Many sales people, despite being very successful, often tend to view customers as the enemy, especially when they are visited for the first time. This can be changed by introducing a simple psychological technique into your sales training sessions. For example:

An experienced sales professional, and a new sales person are going to visit a potential new client. Up until now the older one has always conducted the sales negotiations and the new one only accompanied him. Now the tables are turned, however, since the older asks the other to visit this client on his own. The new sales person is startled by this. The older sales person
then initiates the following conversation:

Old Sales person: “Where are you now?”

New Sales person: “That is a stupid question. I am sitting in the car!”

Old Sales person: “Aha! And what do you think will happen if you were to go into this business and ask to talk to the purchasing manager?”

New Sales person: “He will be annoyed because I am interrupting him and he therefore will not agree to see me. He could even have me thrown out.”

Old Sales person: “It is possible! And where would you be then?”

New Sales person “Right! Back in the car!”

The Austrian psychologist, Dr. Victor Frankl, calls this the paradoxes of the will: the harder you try to forget something the more difficult it is to forget it.

Charlatans were working with these paradoxes in the Middle Ages: they would sell lead which would be transformed into gold overnight, on the proviso that the person that bought the lead did not think about the wealth he was going to get. Nobody, however could go through a whole night that was going to lead to vast wealth without thinking about it. However, if the miracle did not take place then the sales person would lay blame on the customer of not following his instructions.

The more your sales people resolve to stop being afraid of some of their clients’ hostility, the stronger the feeling will become (this is equally true in certain cases with some sales managers!)

You should therefore try to take the “opponent” concept to the extreme and show just how absurd it is. Portray the results of a visit to a intimidating client in the sharpest colours:

I am ready to keep my appointment this customer even though he has a reputation for being cynical and merciless. Nero and Ghengis Khan seem like choir boys in contrast to him! He is so awful he has to hire armed body guards to keep his employees from storming his office and lynching him! He has the heads of 200 sales people who wanted to visit him mounted on his wall!

Encourage your sales people in sales training workshops to imagine such ridiculous things, before visiting a “hostile” customer, the situation then seems ridiculous.

According to Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, someone who can laugh about their problems is on the way to solving them. If you can make a dilemma seem ridiculous, it will lose its power over your mind!

If the sales representative cannot reach this point on his own, he should ask a good friend to take his problems to the extreme.

Do not fall into the trap of assuming that this process is too easy. It is one of the most successful ways of solving problems ever developed!

Remind your sales team in sales training meetings of the following example before they make a first visit: Before you go through the door your turnover is zero and the worst thing that can happen when you leave the company is that your revenue is still zero. It’s a ridiculous problem really!

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