Winning The Sales Game With MIC

M is for - Mindset

What is your mindset going into a meeting? Are you more focused on yourself, selling and making a commission or are you more focused on helping the customer improve a business result that is important to them? Where does your passionate commitment lie?

This is critical because if your mindset is more focused on selling you will find you talk too much in meetings. Do you? If your mindset is focused on helping you will find it easier to master the most important of all the sales skills the customer interview. The reality is that you will never be the great interviewer you are capable of becoming if you care more about making a sale than you do about helping your customer. At its core selling is talking and helping is listening. With the right mindset you are focused on the customer success and you think about it in broad and deep terms. Working with the right mindset means you only feel like you have won when they win. It means lining up your company to help them. There is nothing in this mindset related to you making a sale. That is a by product of you doing your job. Helping them achieve their goals.

In fact stop thinking about yourself as a sales person because your customers do not want to be sold to. That term is misapplied to often in commerce today. What you really are is a facilitator. You help facilitate the correct buying behavior of the customer so that they can win in the marketplace.

I is for - Information

The investment of time you make to understand the customer so thoroughly that you can see how you can add cost effective value to them that is also aligned with their critical success factors.

A simple way to put the value you plan on offering into perspective is to ask these 2 questions:

1. What opportunity or goal (that is of importance to them) can I help them realize?

2. What challenge do I have to help them overcome to do so?

Goals and challenges, these are the two key pieces of information you need to begin to do your job. How well do you understand their goals and challenges? Do you understand them from their perspective, according to their definition and in their order of priority? Have you made any assumptions? If so you are skating on thin ice.

Whatever you offer or recommend must be related to those two vital pieces of information according to how the customer defines them.

The list of information you need is long, hence the importance of the customer interview. For example at some point in your conversations you will need to straight up ask every customer how will you and your senior leaders measure the success of the investment you are looking at making with me?

When it comes to gathering accurate, clear information being direct and to the point is very helpful.

You want and need lots of information and understanding. We will show you exactly what you want to learn and how to gather that info later in the customer interview section called the 5Cs.

Sub point to Information do you look like the kind of person they want to divulge all of this information to?

What appearance package do you put forward for the world to see? Your image matters. You would not accept medical advice from someone who looked shady to you.

Look at yourself as they see you for the first time. Do you look like a trusted advisor? Are you clean, sharp, well groomed, someone who looks like they are on their game? Or do you look sloppy like person who is flying by the seat of their pants, winging it and setting aside too little time to prepare like a person who does not give a crap?

Information is not just about the right mindset and interviewing skills it also includes looking like the kind of person they want to trust with this information.

C is for - Contribution

It is crucial if you want to be a top performer that you make a meaningful and unique contribution to your customers life / business. Whether you help people buy home electronics, life insurance, investments, or you work in the B2B space meaningful contribution is the key to your long term success. (Repeat business, testimonials and referrals)

You enable yourself to make contributions (come up with new ideas) by gathering information, understanding their business thoroughly and clearly, understanding your product and services capabilities and then marrying the two together in a meaningful & measurable (meaning profitable) way that is of strategic importance to the customer.

It requires thinking, judgment, creativity and business savvy.

It also requires extra effort (thinking) that most sales people will not do.

You must know their:

- Industry
- Key trends
- The opportunities they are focused on
- Their company
- Their main goals and challenges
- The cost of those challenges
- How they make decisions
- Etc.

And then craft your recommendation into all that information in order to add real concrete value.

Contribution also includes showing them what market leaders in other industries or what other successful individuals are doing and linking those best practices to their situation in the form of highly relevant new ideas.

Offering a meaningful and measurable contribution to their success in a cost effective way for them is the end game for you. Contribution is king and it is built on the shoulders of information and mindset.

With this as your intent you are now ready to learn the proven step by step plan for mastering the sales interview.

Good luck.

In the spirit of service,

Chris Bennett

p.s. get your mindset right and your body will follow

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