Unfortunately for salespeople who just love to talk, the old saying that “selling is telling” is a complete furphy. Good selling is actually just like good conversation. The best conversations involve genuine mutual engagement, the asking of good relevant questions and real listening. The best sales calls exhibit 80% / 20% conversation share – in the buyers favour. This is the sales equivalent of the Pareto Principle.
Here’s a good activity to test your persuasion style:
- Give yourself 3 minutes to persuade someone on a relevant topic that they will be mildly to strongly resistant about;
- Record the conversation on your mobile phone / hand held;
- Review the tape at 10 second intervals and determine who is talking at each 10 second point (this will give you 18 data points)
- Count the number of points at which the other person (i.e. the persuadee) was talking at the ten second mark; divide by 18 and multiply by 100. This will give you the % of time the persuadee was talking.
- Compare it to the 80/20 rule described above.
- What does this tell you about your persuasion style?
