Selling with Urgency: Part 3. The Change Process - Joe Galea
Posted by Member Solutions on Tue, Nov 30, 2010 @ 12:00 PM
In Part 1 and in Part 2, Andy Gole, creator of the Urgency Based Selling® system, provided us with the three fatal flaws in the selling process and we discussed the conflict between business and social values.
Joe: Andy, now that we have better insight into most sales encounters, how do our readers implement change?
Andy: We need to set reasonable expectations for moving team members from social to business values. Very often, the owner needs to make the same journey. In fact, the value change is one of three paradigm shifts that are generally needed – values, sales process and messaging. You need a change process to move the needle from 0 to 100: you can’t do that in one fell swoop. You can’t expect a memo approach to work. If you move the needle too quickly, without an appropriate change process, you fry the nervous system. I have gone through this experience with many firms. You need short term, reasonable objectives with weekly oversight. Ideally, a cohort group goes through the change and members learn from each other.
Joe: Why don’t firms establish strong change processes to help their teams make the conversion from social to business values?
Andy: There is a fundamental problem in how most business owners look at change. We tend to embrace command and control leadership. We have a meeting and say: “This is how we are going to do things.” That perspective is not sensitive to how change takes place - over time, in small bites. In general, as a culture, we are not skilled change agents.
The situation has irony for Martial Arts studio owners: they are geared to understand change. When they teach their students different skills, they break the change down into units. They have drills. They teach reflexes and muscle memory and eventually they integrate it into a whole. They do not expect a student to function at the level of an advanced Black Belt at the first lesson. So the Martial Arts community implicitly understands the change process.
Joe: You make a really interesting point and I would like to add that through the process the student improves, which offers proof that change is necessary for development.
Andy: There is a second reason why Martial Arts school owners should feel comfortable with business development: their thought process is influenced by Eastern thinking. They are familiar with the concept of yin and yang, opposing forces. There is also a yin and yang to selling. There are soft and strong moves, and an oscillation between states. This is a second advantage a Martial Arts studio owner has over a typical business owner.
Joe: The Martial Arts industry is very open to new ideas and change as compared to others I have researched. You may have just explained why! This is the reason I wanted to interview you. Our readers will be able to embrace a completely different approach to selling and to bringing in new students. Andy, I sense that many of our readers struggle with selling and some even view the role with some distaste: they see something fundamentally wrong with selling. Any thoughts on this?
Andy: Many salespeople don’t realize selling is heroic. There is a common negative stereotype unfortunately popularized by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman: Willie Loman stands for the salesperson as a slimy loser. I refer readers to Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell studied hero myths throughout hundreds of cultures spanning thousands of years. He talks about the roles and the rules of the hero. We become a hero when we cross the first threshold; when we leave our village – to slay the dragon, rescue the damsel in distress. We step outside of the world as we know it. The equivalent in selling is when we grasp the distinction between social and business values and cross over from one to the other. There are at least three thresholds we need to pass en route to becoming a hero in selling. The successful salesperson is a hero and a warrior.
Joe: I agree completely. In sales, we change lives by selling change. That is heroic. Andy, thank you for being my mentor and for sharing some of your basic principles with our readers.
Readers: An MP3 of the entire interview with Andy Gole is available upon request. Simply send an e-mail to consulting@membersolutions.com.
For Part 1 of the Selling with Urgency series, CLICK HERE.
For Part 2 of the Selling with Urgency series, CLICK HERE.
