You think your first mission is to sell your product or to lead your potential customer to make a buying decision, based on your logical arguments? Think again. The customer who decides to listen to you is hoping to believe one thing: you should be able to handle his problem or challenge better than anybody else! You might not realize it fully, but your role and responsibility are vital – no matter the customer’s attitude or manners toward you. In periods of crisis and uncertainty, the customer is craving for a relationship of care, trust and dedication.

Do you know what people instantly respond to, especially in our uncertain times? Your willingness to help, your desire to understand! Rest assured: you don’t need to transform yourself into a psycho-analyst; you just need to put more attention on what he is telling you and much less on what you want to say!

There are a lot of wrong opinions about the wonderful passion that selling is. If you look at the old definition of the word, you will realize that it had originally ONE meaning: to help. Then about 1,000 B.C. that definition was modified and its new meaning became “to cheat” or to betray.

Nowadays is the perfect time to revive the original definition of selling.

My purpose in this article is to share with you the results of 20 years of observation, work and experience in the field of salesmanship. I had a  chance to evaluate and train more than 45,000 sales professionals in 27 countries. The areas of expertise of these people extended from computer systems to industrial equipment or consumer products to chiropractic medicine. Observing and working with these people led me to progressively detect the attitude and behaviors of those who were much more successful than others. I was very interested to find out if one could define a routine "pattern” or “technique” used by top sales people in their approach. What are these top professionals doing that others are not? What tricks or what magic arethey using that makes the customer or patient want to buy from them?

My conclusion was that selling had nothing to do with “special techniques” or any magic. The fact that “one needs to be born a salesperson” in order to succeed also proved very wrong in my own observations and evaluations. What follows is just a snapshot of these observations. See how it can apply toyou.