Mindframe

When you look at the selling masters out there, the people who make sales look effortless, are you encouraged? (“Maybe with hard work, that could be me.”) Or does some part of you feel threatened? (“Terry’s a natural at sales; I’ll never be able to close a deal like that.”) The answer is important, because it’s a key window into your selling mindset. Mindset is a term popularized by Stanford professor Carol Dweck. In studying human achievement, she repeatedly found that one of the best predictors of success boiled down to the way people saw the world. In a fixed mindset framework, positive traits—in our case, the ability to sell—are innate, or fixed. It holds that we are all born destined to reach a certain level and then stop. The goal is to hope you turn out to be a member of that race of magic people. If you approach sales with a fixed mindset, you are discouraged by setbacks—dry periods, difficult customers—because it makes you secretly doubt you’ve got that “special sa...

In To Sell is Human , writer Daniel Pink makes a bold declaration: regardless of our official job title, the majority of us are in sales. After all, if you define “selling” as “an act of persuasion,” then don’t we all spend our professional lives pushing products, ideas, or advice on someone? But in addition to rethinking what sales is and who does it, Pink also seeks to overturn our notions of how to do it. In an era of Yelp and ubiquitous online customer reviews, consumers are savvy in ways they’ve never been before. Lies and slick manipulations won’t cut it when all of the information about any given product is only a few clicks away. And that means the aggressive, slicked-back-hair, Alec-Baldwin-in-Glengarry-Glen-Ross vision of a sales professional has got to go. In its place, Pink offers a new sales ABC: Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity. Attunement Pink argues that a good salesperson is not just about output, but input as well. He defines attunement as “the abilit...

   When it comes to selling, is it better to present your customers with many options, or just a few? It's a debate that's been brewing since at least 2004, when psychologist Barry Shwartz published The Paradox of Choice , in which he argued that reducing the number of available choices can greatly cut down on that dreaded buyer's remorse, leading to an overall greater degree of personal happiness.   And indeed, grocery stores like Aldi and Trader Joe's seem to thrive in part by slimming their options, offering only one brand or one variety of each item. It's not just about reducing shelf space: the theory goes that curating the available options allows you to avoid overtaxing the customer's brain, kicking them into decision paralysis. On the other hand, superstores like Meijer aren't exactly struggling, despite their brain-blasting array of every conceivable product. What gives?   It seems that a larger array of offerings can lead to choice o...