The Importance Of The Structure Of Selling

Furniture World News Desk on 12/28/2014

A  contest took place one day among the Big Three: MR. SPECIALIZED PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE, Mr. POSITIVE ATTITUDE, and MR. PROFESSIONAL SELLING SKILLS. The referee or judge was MR. EXPERIENCE, a successful salesperson who was fond of saying that you cannot buy experience, but not having it can cost you a fortune. SPECIALIZED PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE spoke first:

“No fair judge can award the prize to anyone but me. Regarding POSITIVE ATTITUDE, he is only an abstraction. Buyers are not interested in abstractions. As for PROFESSIONAL SELLING SKILLS, no experienced salesperson, having spent three days in that seminar, has ever left convinced with Alfred Korzybski’s thesis, The Map Is Not the Territory.

POSITIVE ATTITUDE spoke next. “No fair judge can award the prize to anyone but me. As for SPECIALIZED PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE, he suffers from Don Quixote’s disease: “by reading so much and understanding so little, he ended up with addled brains. Regarding PROFESSIONAL SELLING SKILLS, I would add the following: she is as useful to salespeople as a ladder is to squirrels.”

The third to speak was PROFESSIONAL SELLING SKILLS. “No fair judge can award the prize to anyone but me. I would say this to SPECIALIZED PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE: all the product knowledge in the world doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if the salesperson’s timing is off. Asynchronous product knowledge is as disastrous to a salesperson as a conductor who doesn’t know when to use crescendo and when to use moriendo. Without proper timing, the salesperson ends up putting salt in the coffee and sugar in the soup. As for you, POSITIVE ATTITUDE, you too are asynchronous without me.

The judge, MR. EXPERIENCE was an old man who had never completed high school and had never attended any seminar longer than three hours. He had noticed that no buying ever took place in any of the seminars he attended. In his simplicity, he concluded the probable cause of that was that no seminar he had ever attended had any buyers present, except those who had directly or indirectly paid for that seminar.

Everything MR. EXPERIENCE had learned about selling he had learned from his customers. He practiced three rules; one, he listened to the customer eighty percent of the time and talked to the customer twenty percent of the time. When he did talk, he took his cue from what the customer had just said verbally, nonverbally, or both.

He was also a humble man. “I don’t really sell anything,” he was fond of saying. “I simply help my customers make the best buying decision. You see, buyers can – and they do – buy every day in countless stores big and small. Nowhere do salespeople sell without buyers.

One day, John, a friend of MR. EXPERIENCE’s with a Ph. D in classical languages, told his MR. EXPERIENCE the following: “I have known you for many years. You seem to agree with the philosopher and scientist Alfred Kozybski that the map is not the territory.”

MR. EXPERIENCE replied he was flattered to be compared with a man of such great learning, but immediately added that he was a simple man, that all he knew was that product knowledge, attitude, and selling skills have no independent existence. “They begin to exist,” he added, “only when they work together.”

“There’s a word for that,” John said. “It’s synergism.”

“I guess that word is OK,” MR. EXPERIENCE said, “as long as that term means teamwork.’

But it’s time to get back to the contest. MR. EXPERIENCE stated his decision, but not without a lot of blushing. He had always felt uncomfortable speaking before a group of people. No one had ever asked him to put on a seminar, even though he held all kinds of selling trophies he kept in an attic.

“I give the award to none of the three,” MR. EXPERIENCE announced. “The three contestants are straw men as long as they refuse to work together.”

A few weeks later, MR. EXPERIENCE died of a heart attack. The autopsy revealed that his heart was completely worn out from his serving his customers.

One large training company got to hear about MR. EXPERIENCE. It somehow contacted his friend, John, whom they asked if MR. EXPERIENCE had left anything in writing about the structure of selling. John replied that the old man didn’t quite understand what those words meant.

“How do you know that?” a representative from a large training company asked.

“If you are referring,” John said, “to The Structure of Magic,” I myself asked him about that very book. MR. EXPERIENCE replied he had never heard of it. But he did manage to express the following thoughts. He had always felt that champion salespeople worked like wizards, although their magic was not based on the structure of selling. “All the wizards,” he added, “ have a structure, but very few of those with a structure are wizards.”