Secrets of successful sales masters

One of the key skills to become a successful salesman is to ‘serve’. Contribution is not simply to achieve the goal I want, but the concept that everyone involved in my sales improves their lives and further develops the world because of me and my suggestions. And when you make a sale in terms of that contribution, in the end it’s in your best interest.

In order to have a perspective of contribution, you have to think that the other person is not a sales target, but a specific human being. A few years ago, Israeli radiologist Yehonatan Turner wanted his fellow doctors to work with more enthusiasm. So he asked for forgiveness from the patients who came for the CT scan and took pictures of their faces. He then asked his fellow specialists to participate in his experiments.

When fellow specialists look at the photograph taken to interpret the CT image, they can automatically see the face of the person who had the CT scan. And as a result of the survey, fellow specialists said that they were able to empathize with the patients and take a closer look at them because they were able to see their faces together.

Outstanding experts are those who are good at making “side discoveries” that others haven’t found. Indeed, by looking at the human face as well, the specialists made more incidental discoveries. And just like that, 3 months passed. Unbeknownst to a fellow doctor, Turner secretly re-viewed the CT images he had seen three months earlier. However, the patient’s face did not appear at the same time this time. Then an amazing thing happened. The lack of patient pictures reduced incidental findings by 80%. Although they looked at the same picture, when they read the patient’s face without looking at it, their sensitivity and accuracy dropped significantly. Turner said:

“It is important to approach the patient as a human being and not as an anonymous subject of investigation.”

This experiment is equally applicable to sales, which require meticulousness and meticulousness. If you look at the other person as a human being like me, not as an object that achieves what you want, your eyesight for sales rises from 0.5 to 1.5.

In 2008, a well-known US call center conducted a remarkable experiment on the correlation between contributions and sales. The first group, a “personal interest” group, read that people who had previously worked in call centers had learned useful sales skills while working there. The second group, the “contributor group,” described how much help graduates received from scholarships funded by money raised by the call center. A third group, a “control group,” read stories that had nothing to do with personal benefit or contribution.

Then, a few weeks later, we looked at sales performance. There was little difference between the personal interest group and the control group. However, contribution groups raised almost twice as much money as before. Even though it only took 5 minutes to read the story.

We are both selfish and altruistic. If you have the perspective that your sales will improve the lives of others and your work will help humanity develop, you can achieve a win-win result in which you live and the other person lives.

Robert Greenleaf, the founder of servant leadership, whose purpose is to let go of authority and help those below him in rank, says to ask yourself before making a sale.

“Would your customer’s life be better if he bought what you were trying to sell? And when the deal is done, will the world be a better place than it was before?”

If you can answer “yes” to this question, the world will help you with your sales.