• Can you determine the correctness of each part? • Can you improve one part at a time? • Can you eliminate the rules? Simplify? Where could you ease off?
• What if nothing is done? Example: What should you omit from the way you sell? If you don’t give massive rebates and run hun- dreds of millions of dollars of advertising hype, there is no way you can sell a car in America today. Right? Not so, proved Gordon Stewart, owner of a dealer- ship in Michigan. He knew that Americans do not like to bargain for a car. They always feel as if they have been had. So he did something about it. He elimi- nated the dickering and sold the idea of no-dickering pricing. He put red-tag final offers on the windshields of his cars. He gave the people a reason to come in and look. A car sticker-priced at $12,234 had a non- negotiable red-tag price of $10,408. His salespeople were paid on volume, not profit. They had to sell the dealership and the car. Can you imagine a car sales- person selling a car and not price? Selling price is never selling. That year, he sold 2,079 cars to retail customers – well above the 1,125 target set by the factory. If a GM dealer could do that, any business could do it.
REARRANGE?
Creativity, it could be said, consists largely of rearrang- ing what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Rearrangement usually offers countless alterna- tives for ideas, goods, and services. A baseball manag- er, for example, can shuffle his lineup 362,880 times. Ask: • How else can you arrange things? What other ar- rangement might be better?
• What would happen if you interchanged compo- nents?
• Change the pattern? What other layout might be better?
• Can you change the order? Where should this be in relation to that? Change the sequence?
• Transpose cause and effect? • How about timing? How about a change of pace? Different tempo? Change schedule? Chronologized? Systemized?
What if you changed the way you work? Change your
environment? Method? People? Priorities? Habits? Example: What happens when salespeople change the pace of their presentation? Fast-talking sales- people are sometimes regarded with suspicion, but rapid speech may actually increase one’s persuasive- ness. Norman Miller and his co-workers approached Los Angeles residents in parks and shopping malls and
asked them to listen to a tape-recorded speech argu- ing that caffeine should be regarded as a dangerous drug. All subjects heard the same message, but half heard it at the slow rate of 102 words per minute and half at the fast rate of 195 words per minute. The fast- talking communicator was viewed as being the more knowledgeable and objective, and was more effective at changing the subject’s attitudes. Within limits, the faster you talk, the more likely people are to assume you know what you’re talking about.
REVERSE?
Reversing your perspective on your ideas, goods, or ser- vices opens your thinking. Look at opposites and you’ll see things you normally miss. Ask, “What is the opposite of this?” to find a new way of looking at things. The his- torical breakthroughs of Columbus and Copernicus were the polar opposites of the current beliefs of their day. Many creative people get their most original ideas when they reverse a subject. Ask: • How can you reverse the way you look at selling? Turn it around? What happens when you play devil’s advocate?
• Can you turn the negatives into positives? Reframe them?
• What are the opposites? What happens when they are reversed? Reverse assumptions? Roles? Relation- ships? Uses? Functions? Ideas?
• Can you consider it backwards? Work from the de- sired result backwards to the subject?
• What if you did the unexpected? What surprises can you pull? How can you turn the tables? Example: Reverse assumptions. The Williams Compa- nies had 28,000 miles of oil pipeline all over the country. When they were looking to move into new businesses, they assumed they had to find something they could pump through the pipes. Nothing worked. Finally, a sales- person said, “How about not pumping anything through the pipes?” He then asked various companies if they had any use for 28,000 miles of empty oil pipelines. One day he called MCI and discovered they could run their fiber-optic cables through the pipes. Williams sold the idea to MCI, and the rest is history.
Instability has become almost a way of life in the U.S. because of frantic social, business, and technological changes. This instability means fresh ideas will become the most precious raw materials in the world. Salespeo- ple need to think on their own, to produce new ideas, and to take responsibility for their own destiny. This ques- tion checklist may be the tool that will open your mind to create the idea that will revolutionize the way you sell... and your life.
SELLING POWER FEBRUARY 2018 | 29 © 2018 SELLING POWER. CALL 1-800-752-7355 FOR REPRINT PERMISSION.
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