Your Political Guru

You probably don’t Jeffery Gitomer from Adam’s house cat unless you are in sales.  He is one of the best sales trainers in the country.  I’ve been a fan of his for many years – hey what is politics and fundraising except sales and marketing.   He has a great weekly ezine (free at www.buygitomer.com).

I was on my way to Kansas City on South West and I look up and here comes Jeffery walking down the aisle looking for a seat.  So I make space and invite him to grab the middle seat on the exit row.

I had been talking to the other guy in the row (Kelly) who is in the beverage industry.  Kelly was on his way to Kansas to see his son who was getting deployed in a few days to Afghanistan.  He didn’t know Gitomer.  So when I made the introductions I lavished the praise on Gitomer as one of the premier sales guys.  Immediately Kelly’s “sales defense shields” went up.  Sure enough he was in charge of training his sales force and he didn’t want to spend his hour of flight time being “sold” by Jeffery.

Personally I wanted to ask Jeffery a ton of questions and possibly get some free consulting, but I quickly realized that Kelly could use Jeffery’s services, and I suspect Jeffery knew it too.  So I took the opportunity to watch Jeffery “sell.”

One of Jeffery’s maxims is “People love to buy, but they hate being sold.”  I was looking forward to seeing Jeffery do his “pitch.”  You would expect a sales trainer would try to start giving a long list of features and benefits of his company – let the prospect (Kelly) know how long he’s been in business, sales volume etc.

You would be wrong.  Jeffery played it cool.  He didn’t even appear to care about getting Kelly as a customer.  Instead he quickly built rapport by using Kelly’s accent to figure out where he was from, broke the ice by showing pictures of his granddaughter, and talked about sports.  When Kelly started dropping his defenses and asked about Jeffery’s company, Jeffery showed him some of his books, made a quick recommendation as to which one Kelly should get first and why (after Kelly asked).

No killer close, Jeffery switched topics to the Phillies and football.

Kelley started telling Jeffery about all of his experience in sales and about his start up company and the challenges facing him and his sales crew.  I would have thought that Jeffery would pounce on this and point out his company’s advantages, but again Jeffery played it cool.

By this time Kelly was dang near frustrated that he wasn’t being “sold.”  So he starts trying to get Jeffery to give him more information.  Jeffery has a very unique business card it is a minted coin with Jeffery’s head on it.  I absolutely wowed Kelly.  I was watching Kelly’s wheels turning and he was sold.  Now keep in mind that this was a guy who was very focused on see his son before the kid heads off to war.

So what can you learn from this?

1)       The most important part of sales and persuasion is building rapport – not puking facts and figures on people.  People want to know you and know you care about them before they will start listening to you and your ideas.

This is tougher than it might sound.  We want to share our information, the books we have read, why we need to audit the fed or tell them about your candidate.  The reality is that hitting them with all that information makes them put up their “anti-sales shields.”

If you just “puke” everything you know on a stranger you are wasting everyone’s time.  Much better to have them get to the point where they want and ask for more information.

2)      If they do get interested, be prepared to wow them.  That’s when quality, memorable materials come into play.  The Bible says “don’t throw you pearls before swine.”  Just giving printed brochures or business cards to people is a waste of money.  Invest in fewer higher quality materials that will “wow” them, and make you memorable.

I’m glad I had the sense to shut up and watch Jeffery in action.  I learned far more than asking a bunch of questions, I got to see him put his “sales” approach in action.