This weekend, I was subjected to a horrible chick-flick.  To, be more accurate, it was a chick-documentary, but still not something that I would ever pick myself.  The documentary was “My Date With Drew.”  For those of you not familiar with this documentary, essentially its about a man who decides he is going to give himself 30 days to try to secure a single date with Drew Barrymore.

In his words, its a story about how a nobody can use networking, and six degrees of separation to get to an “untouchable” person like Drew Barrymore.  What the movie is REALLY about is how the main character will NEVER be successful in life. – or at least never be successful in sales.

Juff Thull posted a great article on Sales Self-Sabotage on Sales Pro Magazine.

The best point in the article is what he describes as the “Dangling Insult.”  He says:

“Here is a typical example, you may have observed this. A salesperson introduces their solution by saying, “We save companies like yours from wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost…” It sounds innocuous on the surface. Statements like this are standard sales-speak and are often true, but they also contain dangling insults. After all, if your salespeople tell a customer that she is wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars, aren’t they also suggesting that she hasn’t been doing her job very well?”

A few weekends ago, I saw a truck come and deliver cow manure to two of my neighbors.  It started me on a thought process about packaging and how really, anything can be sold, when it is packaged correctly.

Think about cow crap.  I have no idea how large this market is, but I have to imagine it is pretty darn big.  And people sign up year after year to willingly let someone deliver a truck load of cow crap, dump it in a big pile on their driveway, and then they take this stuff in wheelbarrow loads and spread it all over their yard.

When I was a younger sales guy, I used to come back and say that I had a GREAT meeting with the customer.

In reality the only GREAT meetings are the ones that you leave with a signed order.  All other meetings are GOOD meetings.

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As I was relaxing last evening, I remembered an old adage that one of my mentors said to me.

You have two ears and one mouth for a reason.  You are meant to use them in that proportion.

What a simple phrase that says so much about sales.  Listen twice as much as you talk.  When you listen, you can craft your sale around what the prospect’s real pain is – why they would even think about buying your product.