to trust and have an affinity for the people we believe really understand us and accept us.

Unfortunately, we struggle with this as human beings. Some folks just ʻrub us the wrong wayʼ, or worse still, they ʻpush our buttonsʼ. And often, the ones that irritate us the most are the ones closest to us, such as family, friends, and coworkers.
To begin connecting with others, we must cultivate a genuine desire to understand the people around us.

Mastering Rapport

Mastering rapport is reached when an individual develops the skills and the genuine desire to develop relationships of mutual trust and emotional affinity.
Rapport Mastery works best when adopted as a lifestyle to better communicate with people and do business, not merely to manipulate others with surface techniques or to be saved until there is a glaring problem. Rapport Mastery involves personal transparency as well as enthusiasm for the success of others.

The Road to Rapport

There is no instant path to building rapport with those around us. This level of respect and trust will take time to develop. Attempting to rush this process will actually be counterproductive as it breaks that trust. Although each of us will have the ability to connect more quickly with certain individuals, there is no way to create this level of trust and regard for another person outside of the test of time. Creating rapport is a step by step process.

Do I Have Rapport?

Individuals with whom you have established rapport will come to you for advice or information on a wide variety of subjects. Rapport is developed as we understand, recognise, appreciate, and adapt to the behaviour and communication styles of others.

How do you begin to establish rapport?’

The Power of Perception

Rapport starts with understanding the behavioural and communication style of another, discovering how our personal actions are being perceived by others, and learning to control our own behaviours to better meet their needs.Connecting with others begins with recognising and understanding the perception of those with whom we interact.

Humans are uniquely different from one another. Our ideas about the world around us have been influenced by our parents, values, education, and culture. In addition to these factors, the way we perceive, interpret and share this information is based largely upon our behavioural and communication style.

Imagine that two individuals walk into a room. Both are wearing glasses, however one pair has red lenses and one has blue. Neither of them realise they have glasses of different colours. Both individuals are asked to look at a white wall and announce to the other what colour they believe the wall to be. The individual wearing the red glasses will be sure the wall is red, while the individual with the blue lenses will be sure it’s blue. They both would KNOW they were correct and sure the other person was wrong.

Now imagine these individuals try on each other’s glasses. Would they have a better idea of what the other person was seeing? This change of perception would help reduce conflict because each of them would now be able to understand the otherʼs perception.

In order to understand and connect, we need to understand how the other person is perceiving the world around them. By putting on someone else’s glasses, so to speak, we will have the ability to appreciate and understand them better.

Perception is based on an individual’s communication and behavioural style

Pace, Perception and Adaption

To understand human behaviour and communication we need to begin by looking at two basic elements pace and priority.

Pace is the speed at which individuals move and speak. Some individuals tends to be more faster or slower than others. There is not right or wrong pace as we all have elements of both.

Fast paced individuals tend to move, speak, respond and decide quickly, whereas sower paced individuals prefer to spend time in reflection and act carefully.

If you are fast paced person, a slower paced individual may see you as impatient, irresponsible, reckless, rude, manipulative, overbearing, angry and inconsiderate.

If you are a slow paced person, a fast paced individual may see you as unmotivated, lazy, sad, uncaring, disrespectful, disengaged, untruthful and distracted.

All relationships being by connecting with each other’s PACE. If there is missed connection at his level, you will be unable to move forward to build rapport.

This is where adaption comes into play. Connecting in a non-confrontational, non-irritating way requires adapting my own pace to match the pace of the other person. I may be fast paced, however, the only way to show the slow paced person that I am not impatient or reckless, I must control my actions and slow down. In the same way, if I am slow paced, I may need to speed up my interactions so I am not perceived as unmotivated and lazy.

Priority characteristics

As with pace, individuals have different priorities , which refer to what they prioritise as they view their world. Individuals tend to be either:

Task-Orientated – they are more focused on accomplishing tasks. Think in terms of plans, procedures, organisation, function, projects and programs. They like to create lists and check off items as they ate completed.

People-Orientated – they are more focused on establishing relationships. They are energized by being around people. They tend to focus on more on relationships, feelings, friendships, helping others and making people happy.

If you are a task-orientated person, a people-orientated person may perceive you as cold, workaholic, greedy, disconnected, inflexible, unmerciful, unfriendly and not family oriented.

If you are a people-oriented person, a task-oriented individual may perceive you as distracted, weak, overly emotional, unproductive, naive, gullible, foolish and not serious.

90% of conflict is caused by a clash of priorities or false perceptions

Now that we understand what rapport is and how we unknowingly can break it by failing to control our behaviour, we can now develop a process that will help us to better adapt and build relationships.

Know, Like, & Trust

Remember, rapport is established with all types of individuals when they know, like, and trust you. Matching pace provides the foundation for rapport by allowing other’s to get to know us.
However, the other two aspects, trust and like, are developed differently depending upon an individual’s priority style.

We get to know each other by matching pace. We develop rapport by respecting priorities.

Task-oriented individuals must trust you before they will like you. Here’s the progression of establishing rapport with the task-oriented individual: They will do business with you only if they have come to trust you. Once trust is established they will gradually begin to like you.

People-oriented individuals must like you before they will trust you. Here’s the progression of establishing rapport with the people-oriented individual: They must first like you. (One of the best ways to begin to establish affinity with this type is to smile.) Once they like you
they will begin to trust and develop rapport with you.

2 ROADS TO RAPPORT

Practical Application

To build rapport with a task-oriented individual, consider what is most important to this behaviour style. Because this behaviour style views the world from a task perspective, task completion is imperative for constructing trust.

To build rapport with a people-oriented individual, consider what is most important to this behaviour style. Because this behaviour style views the world from a people perspective, they will observe how you interact with others and desire friendship.

They are the basics of building more meaningful, peaceful, and productive relationships with those around you.

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It’s the culmination of weeks or months of blood, sweat and tears and determines whether all that effort was really worthwhile or not.

For a seasoned sales professional, with a well-honed gut instinct and plenty of sales battle scars, the close phase of any deal is often the most tense and stressful period. Even for these battle-hardened sales veterans, things can and do go wrong at the 11th hour. For less-experienced sales reps, closing deals is often an achilles heel, where even the slightest misstep can turn a hot prospect to ice, faster than Jon Snow can say 

“Winter is Coming”.

Regardless of where you are on the sales experience spectrum, it’s likely you’re missing out on some proven strategies to increase your close rate, overcome objections confidently, and protect your most important asset – ‘time’. –

What’s the main cause of lost sales?

A lot of factors can contribute to lost sales, but what’s interesting is that the issues we often perceive as the root cause of our losses are often just symptoms of a bigger issue.

What if I told you the reason so many of your leads are going cold isn’t that your customers aren’t ready to buy what you are selling, but that they aren’t ready to buy you? This is a bold statement, but in the B2B sales world, make no mistake customers are buying you, as much, if not more, than what’s in your kitbag.

The B2B sales world has been turned on its head over the last few years, as technology and buying behaviours have shifted the balance of power from sellers firmly in favour of buyers. Prospects no longer take a back seat in sales conversations; they are extremely savvy, leveraging peer reviews and easy access to research material. They are also highly sensitive to unethical sales tactics and phony sale pitches.

At the first sign of dishonesty or high-pressure sales, most B2B customers will disengage with a vendor. To close more sales, you must become the sort of salesperson whom customers actually want to buy from.

Where do you start? Well, we’ve done some of the legwork for you.

At Trinity, we spend our days focusing on the intersection of your sales cycle and your customer’s buying cycle, that magical place where the deal actually gets done. By speaking directly to your customers at the conclusion of the sales process, through our Win/Loss Review services, we’re able to help B2B sales companies answer one simple but profoundly important question: “Why do we win and lose the deals we pitch for, and what can we do about it?”

After years of interviewing senior decision makers across a wide variety of industries, we’ve identified several factors which can turn a hot deal cold and have also identified a number of characteristics consistently displayed by successful salespeople.

Here are five of the best sales techniques we’ve observed for closing a deal and why they work.

5 sales closing techniques for success

Play the long game. The reason so many sales people fall short when closing sales is often related to being too aggressive or too eager to prove yourself. It can work against you and send the message that you’re not focused on building a relationship. Contrary to what you might think, closing the sale starts long before your customer agrees to sign on the dotted line. It begins in the discovery phase and continues to build as you get to know them throughout the sales cycle.

There needs to be a shift in focus from conquering the sale to taking your time to listen and connect with your customer and earning the right to progress to the next stage of the sales cycle. This is a crucial step to developing sufficient trust, credibility, and authority to do business with a prospective customer.

At its simplest, B2B sales doesn’t actually require any selling, you simply earn the right to progress to the next stage of the process, until you run out of stages and the deal is done.

This may sound simplistic, but then again, sales can and should be a simple process.

Become a great storyteller.  One reason deals go cold so often is that we fail to establish a proper connection with the people we’re trying to sell to. The most successful salespeople understand that stories have the ability to create an emotional connection and fire up the limbic side of your customer’s brain, where feelings and memory reside.

These individuals are avid collectors of war stories, quotes, anecdotes, and case studies, anything in fact that can act as a hook and aid in articulating a compelling story. Being a great storyteller makes you more memorable, a more effective communicator, and establishes rapport with your prospects. By equipping yourself with an arsenal of interesting and relevant stories to pepper your conversations, you will cement your position as a leader in closing the sale. Listen to how Bernadette Jiwa explains the power of stories in her fascinating TedTalk – The Secret to Spreading Ideas

Scrap high-pressure sales. Remember when you last felt pressured into doing something you weren’t ready or comfortable doing? It might have been signing a petition, answering a survey, or listening to a pitch for a product or service you had no interest in.

Your response may have been one of anger, defiance, or simply quiet frustration. It’s human nature to resist high-pressure sales tactics, which is why so many countries have created ‘do not call’ registries for consumers who don’t wish to be called at home by telesales people. If a sales technique is being regulated against by the government, it’s probably time to find a new way to create traction with your customers.

Being too pushy gives the impression of desperation, which in turn leads to doubt and mistrust. If they feel pressured, prospective customers will start to look for an escape route, which in the world of B2B sales is invariably what happens when a deal goes quiet.

Customization is key. If you’ve been relying on canned sales methods, it’s time to trade in your outdated sales techniques for a more personalized approach. Customers are tired of canned sales presentations that aren’t pertinent to them. This method only repels interest in what you have to offer and can quickly make a deal go south.

Instead, the most successful salespeople seek out creative ways to add value to every customer engagement, and customize it to show you are addressing their specific needs. A simple strategy is to apply the “So What” test to all of your customer presentations. During your dry-run before a customer presentation, ask your colleagues to hold up a sign which reads ‘So What’ every time you say something which either a) isn’t relevant for your audience or b) may be relevant but where you have failed to create the connection for your customer.

This one simple strategy could serve to transform the impact of your sales presentations and ensure that win, lose, or draw, your customers will be very happy to invite you back in to present to them in the future.

Customer memory is king. What sets sales all-stars apart from the rest is their ability to recall details about their customers, and utilize these insights to form a clearer picture of their customers’ needs. Nowadays, with easy access to CRM systems and digital information, you are expected to be able to capture, retain, and apply personal information and insights that your customers share with you.

By capturing and leveraging these details, you should be able to establish a deeper and more personal connection with your customers and prospects. It also serves to help you close more sales and increases the likelihood of gaining warm referrals from their network.

If you really want to succeed in sales, then you need to reach the elevated heights of ‘trusted advisor status’ with your customers. Where they not only know, like, and trust you, but value your opinion, your network, and your commitment to helping them achieve a great outcome from your product or service.

To do this, you first need to solidify yourself as a credible source of valuable information, and eventually be seen as an extended member of their internal team. By putting these five best sales techniques into action, you can start closing more sales and building lasting relationships with customers based on rapport, trust, and credibility.

The post Why Do The Hottest Deals Go Cold? appeared first on Head Of Sales.

If you’re a sales manager or CEO, send this to the entire sales team and put them on notice that they will be held to account. If you’re an individual sales contributor, address all of these issues now to save your career. I’m serious – stop screwing around with your success; be the professional you’re paid to be. Here are the things (in no particular order) that make your boss look bad and you look amateurish.

1. Not being across the detail of your key deals. 

Stop giving long-winded waffling answers when asked about the status of an important deal. The senior executives above you are busy and don’t want a bedtime story. Be succinct in your responses. Start at the end and provide a summary before diving into detail. Say something like: ‘It’s forecast for the 13th and their executive sponsor has confirmed with me that the date is confirmed with their internal team. Everyone in the power-base is on board and procurement is in the loop. There are two risks that I am managing…’

2. Failing to have a strategy. 

Never use the words ‘hope’ or ‘hopefully’. In every major deal you need to be thinking about what could go wrong and manage the risks. You must have a strategy for relationships, the competition (including their internal options), and engineering their processes for evaluation, selection and procurement. Hope is not a strategy. Being passive and failing to create any level of positive tension is professional malpractice. You’re not a professional visitor or observer who reports back. Make it happen by building positive relationships with the right people inside the customer organization.

3. Failing to work hard. 

Sustained success is never the result of consistent luck. Work ethic is prerequisite for anyone performing at the top. If you’re not ‘blowing your numbers away’, then you sure as heck had better be seen to be working hard. Work ethic is what smooths out the peaks and troughs of sales performance; to be consistent month-in and month-out. The time to be working hard is when you don’t feel you have a weak pipeline of qualified opportunities – things change quickly. earn your success with the sweat of your brow. Look yourself in the mirror, and your boss in the eye, knowing you’ve earned the right to be successful.

4. Wasting time and being late for meetings. 

Every meeting should have an agenda and confirmed in advance. Time is precious. If you can’t manage yourself, how in the world can you manage complex sales processes and expensive company resources. If you don’t respect the time of others, why should they respect you? Being on time means being at least 5 minutes early. Sit in a nearby coffee shop and prepare, think, plan – take the stress out of meetings. Arrive early and stake the perfect seat, arrange the room. Every pilot knows that their mind must arrive well before the plane if they are to be truly professional.

5. Failing to take notes and follow-up. 

It staggers me how often I see sales people not taking any notes in meetings. ‘I have a good memory’, they say. I don’t care if you have the memory of an elephant! It’s about the customer, not you. They need to see you being fully there and vitally interested in their every word. Taking notes also enables you to break eye contact (the only reason you should) and show them that they are important, that you don’t want to forget, that you’ll follow-up, that you’re a professional. Imagine how you would feel if a builder came to your home to provide a quote for your big renovation and he didn’t measure anything and failed to write anything down… ‘I have a good memory love; no worries, she’ll be right’… Next!

6. Not using sales tools provided to you. 

Your company has invested huge sums of money in sales methodologies and tools… use them! By all means pragmatically, but use them nevertheless. Show people that you’ve qualified the opportunity and that you have actions in play to address weaknesses and gaps. Complete call plans and share with your boss before all important meetings. Build close plans on all the big deals to show you understand the customer’s internal approval gates, procurement processes, compelling events and dates. Here is an ideal meta framework for opportunity management.

7. Not keeping the CRM up to date. 

How can you claim to be a professional when the CRM shows that the deal is still at qualification or discovery stage yet you submitted the proposal last week? Why is the CRM ‘next step’ something that is trivial and happened 3 weeks ago? Why are all of your forecast close dates the last day of the quarter? Professionals keep their records up-to-date to help their boss help them – if you want the resources of the organization invested to help you pursue big opportunities, then earn respect and support by how you operate. How can marketing assist you with inviting prospects to events if you don’t bother to put them in the system. Why should you be allocated any more leads when most of the ones you’ve been given are languishing in the CRM without any notes or change in status? No wonder so many marketing and management people have low opinions of sales people.

8. Being a shocking lone wolf. 

Being a lone gunslinger cowboy may suit your persona but success in complex enterprise selling is always a team effort. It’s amazing what can be achieved when you don’t care who gets the credit. Work well with others; collaborate and be a team player. If you read between the lines, The Challenger Sale says to fire Lone Wolves when they start missing their numbers.

9. Being a ‘Social Selling’ illiterate. 

LinkedIn is the new phone for securing appointments. Your LinkedIn profile is the platform for establishing your credibility before you even meet. Your LinkedIn Publisher posts are how you set the agenda and deal with objections in advance. Twitter is how you amplify your insightful publishing to spread the word. YouTube is how you avoid having to do high risk, time wasting, tire kicking, mind-numbing, Russian roulette high risk demos. Social selling is highly relevant in the world of B2B enterprise selling… get on board before your career sails away without you!

10. Failing to create the necessary value to fund your role. 

One of my European clients did an extensive study concerning the cost to the company every time a sales person pulled-up outside a client’s premises. Field selling is expensive… here is the answer $476. The number is accurate – they have annual revenues in excess of $1 billion in Australia and hundreds of sales people. They asked two questions of every manager and sales person in the company: When you visit a customer or prospect, are you creating $500 of value for them and us? If you asked the customer and your boss to split it; $250 each – would they be willing to both write you a check?

11. Breaking the circle of trust. 

Lying to your boss is the beginning of the end of your relationship with them. Trust is everything – with customers, colleagues, your partner, everyone! Without trust you have nothing in professional sales. Your personal reputation is the most precious thing you have. Who is in the mirror staring back at you? Is there a look of conviction or an empty suit hoping not to be found-out. Don’t cheat your boss out of time or steal their money. Be honest about the state of your deals.

12. Inaccurate forecasting and fantasy pipeline. 

Everyone above you has the living crap beaten out of them when they miss their numbers. It felt like I aged a whole year at the end of every quarter when I was managing the region for American corporations. Regular ugly surprises at the eleventh hour make heads explode. Squirming out of commitments damages you enormously… be a person of your word and don’t over-promise. Bad news early is manageable but consistently delivering ugly surprises at 3 minutes to midnight is terminal – for you or your boss.

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Methodology and Philosophy (1900 -1950s)

• Trust Based Selling – Improve professional image by building trust (1916 – DM Barrett / Patterson)
• Scientific Selling – Use phrenology to identify prime prospects (1916 – Phrenologists)
• Mood Selling – Use emotion to persuade customers to buy (1920’s – American Bible Society & American Bible Tract)
• Fuller Brush Men – Focused on people. Strong management helping sales teams (1920’s – Fuller Brush Co. / Alfred C. Fuller / Albert E. Teetsel)
• Psychological Selling – Learn to understand what makes buyers tick (1930’s – Dale Carnegie / Ford Motor Company)
• Barrier Selling – Get prospects to say ‘yes’ often enough to be trapped (1930’s – Insurance companies and Britannica Encyclopaedia)
• SELL – Tell-Sell process leading customer to a commitment (1940-50’s)
• ADAPT – Develop some pseudo technical jargon to keep buyers intrigued (1940-50’s)
• ARC – Cross selling and up selling in retail (1940-50’s)

1916

A major milestone in sales methodology development took place in 1916 when the first World Salesmanship Congress took place in Detroit (USA). Its constitution vowed the event was to “promote the dignity of salesmanship by the elevation of the rank of the salesman to a higher
plane” and to “encourage contributions to the science of salesmanship in the form of books, lectures, courses and publications.” The idea for the event came from D.M. Barrett, who was the editor of Salesmanship magazine and who had already organised a sales club in Detroit whose slogan was “Business betterment through betterment in salesmanship”. The keynote speaker at the congress was Woodrow Wilson, President of the USA at that time. Here we can see how individuals and organisations made the first attempts at making sales a more prestigious career and also at giving sales a rightful place within businesses.

Patterson (NCR) was one of the major sponsors of the World Salesmanship Congress. The sales methodology being promoted then, as the most effective of the day, and the message given to the more than three thousand salespeople who attended the congress, was that to be effective salespeople needed to build trust with customers. Earning and keeping the customer’s trust, attendees heard, “was the only way to promote the dignity of salesmanship, elevating the salesman to a higher plane…”

Even at this early stage in the evolution of sales methodologies, new sales techniques were being promoted as the answer to the challenges salespeople faced.

Amongst the more dubious people that introduced alternative sales methods at the World Salesmanship Congress was one Grant Nablo, a phrenologist (someone who is supposed to be able to read a person’s character by the shape of their skull). His proposed sales methodology
hinged on salesmen learning to read the character of their prospects by observing the shape of their skull. The basis of this sales method, proposed as the “introduction of Science in Selling”, was that if salespeople identified prospects with high foreheads they could improve sales for new products because these people (with high foreheads) were more imaginative than others and were likely to be early adopters, making selling new ideas, products and services easier and quicker.

So popular was the Science in Selling (phrenology) method that the Ford Motor Company produced a primer for its sales force – “Ford Products and Their” Sale (1923) that contained the following instruction: “Sell the vehicle according to the shape of the prospect’s head. High foreheads leave room for larger development and indicate people who are less likely to resist new ideas…”

1920’s

The great depression in the US, caused by the stock market crash of 1929, gave impetus to a range of sales methodologies as more and more people – struggling to earn a living – turned to selling simply because of the low barriers to entry into the craft. Although efforts to organise and standardise sales systems had started already, they were the realm of big corporations and mostly those operating in the B2B arena. This left the majority of people coming into the sales profession with little or no training at all from the companies they joined –organisations such as the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society– so they developed their own methodologies. The more successful of these enjoyed a period in the sunshine as the techniques spread and appeared to have some success. Amongst the more familiar – vestiges of which still continue in selling today – are the sales methods of:

Mood Selling which was introduced at the time of the depression. It was developed by bible salesmen who called door-to-door and, without any sales training, attempted to appeal to the emotions of buyers by claiming that the purchase of a bible would not only be good for the customer’s soul, but would help the salesperson stave off the starvation of his children.

This method of selling relied on an emotional pull to the people being sold to. Popular appeals were the saving of a soul (bible) and helping the salesperson feed their children (who these salespeople often took with them on their sales calls).

For a time, Mood Selling was a successful, though less than ethical, sales methodology. But customers and prospects started to see through the techniques being used and began to resist the appeals made by these “salespeople”. The change in buyer attitude forced salespeople to take stock of what they were doing and how they were selling.

Amongst the myriad of methodologies that came to play during this time, was that of the Fuller Brush Company. The company had been founded in 1906 by Alfred C. Fuller, who would both manufacture the brushes by night and sell them by day. In 1908, his wife joined him in his selling efforts and had better results than he did on her first day, and almost every day for a couple of years. By the 1920s The Fuller Brush Company had people all over the country going door-to-door selling brushes. But there was something different about these salespeople. Fuller provided them with training on a system that gained them entry to the houses they called on almost every time. The sales method had been developed by Alfred C. Fuller and refined with the collaboration of his sales managers. Every call started with presenting a gift to the housewife, followed by a demonstration of their products – Fuller had worked out early on that the key was to sell what the brushes could do for his clients, not the brushes themselves. In 1922, these men started to be known as the “The Fuller Brush Men”. They were not employed by the company, they were distributors. They each had a territory and the tools and processes they needed to be successful. One of the most talented managers was Albert E. Teetsel who brought to the company the concept of positive thought. He encouraged every salesperson to always reply to “How are you?” with “Fine and dandy”, underscoring the company’s most distinctive feature – its emphasis on people. Each distributor had to sign a pledge which said, amongst other things, that the salesperson’s “obligation is one of
service to the customer, to the company I represent and to the community in which I live and work.”, and, “I will be courteous; I will be kind; I will be sincere; I will be helpful.” The commercial and popular success of the company was built on the focus on its people, in particular, the sales team.

1936

In 1936 the iconic book ”How to Win Friends and Influence People” was published, catapulting Dale Carnegie to the head of the line of sales gurus. The huge success of his book is still being felt today and many of the modern sales techniques (including the concept of Customer Centric and Relationship Selling) have Carnegie to thank because they haven’t ventured too far from what he propagated as the way to effective relationship building and successful selling.

With everyone in sales trying to win friends and influence people, the advent of commission and sales incentives changed the paradigm once again and launched what was a successful, but massively flawed, sales methodology – Barrier Selling. This powerful technique evolved at the same time as salespeople were making the adjustment from earning a base salary to commission as an incentive for sales performance. The technique pushed salespeople to manipulate their customers.

Barrier Selling was (is) the sales method of asking customers leading questions to which the most logical answer would be “Yes.” Salespeople would ask several questions getting a string of affirmative (yes) responses before throwing in the key question “And of course, you want us to deliver this widget early next week?”

In using this method, two factors worked against the customer. One was the fact that salespeople seldom applied it without a spouse or child being present. So, for example, insurance salespeople – who were (and still are) notorious for using this technique – would never sell life insurance to a partner without the spouse being present. The kind of questions asked would be something like: “Obviously if something happened to you, you would want your partner to be looked after. Wouldn’t you?” It is unlikely that the person would say no in any circumstances, but even less so, with the partner present. Britannica Encyclopaedia salespeople were no different. They wouldn’t attempt to sell a set of Britannica without the
children being present. And the questions used to “trap” the buyer would be something like: “Obviously you want your child to have the very best education possible, don’t you?”

At the time that this technique was popular, salespeople still had a large role to play in providing information. Customers had little choice, limited access to information and relied heavily on what salespeople said and did, in order to learn about new products and services. In addition, there weren’t laws and controls to prohibit salespeople or protect consumers from this type of behaviour. Caveat Emptor – “let the buyer beware…” was the consumer mantra of the day. Salespeople made claims and promises, used techniques and methods simply to get a deal. And they did so with impunity and little fear of consequence. Because a large portion of a
salesperson’s income at the time (very often as much as 90%) was based on their ability to close the deal, salespeople were willing to risk everything with little thought to how customers felt or suffered as a result of their activities.

So destructive was this method of selling that governments introduced the cooling off period, allowing people to cancel agreements entered into under these circumstances.

1930s to early 1950s

In the period from around mid 1930s to early 1950s, just after the decline in the popularity of Barrier Selling, a range of alternative selling methods of little effectiveness, appeared on the scene. Each of these represented a different approach to selling that claimed, at the time, to revolutionise the way salespeople performed. Some of the more popular of these included:

SELL – Show, Explain advantage, Lead to benefit, Let them talk
This method encouraged salespeople to the Tell-Sell approach. Salespeople told their prospects success stories, in the process showing features of their products, explaining the product’s advantages and how other customers became successful or achieved staggering results (benefits) as a result of using this products.

ADAPT – Assessment, Discovery, Activation, Projection, Transition
Adapt was an acronym that became popular around the 1950s in Britain as a means of interacting with customers and prospects. The focus of this (at the time) popular method was to undertake some form of pseudotechnical assessment. The salesperson gave the appearance of using some methodology to assess the prospect’s business issues, though none of the records actually illustrate how this assessment was actually conducted. Once the assessment had been conducted, salespeople then directed the sales call, hoping that the prospect would discover how a product would benefit them. Once this discovery was made the salesperson would request a commitment which would transition the buyer from prospect to customer.

ARC – Ask, Recommend, Cross-sell and Close
In the early 1950s a sales method, uniquely designed to improve retail sales situations, evolved. ARC encouraged salespeople to ask customers what they wanted and then to introduce additional items to complement the initial interest. This method of cross-selling improved sales performance and enabled salespeople to increase the size of the original order. It wasn’t long before ARC spread to other areas of selling. Even in business-to-business selling the idea of cross-selling found traction and enabled salespeople to expand share of wallet. This technique was later used as part of Strategic Selling (Miller Heiman, 1975) to help salespeople cross and up-sell, and in the process increase share of wallet.

Coming up soon:

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 2 (late 1950s – 1980s)

The History of Sales Methodology – Part 3 (1990s – 2010’s)

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