Highly Successful Salespeople Can’t Remember What They Say

We were in an internal meeting last week and Frank Belzer said something really profound.  Chris Mott asked him to repeat it and he said, “I have no idea what I just said.”

Light Bulb.

Chris and I can’t remember most of the most magical, profound, insightful things that we say, whether they occur in sales calls, training environments or consulting scenarios.  The ideas come to us through intuition, they’re based on experience and they’re typically game changing, life changing, business changing or paradigm shifting insights.

Why can’t we remember them?

We don’t remember these memorable sound bites because we didn’t prepare them, haven’t said them before, and weren’t paying much attention to what was coming out of our own mouths.  We’re focused on the other individual(s) in the room.   We’re in the moment, with clear minds.   occurrences like these happen often for us and for other highly successful individuals. When you are in the moment, your own idle thoughts, strategies, tactics, next steps and scripts block great ideas from coming through.   Most unsuccessful salespeople aren’t able to engage and persuade resistant prospects. They’re too busy reciting their prepared objection handling scripts which, to their prospects, sound like high pressured sales pitches.

Instructions to Your Salespeople: Clear your minds.  You know enough and have prepared enough to succeed. Focus only on what your prospect is saying in that moment and question everything they say.  Ask lots of “why” and “how” questions to identify compelling reasons for them to spend money with you and only you. Refer to the sample dialog in this post from last week as an example.