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Words, of course, are the most powerful drug known to mankind. RUDYARD KIPLING

Grab a pencil and answer the following question: What tasks are salespeople paid to do?

1. ___________________________
2. ___________________________
3. ___________________________
4. ___________________________

Over the past year, I have asked this question of thousands of people. Perhaps the most popular answer given by people outside the sales field is “SELL!” They write it on all four lines. Meanwhile, salespeople often respond with answers that reflect their company’s sales process: close deals, demonstrate products, qualify opportunities, and prospect for leads.

Here are the actual answers given in the order of priority.
1. First and foremost, salespeople build customer relationships.
2. They read customers’ minds and know what they are honestly thinking.
3. They predict the future and foretell which deals will actually close.
4. They persuade customers to change their opinions and beliefs.

How many answers did you agree with? More importantly, where do you learn about these four fundamental skills?

A quick search of the Internet using the phrase “sales books” will return more than three million result, so you might ask, “Why read another book about sales?” Most likely, you have already several books about salesmanship including the well-known classics. You probably found that some had merit and were worth the time and effort to read. However, they all tend to focus on the logical steps of the sales cycle such as prospecting, qualification, and closing techniques. They give limited attention to the less-perceptible aspects of the sales process.

Sales is more than a science--It is an art. The skillful combination of structure and free thinking, process and people, and logic and emotions. Where can you go to learn about this? Unfortunately, most of the popular sales training programs assume salespeople are already capable of building rapport and have an aptitude for establishing trust, that salespeople possess highly developed communication techniques, are proficient in determining what information is important, and can discern when someone is misleading them.

These methodologies do not explain or fully take into account the human characteristics of the people who actually make the purchase decision. They concentrate on the logical and procedural aspects of the sales cycle. In short, they offer frameworks that are limited to the “tangible” processes of the sales cycle. These may include the basic questions a salesperson commits to memory, such as,“What is your budget?” and “What is your time frame?” Or the programs
may emphasize the financial justification of a salesperson’s solution. They explain how to create a return-on-investment (ROI) model in order to show customers how much money they will save by selecting a product.

Changes in the World of Sales
The salesperson’s world has changed dramatically in the new millenium. Long gone are the days of “order taking” or closing deals without much effort in a superheated business market. Following a decade of unprecedented economic growth, expenditures by corporations are at a fraction of their previous level.

This situation has only been compounded by a downturn in the overall economy and the terrorist attacks. With so little money available, projects must be continually justified and are constantly being reprioritized. These issues are reflected in the protracted length of today’s selection process and the intense scrutiny vendors face daily.

Perhaps most importantly, today’s customers are smarter. Information is not only easier to find but available in greater detail than ever before. For example, the number of magazines available in the United States almost doubled from 1970 to 1999. Today, there are over 10,000 magazines published, each with a very specific audience.1 For instance, there are magazines for bird watchers, bread makers, and bow hunters. This exemplifies the overall trend of our society toward specialization centered upon very narrow areas of expertise. In some ways, today we know a lot more about a lot less.

In addition, technology has become a way of life. Eighty percent of all homes in the United States have personal computers. Via the Internet, customers can research products, prices, and opinions. Conversely, our cars, appliances, and toys have become computerized tools. Collectively, this has raised the level of sophistication (and skepticism) of the customers we must converse with and sell to. The balance of power is definitely in the hands of today’s buyer and the situation will only continue to get worse

Successful Salespeople
Throughout this book, we’ll examine what successful salespeople do and explain their unique ability to acquire information about a customer and discern a deeper level of meaning from what the customer has said. They possess an insight that enables them to develop the optimum account strategy by comparing what they’ve learned from previous wins and losses with the current situation.

Four major attributes separate successful salespeople from unsuccessful ones. Successful salespeople:

• Are skillful builders of personal relationships. At the foundation of all sales is a relationship between people. Great salespeople have an innate talent to build these relationships by creating rapport. Their presence has an appeal that makes a customer feel at ease. The customer enjoys their company. They build personal alliances based upon understanding individual wants and needs. The customer trusts them.

• Are masters of language. They are accomplished communicators who know what to say and, equally important, how to say it. Through their mastery of language, they are able to convey and decipher deep underlying messages that less successful salespeople miss. While using the same language as most salespeople, they have developed an uncanny ability to persuade nonbelievers.

• Are sales cycle experts. The sales cycle is the formalized information exchange between a customer and a salesperson. It consists of a series of steps that are designed to gather information about the customer and present information about the salesperson’s solution. While a company has identified these steps for the sales force, successful salespeople enhance this process by drawing upon past sales experiences. They use this reservoir of experience to manage and control their deals. As a result, they close more business.

• Have highly developed intuition. Successful salespeople are continually cataloguing their successes and failures. They store patterns of individual and company behavior and link them to the sales process. From this base of intuitive knowledge they are able to create and execute account strategies. They also use a unique form of highly developed intuition to ensure their message is acted upon by the customer. Through their intuition, they are able to integrate their spoken words with the sales situation based upon their experiences with different types of people and past sales cycles.

Heavy Hitters
A successful salesperson is commonly referred to as a “Heavy Hitter.” Heavy Hitters have an extraordinarily developed intuition, or deeper level of understanding, about the deals they will close. This understanding is somewhat equivalent to the ability to predict the future or analogous to reading minds. Heavy Hitters have a “feel” for their deals. They can “see” which deals will close this quarter and they can accurately forecast future deals. They not only listen to a customer
but also speak the customer’s language. This book is about understanding and modeling the Heavy Hitter’s behavior. Based upon my personal experience teaching these concepts to salespeople, I believe that almost all salespeople can become Heavy Hitters if they study the concepts presented in this book and put them to use.

From this point on, I will refer to a successful salesperson as a“Heavy Hitter.” And, for the sake of simplicity, I will alternate the pronouns “he” and “she” from chapter to chapter.

About This Book
The goal of this book is to help you learn how to apply the principles of intangible human behavior to the sales cycle. The behavior is considered intangible because it can’t be seen. However, to Heavy Hitters it is quite real. The principles are presented through practical models that can be implemented by anyone. However, you must be willing to take the time to understand and apply the concepts of Heavy Hitter Selling.

The book is composed of three sections. In the first section we will examine the layers of communication that occur in every conversation between salespeople and their customers. When I use the term “customer” throughout the book, I specifically mean someone a salesperson is trying to sell something to. This includes suspects who have yet to be introduced to the solution, prospects in the process of evaluation, as well as existing customers who may buy again.

Our quest to understand the human nature of communication continues by studying the structure of dialogue between the customer and salesperson. We will also introduce the fundamentals of neurolinguistics, the study of how the brain uses and interprets language. We will build upon this foundation to examine how the brain and the entire body work in conjunction with language. This is how people are “wired” to communicate. If you know how people think, you can organize your information to have a better impact on their decision-making process. In addition, by scrutinizing how language, the brain, and body work in combination, you can determine the truthfulness of someone’s message.

The second section reviews the strategy of connecting with customers--where to go, whom to connect with, and how to build relationships with them. Heavy Hitters selectively choose the battles they will fight. They create rapport to build relationships by understanding the customer’s personal wants, needs, and desires. Building rapport is an art that is achieved by speaking each customer’s individual language and communicating both verbally and nonverbally. One of the Heavy Hitter’s most important customers is his sales manager. Your sales manager can make your life enjoyable, tolerable, or miserable, and your mental condition is profoundly influenced by this key relationship. Therefore, it’s important to win over this key person.

Another very important customer is you. You probably ended up in sales through a series of unpredicted occurrences or maybe even by happenstance. While you learned that you must be persistent and energetic, who has taught you how to behave as a salesperson? Do you know what really motivates you and how to deal with the ups and downs of this stressful profession? We seek to understand how to live with ourselves given the volatility of our chosen career.

The third section, on the power of persuasion, reveals that there is an additional dimension of meaning and structure within language that can be used to convert skeptics into believer. While Heavy Hitters do this intuitively, we will detail how to not only persuade the rational intellect but more importantly appeal to the emotional subconscious by studying the language of two very well known Heavy Hitters.

Two Well-Known Heavy Hitters
The term Heavy Hitter isn’t solely applicable to sales. Powerful people who have acquired prominence through their ccomplishments, expertise, and reputation are also known as Heavy Hitters. These include politicians, entertainers, lawyers, doctors, sports heroes, and famous businesspeople. The Heavy Hitters in our society create and enforce its rules, determine what we watch and wear, and even influence how we behave.

Over the years, I have mentally recorded the techniques and actions of successful salespeople and witnessed how they are able to change a customer’s belief and opinion’s solely by the words they speak. In order to explain this natural and instinctive phenomenon to other salespeople, I found myself using examples of language from a diverse set of people including Bill Walsh, the famous former football coach; Dear Abby, the advice columnist; and Sun Tzu, the legendary Chinese general who lived more than two and a half thousand years ago. Regardless of the eclectic mix of examples I used, invariably, I always used quotations from two very well known Heavy Hitters, Ronald Reagan and Jesus Christ.

In 2000, Ronald Reagan was ranked as the eighth-best President in U.S. history according to a survey of seventy-eight historians. It’s not surprising that he was ranked behind national heroes like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. However, the most surprising part of the survey is that he was ranked as the most underrated president of all time. What made this president so unique was his ability to communicate and persuade. In fact, Reagan is known in the annals of history as “The Great Communicator.”

Historians consistently rank Jesus Christ as one of the most influential persons of all time. The fact that over six billion copies of the Bible have been printed and one-third of the world’s population follows his teachings is direct proof of his impact. His legacy continues to affect people all around the world daily. Obviously, the communication methods of Reagan and Christ are well worth studying today.

While thousands of books have been written from a theological and political perspective about both of these men, studying them from a business perspective teaches powerful lessons that apply specifically to salesmanship. For our purposes, we are more interested in how something is said and why it was said, rather than what was actually said. Therefore, we want to study and understand the purpose, content, and structure of their language usage to help us learn how to become more convincing. For our pursuits in this book, we are not interested in their political ideology or religious theology.

An Honorable Profession
Unfortunately, our society holds the sales profession in very low esteem, and a recent survey by the Gallup Organization confirms this attitude.3 When the most honest and ethical professionals were ranked, those in occupations based upon selfless service, such as doctors, nurses, teachers, judges, firemen, and police officers, were ranked the highest. Meanwhile, vocations that involve selling dominate the bottom of the list as it is perceived they are based solely upon serving self-interests.Is this stereotype honestly deserved? Based upon my experience, I don’t think so. The overwhelming majority of salespeople that I have worked with through the years have been ethical, intelligent, hardworking, and friendly. During the past year alone, I conducted training sessions with more than a thousand salespeople. Frankly, I liked them all and enjoyed their company. I suspect the ratio of bad salespeople to good is no different than the ratio of bad to good people in our society as a whole.

Using This Book
This book is a textbook as well as a reference book. I encourage you to write in it while you are reading. Have a pencil handy to make notations. Underline key concepts and important terms to help you remember their significance. This book is intended to be a continual resource and an ongoing reference that you can consult over and over again like an encyclopedia or dictionary. Throughout this book, real-world case studies are presented to illustrate the practical application of these concepts. These examples, known as “cultural transmissions,” are true and based on my personal experience. A cultural transmission is the method of learning a behavioral technique by emulating a successful practitioner. Learning by example is the most effective way to learn.

In addition to the concepts of neurolinguistics, I will also use various established psychological theories to explain the behavior of the Heavy Hitter and the customer, theories that I have adopted and use as a framework to explain the specific behavior I have observed.

As salespeople, we are much more concerned with reaching the destination rather than experiencing the journey. Since you have been conditioned to achieve your objectives as quickly as possible, your natural tendency will be to read quickly through this book a chapter at a time regardless of whether you are really paying attention to what you have read. If you try to “power read” this book, you might feel overwhelmed as there is a lifetime of experiences on the following pages. Read this book differently. Read it only when you want to and read it in very small chunks of a dozen pages or so at a time. Stop when you are tired and pick it up again later when you feel like it. By doing so, your mind will be absorb the information and interpret the message in ways that are more meaningful to you.

Think of all the tools you use to complete your job. You use your car, cell phone, and computer, to name just a few. Each of these tools comes with a user manual to help you to understand how the product works and teach you how to get the most use from it. Since you basically talk for a living, the most important tool you use every day is language and the words you speak. Heavy Hitter Selling is the owner’s manual for your mouth.