Читать книгу Sales EQ - Blount Jeb - Страница 10

“Thank you! That's incredible. Thank you!” I was gushing and could barely find words as a wave of relief rushed over me.

We quickly put together a plan for the next steps and getting a contract over to his legal team. I was anxious to get off the phone and share the good news with my wife and our team, but, before I let him go, I asked what compelled them to pick my company.

“You know, we just felt like you guys were a lot like us.” He pointed to how much fun his team had the day they toured our production facility.

At lunch, we shut the plant down, brought in barbecue, and ate on paper plates – his stakeholders, our sales team, and the plant employees all mingled together. He explained that they enjoyed spending time with our people without all the formality. His team felt our people were down-to-earth and cared – just like them.

Closing that deal was a two-year ordeal requiring a significant investment of resources, a team of people dedicated to the cause, and hours and hours of work on strategy, stakeholder mapping, endless financial analysis, and extensive supply chain work to source and customize an array of products, not to mention all the emotional anguish.

But it wasn't the six-inch-thick request for proposal (RFP) response with every imaginable spec that closed the deal. Nor the final presentation we spent three days and nights rehearsing. Nor the detailed implementation plan that took a week to develop. Nor the research, demos, samples, and data. Not planes, fancy entertainment, or sports tickets.

In the end, they felt that we were more like them than our competitors were. They felt more comfortable with the people on our team and our company culture. They liked us more. We were a safe choice. A pivotal decision swayed by the whim of emotion. A similarity bias. Unquantifiable and irrational.

It was the biggest deal I'd ever closed. Huge. The commission on the account alone was enough to purchase a 5,000-square-foot home with cash (which I did) and have enough money left over to make a significant contribution to my savings. Just like that, at the age of 26, I went from the depths of depression to the top of the world. Closing that deal changed my life and set my career on the fast track.

Since then I've closed bigger and more complex deals worth millions more dollars. Yet, no other sale taught me more about what matters most in sales. It was a humbling lesson on why what we often believe is important to influencing the outcome of a sale is just dead wrong.

It also put me on the path I've been on as a practitioner, leader, author, consultant, researcher, and trainer for the past 20 years, on a mission to answer two simple, yet frustratingly elusive, questions:

1. Why do people buy?

2. How do we influence them to buy?