Sales Magic

Revolutionary New Techniques That Will Double Your Sales Volume in 21 Days

Kerry Johnson

• Publisher: G&D Media
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781722522735
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Managerial Accounting
• Index: Business

Kerry Johnson reveals the hidden and subliminal techniques that top sales professionals unconsciously use and how you can master these simple but profound techniques by using NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), a series of powerful discoveries about behavior, communication and trust. You will learn how to speak the language of how your prospect thinks.The book will show you to increase your closing ratios by gaining trust in only a few minutes. You can then communicate with your clients on deeper, ever more subtle, levels. Using both verbal and physical skills, you will learn how to pace your sales calls. You will learn how to establish rapport with ease and assurance, listen to clients more effectively, turn objections into approval, and discover a client's buying strategy in minutes. Sales Magic also contains charts, diagrams and quizzes, as well as a special twenty-one-day program which guarantees that you will be able to successfully use Dr. Johnson's techniques immediately.Kerry Johnson, MBA, Ph.D. is in constant demand as a speaker. He presents around the world to audience from Halifax to Hongkong and from Stockholm to San Diego.He is the author of 9 book that have helped hundreds of thousands increase their sales. In the 1970's he was a professional tennis player on the International Grand Prix Circuit. He is in contact demand, as a speaker and motivator, to demonstrate and explain the new technology of selling which he has developed, the technology you will learn to apply in Sales Magic.

PART ONE

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BUYING AND SELLING

ONE

How People Buy: Seeing Your Client Through Your Client’s Eyes

“People buy trust first, products second.”

“If you can see John Smith through John Smith’s eyes, you will sell John Smith what John Smith buys.”

This is a motto of sorts at International Productivity Systems, Inc., the company I founded in 1980 to study the country’s top salespeople. We have learned that selling to people the way they want to buy is the single most important element of every super-seller’s repertoire. No matter what their style, service, or product, no matter whether the price or fee is large or small, the most effective salespeople seem to have an uncanny ability to size up their prospective clients or customers accurately. They are able to pick up behavioral cues that reveal how their prospective purchases would make buying decisions. They know what their clients would say. They are able to predict how their customers make decisions. In short, they seem to know their clients and customers almost as well as they know themselves.

It wasn’t too long ago that sales was seen as an adversarial relationship. On the receiving end of the sales pitch, a client was someone on guard, afraid of being manipulated into buying something he or she didn’t want. The salesperson was taught to do just that—to counter this hostility by outmaneuvering customers with expert sales pitches and manipulation. The profession had such a bad reputation that salespeople were reluctant to admit who they actually were.

This attitude has made a 180-degree about-face during the last decade or so. Sales professionals have begun to acknowledge the importance of the client’s input to the sales process. Terms such as relationship selling, personalized selling, and insightful selling have been thrown around in articles and speeches. Years ago, in a piece he’d written for the Harvard Business Review, best-selling author Harvey Mackay wrote that at his company, Mackay Envelope, salespeople had to have a sixty six-point dossier on each prospective customer. “The point here is that people don’t truly care how much you know until they know how much you care,” wrote Mr. Mackay. I agree with him. No matter how good your product is, how articulate you are, or how good a deal you are offering, if you forget that there is a human being on the other side of the desk, you are losing the point of what sales is all about.

We at International Productivity Systems have taken the concept of knowing your client one step further. We have discovered that it is not so much what or how much you know about your customers that is important, but the trust you gain from showing them that you are in their comer. People buy trust first, products second. Trust can overcome a higher price or even lackluster servicing of your product. If clients sense that you are with them and not trying to manipulate them, they will be more willing to listen, to learn what your product or service can do for them. Trust is what will keep them interested and what will get them to spend their money.

In experiment after experiment, researchers have reported that trust is crucial in successful selling. If trust is present, clients are more receptive to suggestions, give more time to a salesperson, and schedule appointments earlier in the day. They are also more likely to open up, discuss needs and buying habits, and inform sales-people about future plans. If the risk is high and the dollar amount of a potential deal considerable, trust is even more crucial to a sale.

The new interest in trust has spawned some rather interesting rituals. At a Jacksonville, Florida, auto dealership, for example, the general manager climbs up a ladder, pauses, counts to two, and then steps backward, falling into the arms of his coworkers. Called a trust fall, it’s not a New Age touchy feely session, but a real attempt to instill the concept into every salesperson. Trust seminars are everywhere.

But what is trust? How is it formed between a client and a salesperson? How do the super-sellers get their clients to trust them so thoroughly?

I have been teaching business people that they don’t do it by being smarter or more manipulative. They do it because they have what I call unconscious competence.

The Power of the Unconscious

Unconscious competence is communicating with clients at an unconscious level. To illustrate just how powerful the unconscious mind really is, I want to describe an experiment from my graduate school days in psychology.

As part of my thesis, I rode around on Continental Airlines (before they merged with United) with several classmates, finding out what people liked and didn’t like about the airline. As part of our survey, we would ask people to give an overall score for the service, or the food, or anything else included in the price. For example, we would ask people how they liked the mugs their coffee was served in. The subject would give an overall rating from one to ten. For the purposes of this example, let’s say someone gives the mugs a rating of seven.

We would then divide the mug into different components: its size, its color, the shape of the handle, its weight, how it feels. We would get ratings on each component. What we found when we averaged out the scores on the individual components was that they were the same as the overall score. The scores of the person who had given the mug an overall rating of seven, for example, averaged out to seven. If someone had given the mugs an overall score of five, their scores for the different components would average out to five.

This happened over and over again, to a statistically significant degree. Even though our subjects didn’t know what we were after, they kept giving an overall score that later turned out to be a composite of the marks for the individual components.

We really don’t appreciate how much information is constantly being processed by our unconscious minds, and how quickly it all happens. In the above experiment, we could say that our subjects were guessing at an overall number. Yet, the guessing turned out to be much more exact than merely picking out a number at random. There was quite a bit of calculation involved.

In some ways, I think the super-sellers are like these subjects. John Savage, for example, was a financial planner who has earned millions of dollars in commissions. My friend passed away from cancer 20 years ago, but I’ve heard John speak at many sales training seminars. He lists such principles as working hard, being focused, having clear goals as the ingredients of success. I’ve heard Jim Rohn, also one of my past mentors and known as the father of motivational speakers. He said something similar, then look around at his audience and wonder, “I recognize some of you from before. Why are you here again?”

People return because the tried-and-true techniques work a little, but not enough. These super-sellers don’t seem to have an appreciation for the unconscious ways they are able to build trust and make sales. They don’t see the power of their own unconscious competence. But it exists. All you have to do is learn to recognize how it comes out when you interact with your clients.

Mental Maps and Representational Systems

Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the founders of what is now known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), began their work at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the 1970s. Bandler, a mathematician, and Grinder, a linguist, were both interested in issues of psychotherapy as it related to their fields. They began studying the working methods of successful therapists, hoping to provide useful insights for all therapists to follow.

In doing their research, Bandler and Grinder discovered that people have three basic methods of perceiving the world around them:

• Visual

• Auditory

• Kinesthetic

Those people who are visuals see the world, the auditories hear it, the kinesthetics feel it. These three representational systems, or mental maps, are ways of organizing all the stimuli that we receive at any given moment. They help us to understand the world and to relate to it. With these mental maps as guides, we make decisions on how to respond to whatever is going on around us.

The use of mental maps is unconscious. A person doesn’t choose which map he or she will use with which to communicate. For that very reason, if you know how to “read” someone’s mental map, you have a very powerful tool to use in understanding how someone’s mind works. The successful therapists were able to pick up on the mental maps their clients were using and produce results, because they could literally understand how clients were thinking and use that information during psychotherapy.

The same was true for the super-sellers we studied. While they were going about their traditional jobs and pitching their products, they were also communicating to their clients the way their clients were communicating to them. The more they did it, the more successful they were.

Like any model of human behavior, the visual/auditory/kinesthetic system makes things appear neater than they really are. No one thinks completely in one mode to the exclusion of the other two. Our minds are constantly at work, processing infinite numbers of stimuli at any given moment. A person switches from one mode to another and back again, depending on a hundred different factors.

The important point is to think of mental maps as preferred modes of thinking; what a person is most comfortable with; what seems like the most natural way of understanding the world. It is the mode people use when they are most relaxed or unguarded, and it is the mode that produces the strongest reaction when communicated back to a person.

The Visuals

Dan Fouts was the former quarterback of the San Diego Chargers football team. Currently, he is a color commentator for CBS sports. He is also an honored member of the Football Hall of Fame. Fouts developed a very successful throwing technique called a timing pass. Here’s how it worked: His wide receiver went out for a pass. Fouts threw the ball while his receiver was still running away from him, so that when he turned around, the football was already there, hitting him on the numbers.

This pass gave linebackers fits—they found the pass very hard to intercept. Normally, the linebacker tries to look at the receiver’s eyes before he tries to intercept a pass. This gives him a clue when and where the ball has been thrown. If the receiver doesn’t turn around and wait, the linebacker never knows the ball has been thrown, and can’t make the interception.

One reporter, noticing this effective passing technique, walked up to Fouts and said, “You throw the most precise timing pass in the league. How do you do it? What do you think about? What goes through your mind before you throw those bullets?” Dan Fouts said simply, “I go back in the pocket to pass. As I’m waiting for the wide receiver, I see the pass pattern in my head. I see the receiver going down and out, post pattern, around to the side, and then an X in the middle of my mental playing field. I throw the ball to the X that I see in my mind. If the receiver is there, he catches it. If he’s not there, nobody catches it.”

Seven time Super Bowl winner Tom Brady of the New England Patriots says much the same. He sees a mental map of the receiver route. He only looks at the last second at the receiver he is throwing to making sure it is in the same vicinity.

Notice the word that Fouts used so often in his response. He saw the pass pattern in his head. He saw the receiver going down and out. He threw the ball to the X that he saw in his mind.

Fouts is a visual: someone who thinks by making pictures in his mind. He understood what was required to make the pass because of what he saw. The images he constructed for himself guided his decisions throughout the entire process. If he hadn’t been able to visualize his “mental playing field,” he wouldn’t have been able to throw the pass accurately.

Bandler and Grinder estimate that about 35 percent of us are visuals. Such people are able to understand something much better if they see it. Their minds turn everything you say into pictures. If you discuss your ideas in visual terms, they smile. Their eyes glow; they understand, they comprehend. They are comfortable with you.

Think of visuals as having minds that work like View-Masters, those periscope like contraptions with circular slides that we all played with as kids. When you put the View-Master up to your face and pushed the lever, you saw gorgeous, three-dimensional photographs that made what you were looking at come alive. This is how a visual thinks. When you start talking, he starts clicking the View-Master, understanding your words by comparing them to pictures associated with those words. He is accessing images the entire time you are speaking to him.

Visuals have great visual memories. They can describe how things look in minute detail. They remember colors, shapes, and forms. They also think in images when fantasizing about the future.

How can you tell a person is thinking visually? The words and ph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Magic of Trust
• Part One: The Psychology of Buying and Selling
• Part Two: Creating Magic: Techniques for a Successful Sales Strategy