[Strategy] Facilitating-as-a-Sales Process

The skills required to facilitate training for an audience with content that wasn’t developed by the facilitator, are the same skills sale people practice every day:

Persuasion: Since a facilitator doesn’t create the presentation content (or product) they are facilitating (just like the sales person doesn’t create the product they sell door-to-door), the skills of persuasion through using influence in the room, is critical for success. The facilitator must use all the skills of persuasion their fingertips to get the “customer” to buy the product. Yes, the audience already “bought” the product by being there physically. But just like children in school, you have to “re-earn” their attention caring and awareness, rather than taking it for granted.

Body language: Sales people know that confidence, body language, and silence combined with active listening (more on this one below), can help close the sale in a face-to-face encounter. Facilitators need to keep this in mind. Particularly, when facilitating content with which they are not familiar. A facilitator with none of those traits, just like a sale person with none of those traits, can stumble and fall in the room.

Active listening: Facilitators should listen more that they talk. This is easy when the facilitator has developed the product they are facilitating. It’s hard when facilitators haven’t developed the product they are facilitating. The problems compound when they don’t believe the content itself. The first person to listen and react to the content should be the facilitator. But not in the room. Not in front of the audience. And not when the audience pushes back and disagrees, asserts themselves, or engages in conflict with the content.

With all this being said, the facilitator should remember, above all else, that the work is on the line in the room, not the facilitator as a sales person.

[Advice] New Behaviors

Peace builders struggle with sales for a variety of reasons, but the most pernicious reasons are around behaviors.

There are three areas where behaviors can be changed for peace builders to close more sales:

Determine what kind of prospecting are you doing as a peace builder: active (networking) or passive (website development). The prospecting that you are doing as peace builder may come down to understanding that you have to leverage what you do like (passive prospecting) in order to mentally and emotionally address what you don’t like (active prospecting).
Determine what the one scary behavior is that you would engage in during the day. The scary behavior goes beyond just writing a blog post and hitting “publish” (although it may start there) and goes right to researching ten local companies and calling their human resources departments. Many times, the scary behavior involves collecting “no’s” as if they are going out of style.
Determine where you as a peace builder are making excuses to not engage in the act of selling. Whether you have decided to become an evangelist—or a champion—for an idea with clients, or if you have decided to use cold-calls as a way to collect informal information about the market, peace builders often make excuses to get out of doing hard work that’s scary and uncomfortable.

Many times peace builders struggle because the things that they don’t want to do (the scary things) are the very things they need to do to build the sales in their practices.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Advice] Engagement-As-A-Service

Imagine if engagement with customers, clients, and others could be measured as a trackable KPI of success in your organization?

Imagine if you actually engineered your organization at all levels to compete not in a race to the bottom on price, product, or service, but instead if you engineered (through reward and recognition) for engagement through failure, risk-taking, and decision making?

Imagine if the digital tools you have laying around that you don’t know what to do with, were engaged in actively and intentionally increasing engagement, rather than just selling?

Imagine if engagement were the service your organization offered, and the product (physical, digital, or another form) was actually an afterthought?

Imagine if quality engagement with your employees through open-book management, pay transparency, and treating adults as if they are adults, were the “new normal” rather than a “radical departure.”

We don’t have to imagine. There are organizations at scale that are doing all of these things all around us in all areas of the global economy.

The only question your really have to ask (and answer) in your organization is: Do you have the courage to go past imagining to acting?

-Peace Be With You All-

[ICYMI] No

The word “no” is so compelling because it serves as both a positive and a negative.

We’ve written about this before, here and here, and it never fails to amaze us how much more there is to cover. This is because the crowning question that we asked, from clients to casual observers of our blog and social feeds is: “How do I say ‘no’?”

Saying “no” to an opportunity, a person or a situation is hard for three reasons:

It requires us to articulate the values that we hold dear.
It requires us to make judgment about those values in relation to another persons’ desires and requests.
It requires us to place a potential future best, above a present tangible good.

It is hard for people to say “no” (positively or otherwise) because we feel as though we are letting down other people. And being the social animals that we are, reciprocity and social norming exert a powerful pull upon our psyches, our hearts and even our souls.

The word “no” places a delineating marker between people, ideas, projects and purposes. It segregates, and closes off, even as it opens up other possibilities. This is why rejection is such a hard thing to overcome for sales professionals, marketers and others who engage in the business of persuasion.

“No” ultimately can feel like a rejection of persuasion, rather than a statement of preference:

Preferring the safety of nostalgia over the danger of the new
Preferring the comfort of the present over the uncertainty of the next moment over
Preferring the status quo over a change

What are you saying “yes” to by saying “no”?

Originally published on March 19, 2015.

Download the FREE E-Book, The Savvy Peace Builder by heading to http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com/e-book-the-savvy-peace-builder/ today!

[Opinion] The “Willy Loman” Mentality

A “Willy Loman” mentality is slowly growing out there, even as the era of the door-to-door salesman is really about to kick off in a big way.

The mobile phone, and the immediacy with which that piece of hardware allows products and ideas to come to consumers, is the new house door.

Attention spans wane and doors close much, much quicker in the mobile world now, than they did in the physical world of the actual door closing in the Fuller Brush Salesman’s face.

We understand that the dynamism of having to be interesting in seven seconds or less seems daunting, but the same dynamism that depresses, can also allow the savvy, the entertaining and the persistent to scale at or below cost.

That last part is important to remember for those who are daunted, just like it was important to remember when selling vacuums door-to-door.

Persistence in the face of 4.5 billion doors closing in seven seconds or less can be either a deterrent to trying in the first place.

Or, it can be the lifeblood of the salesman that Willy Loman could have been.

-Peace With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

[Strategy] Gatekeepers’ Dent in the Universe

Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides to say “no” to the next big idea.

People wake up in the morning and decide to go to their jobs as secretaries, executive assistants, Vice-Presidents and others, and do their job as best they can.

For them, that’s making a dent in their universe.

And, when a “no” falls from their lips about the big idea that you want to pitch to their boss who signs the check and makes the decision to go forward, they are making a dent in your universe.

Their dent doesn’t match your dent, but it doesn’t mean that their dent is any less valuable, interesting or relevant.

It just feels that way in the moment…

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-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

Authentic Teaching

Authenticity has become synonymous with credibility.

Consistency has become the new currency.

Yet, in the world of content development (and the entrepreneurial base that it begins from), the “old” rules of marketing, advertising and sales still apply:

The audience doesn’t really care what you know; they only care about what you can teach them.

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/

Advertising Drowning

These days, advertising is flashy, interruptive, and mostly tuned out by an organization’s target audience.

Sales are harder because the distance from initial engagement to close has never been more tenuous.

Marketing, ironically enough, is easier than ever before because the tools for creativity, engagement and growth have never been more accessible than they are right now.

The individuals, organizations, associations and corporations that get this are thriving.

Those that don’t are either treading water—or are drowned already and don’t even know it.

-Peace Be With You All-

Too Clever For Our Own Good: How The Third Person Effect Makes Us Vulnerable To Persuasion Techniques

This guest post is written by David James Bawden. David James is an up and coming Marketing Assistant at SPL International. His ideas on content marketing and perspectives are his own and do not necessarily represent those of SPL International. Follow him on Twitter and read his blog at http://doingthingsdigitally.com/

How easily do you find yourself persuaded by adverts? When lynx tells you that their new deodorant will have women flocking to you do you feel a sudden need to rush out to buy lynx? Or do you find yourself wondering who these obvious sales techniques actually work on? Insulted that the company running the advert thinks so little of your intelligence?

This reaction, thinking that adverts influence the intangible ‘other’ more than they influence yourself is known as the third person principal and it actually makes you dangerously susceptible to persuasion techniques.

Psychological studies have shown that when watching an advert proven to be highly persuasive to them, people have dismissed the effect on themselves but said they believe that the advert would be persuasive to ‘other people’.

This effect is amplified when the person sees the subject as being of little or no relevance to themselves meaning you are more likely to be influenced when forced to think about something you previously had no interest in.

Clearly there is a danger here. By dismissing an adverts power to persuade out of hand we are making ourselves more open to the message that advert is trying to get across. Instead of looking down on the none existent ‘others’ we should be more aware of how marketing messages affect us and understand exactly what power they have to influence us.

David James Bawden

-Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/
HSCT’s website: http://www.hsconsultingandtraining.com

[Opinion] Would You Like a Side of Mediation with That?

Mediation and sales have several things in common:

They both involve establishing trust right away.
They both involve starting from a referral from one or more of the parties.
They both involve establishing a relationship between the two parties and the mediator/s.

The key place where sales and mediation differ is that a sale is usually closed: Either the salesperson gets the order and gets paid, or the prospect gets the salesperson to go away.

Mediation relies on both parties having the autonomy to walk away. Sales involves parties being pressured (whether lightly or heavily) into making a decision to “buy” or “walk-away.”

The big takeaway form all of this is that if your career is in mediation, learning where to put pressure on versus where to ensure autonomy will ensure that each participant has a satisfactory outcome.

And that you get paid.

Active listening is a huge driver for both sales and mediation.

If you aren’t listing to what your customer is saying that they want—or the parties in the dispute are saying that they want—you’ll wind up going home.

Peace Be With You All-

Jesan Sorrells, MA

Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: jsorrells@hsconsultingandtraining.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HSConsultingandTraining
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Sorrells79
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesansorrells/