I have recently attended a crash-course on “Selling Technology”, organized by the Catalan Agency of Competitiveness (ACCIO), in Barcelona. From my position at CTTC as head of the M2M Communications Department, this is always a nice skill to include in the personal continuous improvement cycle.
The course was pretty interesting, and I decided to write down some of the key ideas that I took home; of course, I also share them with you.
The opening of the session was brilliant: “We are all selling, all the time, in our daily lives; when we were born and cried to get breastfeed, and we got it, we closed our first sale.”
Above all the ideas that were presented in the course, I would like to highlight these:
- Sales have to be “Customer-oriented”; “product-oriented” selling goes nowhere nowadays. Technology is a means to solve the problems of costumers, not an end by itself.
- Attitude is a multiplier. This applies to selling and, indeed, to everything we do in life.
- Selling (as almost everything) needs to be organized, systematized, professionalized, and measured; nothing can be improved if it is not measured.
- When selling, always look for a win-win situation.
- In selling, all is about trust.
STOP! This last one is the one that I like the most. Trust. My experience as a seller – we all sell something, no matter what is your job – tells me that trust is above all. And when it comes to trust, today I have learned about the Halo Effect.
The Halo Effect consists in a cognitive bias that we have towards a person, company, product, or whatever, influenced by a previous experience based on a single “feature” of that person, company, or product. For example: we tend to perceive a person as “intelligent” because once showed to be “intelligent”; and not only that; we automatically assume that this person will have “all the features” that we subconsciously link to all “intelligent people”. The human brain can be wonderful sometimes, for good and for bad.
So, when it comes to selling and trust, it is pretty convenient to build a positive Halo Effect around you, your company, or your product. But above all, about you.
Jesus Alonso-Zarate 