Our product, Motivational Maps, has many applications and some of them are pretty obvious: motivation, performance, productivity, team building, appraisal, and recruitment to mention the most obvious. But selling? How is Motivational Maps relevant to selling and increasing sales? The good news is that Motivational Maps is highly relevant to sales and there are three areas that I briefly want to consider.
First, and most directly, let’s remind ourselves of that great truism that Brian Tracy, one of the world’s leading sales trainers, observed: “50% of any sale is a transfer of enthusiasm”. That’s right! And what does that mean? It means that you can train people on every identifiable sales skill available: how to present, how to close, how to handle objections and so on and so forth, and you can make them encyclopaedias of knowledge about selling, but at the end of the day without that enthusiasm, they are likely – 50% likely – to fail. So what is enthusiasm? It’s an infectious energy that comes from belief and love and purpose – and it’s the brother or sister of motivation, that other word for profound levels of energy that get things done. In short, Tracy is saying that selling is 50% down to motivation.
In any situation there is a logical and an emotional component to buying. The logical component is effectively the ‘spec’ – what we need to buy to advance our business whether it be a management information system, a CRM, some software, a computer, a phone, a stapler, office paper and paper clips – and we have various criteria of which price is one component. Only a foolish business always buys the ‘cheapest’ product or service: do you want the best price or the best value is a great question to rebut the cheapo mind-set. Given the spec, and of course different sectors and industries can widely variant stances on how flexible their buyers can be, it should be the case that purchases are made on a logical basis. Yea! Should be – but are they?
Of course not, emotion always creeps into the equation, and in some instances, including some of the most senior buying decisions, the emotional decision trumps any logical choice. For my own part KLT is vital: I need to Know someone, Like someone, Trust someone, first, and then I’ll consider their logical offering second. So knowing someone, and getting them to like you as a pre-requisite to a successful sales pitch is vital.
I am not a particularly great sales person but using Motivational Maps I can get to know people and assist them in their efforts to like me! How – by getting them to do a Map. Let me paint a typical scenario. I get a call from a business association asking me to be the guest speaker talking about motivation at a business breakfast. There are 50 or Managing Directors, Finance Directors, HR specialists in attendance. I do my thing. At the end I say, “And if you like what you’ve heard and would like to do a complimentary map, give me your business card before I go with the word MAP written on it. Somewhere between 10 and 20 – let’s say 15 – people do just that. And then about 10 do a map. Immediately I know exactly what the motivational hot buttons of ten people who have qualified themselves and expressed an interest. I follow the trail and convert 3 or 4 of the 10 into clients. But the conversion is based on pitching the solution to their problem within the language of their motivators – in other words, what they want. So this is not manipulative; it’s simply giving people what they want. Or as Dr Tony Alessandra puts it in his great book, The Platinum Rule: it’s doing to others as they want to be done by!
Allowing people to do Motivational Maps, therefore, is a wonderful way of getting underneath their skin and really understanding what they want at an emotional level. But that’s just the start. There are two other important applications of Motivational Maps to sales.
The first is working with sales managers; for the truth is most managers, including sales managers, do not even know what motivates their self, never mind their team members. We see time and time again what we call wrong reward strategies applied that have the opposite effect on a sales team and eventually lead to under-performance. One of the worst examples of this is the blind assumption that everyone is motivated by money, so money is the only reward. This is firstly palpably untrue, and secondly desperately damaging to the long term effectiveness of any sales team. So Motivational Maps here are invaluable.
And finally, Motivational Maps is brilliant for giving the owners and senior people in an organisation an immediate fix on how the sales team is really doing; for, if Tracy is right, measuring the total motivational score of a sales team, or division even, is going to provide a massive insight in how things really are. One might argue that this would be apparent from the targets; but not so, except when a company is on an exceptional roll. The truth is, many companies have sales forces that blind them with monthly numbers and prospects and leads and jam tomorrow that it can literally takes years to work out that all the activity and promises were, after all, smoke and mirrors, and another Sales Director bites the dust yet with his CV intact for his next appointment!! Motivational Maps can see through all that. How? By measuring the motivations of these team: there needs to be a correlation between high performance and motivation? Is there?
I have covered these areas in brief, but I hope you can see from my analysis just how profoundly Motivational Maps and selling are related. Perhaps the next question is: are you using Motivational Maps in your sales force or process? If not, then contact me for a complimentary Map, but remember if you do I will see what you really want, yes, YOU!
The Mapping Motivation Series 