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Business Digest, Europe’s leading business publisher has been helping executives improve their understanding of the corporate environment since 1982. Business Digest prides itself on clear, detailed and challenging eight page dossiers which cover management and leadership perspectives and practices in Europe and throughout the world. Below, are excerpts from their recent dossier on Heavy Hitter Selling.
To download the full dossier, please visit www.business-digest.fr

VIEWPOINT
Product standardization and better access to information for consumers have contributed to marginalizing the position of salespeople, who are often squeezed out by retailers. Yet, Steve W. Martin claims that there is a “race” of exceptionally talented sellers called Heavy Hitters who are able to win contracts in difficult markets and withstand the stress of being rebuffed by information-satiated customers. What are the secrets of these high-flying salespeople? What are the telltale signs of a Heavy Hitter? The answers to these questions are especially valuable because the art of persuasion is an inestimable advantage in many fields.

What distinguishes a regular salesperson from what Steve W. Martin calls a “Heavy Hitter?”
In addition to perfect knowledge of the product and sales process, a Heavy Hitter pays special attention to the human dimension that determines the salesperson customer relationship. Intuition, persuasiveness and sharp listening skills are at the heart of their know-how. An understanding of these characteristics and what underpins them is particularly important, as the art of persuasion is not exclusively a tool of sales related trades.

How do people communicate?
Martin emphasizes that communication between people takes place on several levels: physical (the handshake, an overall sense of the other person, etc.), visual (the first impression), auditory (the phonetic particularities of the words exchanged, the level of language, the register it belongs to, etc.). Moreover, each relationship is accompanied by an internal dialog, whereby each person notes his or her impressions of the other party.

At that moment, there are two distinguishable levels: what is expressed and what is felt. It could so happen that one of the participants perceives a contradiction between the contents of these two levels. He or she will then seek to end the relationship he or she deems useless or dangerous. All individuals are sensitive to the consistency between verbal and nonverbal language: body posture, behavior, vocabulary used. The slightest discrepancy reveals that the speech is prepared. That is why it is important to learn to use the other person’s language.

Neurolinguistics, a science of communication
For forty years, psychologists have been striving to study the subconscious and non-linguistic content of interpersonal relationships, in particular the interactions between the brain, language and the body. This has led to the emergence of several new fields, the best-known of which—developed by two American researchers, Richard Bandler and John Grinder—is undoubtedly Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP). Thus, the art of persuasion has ceased to be a division of rhetoric and has made inroads into the field of scientific research.

There are no neutral relationships
One of the assumptions upon which this approach is based is that there are no neutral relationships between individuals. This means that, at the outset, any relationship, even a silent one, is based on a pattern of attraction-indifference-repulsion. According to NLP specialists, the fact that we are all “connected” implies that any human relationship is firstly, consciously or not, conflictual in nature. One of the challenges Heavy Hitters face is being able to set the other person onto a path not of indifference-repulsion, but of active listening attraction. One of the functions of language is also to evacuate the tension of an excessively strong physical presence: we thus seek consensus through a series of codes or social roles.

Which “family” do you belong to?
The first step towards a successful sale consists of identifying the customer’s type of “preferred wiring.” The author indicates that although we communicate through vision, hearing and touching, we all prefer one of these three senses when communicating with someone else. Some are mostly visual, others auditory and a third category have a global way of assimilating reality: kinesthetic. Steve Martin bases his conclusions on the work of many linguists and applied psychology researchers (Milton H. Erickson, Lawrence Pervin, Oliver John). Thus, CEOs are said to be more visual than kinesthetic (the latter being found mostly among advertisers), since they must have a global vision of their business. Product managers, however, are considered to have auditory perception, as they are used to listening to user advice or objections.

Neurolinguistic programming and the sales force
As in all trades where the obligation to convince is professional in nature, salespeople must use all of these techniques, says Martin. He emphasizes that the Heavy Hitter instinctively knows that we are also communicating through body language. By observing the other person’s way of speaking and behaving, they will know what attitude to adopt to turn the prospect into a customer.