Brian Tracy presents a short instructional talk applying the Golden Rule to sales: sell to others the way you would like to be sold to. He emphasizes seeking to understand the customer before trying to be understood, practicing honesty and deep product/competitive knowledge, and—centrally—caring for customers; top sales professionals differentiate themselves by acting as consultants and putting customers' needs before closing the sale.
Hello. To improve your sales performance and become a better sales professional, highly paid Adopt the Golden Rule mentality. The Golden Rule says, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It also says, love your neighbor as yourself. The Golden Rule mentality in sales says simply sell unto others as you would have them sell unto you. Now what does this mean? Aren't there all kinds of different personalities that require different sales performance techniques? Yes and no. Practicing the Golden Rule in selling simply means that you sell to other people the way you would like to be sold to. The successful sales professional uses the Golden Rule to sell with the same honesty, integrity, understanding, empathy and thoughtfulness as that they would like someone else to use in selling to them. You become a brilliant sales professional by seeking to understand before trying to get the person to understand you. To improve your sales performance, you must first seek to understand the customer. If you'd like a sales professional to take the time to thoroughly understand you and your situation before making a recommendation, you should practice the same thing with your customers. If you would like a sales professional to give you honest information and to help you make an intelligent buying decision, you should practice the same with your customer. If you would like a sales professional to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the strengths or weaknesses of his or her product or service and that of his or her competitors, then you should do the same with your product or service and your competitors. Now improve your sales performance by caring. Perhaps the most important part of Golden Rule selling is the emotional component embraced in the word caring. A top sales professional cares about their customers. They care about themselves, they care about their companies, they care about their products and services, and they really care about helping their customers to make good buying decisions. If you think about the very best sales professionals that you know, you will recognize that they are caring individuals who maintain a high level of sales performance simply because they care. And you should know that they don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. If you think about your very best customers, you will recall that these are invariably people that you care about and who care about you. When you think about the people you buy from, you will recall that they seem to care about you more than the average person does. In every part of your business life, you will find that the significant people have all the denominators of caring as part of their character and their personality. Differentiate yourself from your competitors. A top sales professional positions themselves as a consultant, sees themselves as a resource for their clients. Top professionals see themselves and carry themselves as advisors and mentors and friends. They become emotionally involved in their transactions, and they're generally concerned that their product or service be the ideal solution to the real needs of the prospect they're dealing with. Top professionals differentiate themselves from their competitors by being more concerned with helping their prospects than with selling their products or services. Their customers often feel that the sales professional cares more about them than they care about making a sale, and it's true.
