In this brief video recorded at Brussels airport, Zach Selch reviews Steve Martin’s book Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics: 10 Advanced Sales Call Strategies for Senior Salespeople. He explains that the book teaches salespeople to dissect a prospect’s language at a very granular level—counting visual, auditory and kinesthetic words, tracking eye‑movements, and using those cues to tailor presentations and build rapport. Selch argues that this hyper‑detailed, almost manipulative approach is ill‑suited for his international clientele, many of whom are non‑native English speakers, and would be overwhelming for most sales teams. He suggests the method might only work for account managers or accountants who handle a handful of customers and can afford to study each client deeply. Selch also notes that while Martin is a compelling speaker, the audience at a recent 500‑person event did not adopt the techniques. The review ends with Selch’s own pitch, inviting viewers to contact his firm for help growing international sales.
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Hi, I'm in the Brussels airport and I want to do a quick book review of a book I just read recently. And I can't always review a book that I like, so this isn't my kind of book. It might be your kind of book, depends. First of all, it's called Heavy Hitters by Steve Martin and First of all, what might be sort of a problem with me or why it might not fit me perfectly is because pretty much everybody I deal with, English isn't their first language. And this is very, very focused on really studying the language of the customer in very, very minute detail to try and get to know the customer well and sort of manipulate the customer, play mind games with the customer. In my opinion, that's the way I would phrase it. Who might it be a very good fit for? If you're an accountant, If you're an account manager and you deal with 10 customers that you have to get to know very, very well, and if you can get inside their minds, that might be perfect. But the basic idea behind it is that if you study very carefully, in excruciating detail, the language of your customer, you get to understand a lot about their psychology. And just as an example, so he talks about, is somebody a visual thinker? Is somebody an audio thinker? Is somebody a kinetic thinker? They say things like, we'll see how it goes, or, I hear you, or, let's get this moving. In a perfect world, what Steve is suggesting is basically that you count down. You sit in a meeting and you make notes of how many times somebody used an audio phrase or a visual phrase or a kinetic phrase. You study this, and then you typically will then use it to prepare your presentation or change the way you talk. I'm not against— we all mirror our customers instinctively. We all do little things to try and build rapport instinctively, or sometimes very consciously we try to build rapport with our customer through little manipulations. All salespeople do things like that. To me, this is just going way overboard, in my opinion. The level that he talks about, I can't imagine anybody I know doing it. Now, again, to be fair, when I talk about some of the stuff I do, a lot of people say, wow, Zach, I would never, you know, put so much work into something or go so deep into things. But it works for me. This apparently works for him. I'm sure there are people who it works for. It's called Heavy Hitter Sales Linguistics: 10 Advanced Sales Call Strategies for Senior Salespeople by Steve Martin. Steve's written a couple of other books. I've seen him speak. He's a good speaker. Again, not my kind of guy in terms of, I just can't imagine the level of The focus that I put into a meeting now, taking notes, trying to keep track of what the customer needs, what I think the customer is thinking, all those type of things. He's looking at taking this 10 times deeper. How is the customer moving his eyes when you mention certain words? If he looks left, that means one thing. If he looks up, it means something else. I can't imagine anybody I know going into that depth. And when we had him speak at a meeting, I know that, you know, of the 500 or so people at our meeting, you know, one of my colleagues hired him. He came in, spoke, about 500 people heard him. I don't think anybody took anything home and started using it the next day. That's my opinion from talking to people afterwards. Anyway, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
