Cheers,

Ian

When you present something congruent with someone’s belief it is easy to gain compliance. When you need to change their belief in order to gain compliance the task becomes a little more tricky and you must understand what belief you are actually trying to change. And, in the case of most sales objections, they are based in a belief of some sort and you need to ferret out the basis for the belief before you can change it. One of the most common objections is the price is too high. You first have to determine if in fact the price is too high or if for example they have a belief that you can always get a better price if you don’t accept the first. If that is the case, then you simply need to understand what constitutes winning and give it to them or present them with evidence that there is no better price and not accepting the price will increase their pain or displeasure by not taking some action.

Great conversation guys, thanks for including my material!
Dave Lakhani

Greye

What you describe is one model of how personality works – there are many others of course.

But I don’t believe Lakhani is drawing such such complex distinctions – he’s just labelling things which people have a relatively closed attitude towards (with or without evidence to support them) as beliefs. It’s a broad definition.

Beliefs could include big stuff like believing in God, or more pragmatic things like “givers gain”. It could even be simple stuff like “if I don’t hit my numbers this month my boss will fire me” or even prejudices: “slick salespeople in suits always try to cheat you”.

My view is that some of these are really difficult to uncover – some maybe taking years of therapy!

But Lakhani’s point is simple, and I think it’s a good one: when you are trying to persuade people (his book is about persuasion generally, not just selling) it is much easier to position what you are trying to get them to accept as being in line with an underlying belief than it is to try to convince them to change a belief.

Given people’s ability to hold conflicting beliefs, that may even be a matter of finding the right belief to align with, and downplaying elements that conflict with another belief.

Take my example. To a large degree, I don’t really care whether the manager believes they need to be seen as competent because of some underlying self-worth value they have, or because it’s been beaten in to them over years by their boss and they happen to know the boss is looking for an excuse to fire them. At that point in time, what I do know is that I must position my product to make sure the manager doesn’t see it as threatening their perceived competence – or I will struggle to sell. It would be possible – but far more difficult – to try to persuade the manager that in fact demonstrating competence all the time is not necessary (and it would need me me to try to figure out the underlying reason why the belief was held too and address that – which might not be easy).

So as I say, there’s no great philosophy or model of the mind in Lakhani’s statement. Just a simple truth really. But one that’s often forgotten.

Values help shape beliefs, beliefs shape attitude, attitude shapes memories and all four shape decisions. Our personality is made up of values, beliefs, attitudes and memories. Our motivation comes from our values. Our acceptances come from our beliefs. The context comes from attitudes and who we are comes from our memories.

If you want to start to uncover a person’s values you need to ask some open questions like…

“If you could change three things in the world what would they be?”

“If you suddenly came to have $100 million what would you do with it?”

“If you were the next president of USA (Prime Minister of UK) what 3 things would you look to change?”

“What would your ultimate job be for satisfaction and enjoyment?”

“If you took a year off work, and money not an issue, what would you do with the time?”

Obviously, these questions are asked over a coffee when you have full rapport and just chewing the cud, fat, rag or whatever one chews when wishing to chat in an aimless manner.

Rgds

Ian

I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I wrote about this topic not too long ago. Your readers can check it out:
http://salesandmarketingloudmouth.com/2008/11/14/more-short-takes.aspx

Best,

Tim