GlobalBX

Imagine that the products you have to offer, along with information on your company, are contained and displayed in a form of smart trolley. You now have two choices about how you approach the market: you can either push the trolley in front of you, or pull it behind you.

If you choose the pushing procedure then when you get to see customers and prospects, what they will mostly see is your products and your company profile…when in fact the only company and products they really care about are their own. The pushing process also creates a situation where the least of what the market sees is you, and not surprisingly you will be perceived as a ‘pusher’ in business, and you will duly treat the person in front of you as just a potential buyer. This approach is a form of ‘lurking’ because it is viewed as being self-seeking, and a potential threat to the status quo.

If you take the second choice and pull the trolley behind you, then what the market will mostly see is you, and the least of what will be seen is your company and your products. This form of approach demands that you treat the customer or prospect as a business person (or a private individual, as the case may be), and that you position yourself as a business person who is primarily concerned with the ‘progress needs’ of the other party. Then, as you find those needs, you will turn behind you to the trolley and take out products and information that are required for your business discussion. This approach involves ‘working’ because it represents a responsible effort to apply motivation and skill, to create mutual success.

Using this analogy, most sales people are perceived by markets to be guilty of lurking!

When I explain this ‘choice’ at training sessions, I use a chair to represent the trolley, and I become the sales person talking to an attendee who becomes the customer…and I go through the push and pull scenarios to show the futility of one approach, and the fertility of the other. If you have to conduct training sessions or sales meetings, the exercise is well worth using…remembering the communication rule that ‘talking is silver, showing is gold’.

It should not come as a surprise that the push procedure is preferred and used by most sales staff, and indeed by so-called consultants and advisers…because the vast majority of business people have no confidence in projecting themselves first, and their company and products second. To pull the trolley behind you is potentially very exposing, especially to people whose knowledge base is confined to the company and its products. Customers and prospects obviously do not to respond to the push approach, and what makes this untenable situation worse is that they rarely complain about such ‘sales behaviour’…for four reasons:

• they don’t have time to complain
• they find the push approach easy to repel
• they don’t know the pull approach exists
• they probably use the push concept too

To permit sales people to ‘push’ their way into markets in this menial manner is the equivalent of allowing tele-marketing staff to begin their phone calls with the phrase ‘Hi, how are you today?’ If you apply quality control procedures to ensure the quality of your products, then the same form of positive pressure should be applied in the form of quality sales training…on a dietary basis. Markets should judge that your products and sales team, are both working well.