Selling yourself short when communicating! June 20 2018.

This week in Help Me communicate. Selling yourself when communicating! Maybe you want a new job, a new mate or a new anything. Maybe you want to be a great leader. Learn to sell yourself and your ideas effectively.

You sell all day anyway. All of us sell all day through the natural 5 step Human Interaction Process.

Today you can learn what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong when you’re selling yourself and your ideas, at work or in your social environment. 

Are you selling your ideas to your team effectively? Do you want to lead the best team in your organization? Good leaders are good sellers.

Today I’ll give some tips on selling yourself with integrity and honesty using Socratic selling in your natural Human Interaction Process. HIP.

When you learn to sell yourself effectively with healthy communications techniques, life opens up and opportunities are easier to recognize and cease.

Actually, you are selling in every human interaction with another person. We sell all day. How many times do you interact with people in your day? Every time you do, you are selling in the intention part of your HIP.

Here’s how the HIP works.

Human Interaction Process: 1, we sense with one of our 5 senses. 2, we think and perceive. 3, we feel. 4, we gain an intention from the first three steps and then 5, we act. This process happens over and over again in every long conversation with another person, and within each person. Sense, think, feel, intend and act.

In the intention part of the process we want something and then we act from that intention to get what we want. Intention and action is our selling process.

You sell all day. Every time you have an intention, you’re selling. Every time you interact with another person, you’re selling.

Mostly people are adequate at selling themselves. Mostly we’re successful at it or we would be miserable. We sell to close friends every day and succeed. We sell them on the idea of going for a drink or for a meal. We sell them on our perceptions of life events and want and get agreement. That’s all selling. The reason we’re successful at it most of the time is that we surround ourselves with like minded people and that’s a good thing. It brings us happiness and peace of mind most of the time.

When we don’t succeed at selling ourselves often an anxious emotion like fear, anger, frustration, vengeance is triggered. Have you ever felt anger, frustration, or vengeance when you didn’t get what you want? Of course. We all have. Forgive yourself if need to. Negative emotions are part of the human condition and we all have, and access, the full spectrum of feelings and emotions inside us.  Both Positive and Negative. 

What people want is to experience positive emotion. Our intentions and actions are directed to get that. Sometimes we could sell better. Are there times you wish you could sell your ideas and intentions better so you could be happier, more peaceful and get what you want? Of course.

Socratic selling is the most effective method of selling. I’ve used it most of my life and it’s worked really well.

When I was 18 I used it to get a job that gave me a new company vehicle, and expense account and a higher wage than many 30 year old’s. At 24 I got an industrial sales job where I had the company vehicle, expense account and access to the private company plane for my out of town sales calls. Most sales people never get a job where they can use the company plane for sales calls. At 28 I started my own business from the trunk of my car and grew it to 3 stores and 3 million in annual sales. I made over 30,000 professional sales calls by the time I was 35. I learned to sell well.

I met hundreds of professional sales people. What I've noticed is that great sales people are not the best talkers. They are the best questioners and the best listeners. Socratic selling is about questioning. 

When I realized that sales were part of every human interaction process, I got good at selling and I got good at leading. We’re selling our ideas and processes all day as a leader, or a worker.

Here’s the easy way to sell. 7 SUCCESS steps to effective Socratic Selling. We have a version of this for product and service selling that varies a touch as well. Here's the ouotline followed some detail. 

Search inside. Become aware of your HIP before sharing your own agenda. Ask yourself the right questions.  

Understand the other person.  Ask what their HIP is before sharing your own agenda.

Clarify: Use discovery questions.  Ask to make sure you got it clear and right.

Connect: Find common ground. Relate to their feelings and intentions.  

Execute: Close the sale, ask for the buy in, agreement on solution, or go forward process and manage expectations.  

Survey: Check in to make sure things haven’t changed. Keep your agreements. Renegotiate if you have to.

Solidify with positive affirmation.  

1. Search inside. Become aware of your Human Interaction Process (HIP) before sharing your agenda.

Before speaking your story or even before expressing body language, tune into an awareness of your personal HIP before acting in any way.

Ask yourself: What did you just hear or see, and what are your thoughts and perceptions about it? How does it make you feel? What bottom line need do you want to fulfill right now - what's your intention? Don’t act, just reflect internally.

What is your underlying intention? On May 23 of this year I talked about overlying and underlying intentions in the 'Power of Intentions when Communicating.'

Overlying intentions are reactive and can be negative in nature but they are governed by underlying intentions. Underlying intentions are not ones we hide from another person. They are not deceptive in nature.

Underlying intentions are based on our real bottom line needs. Needs to be accepted and loved. Needs to give and share love and other good things. They have ‘good for all’ roots. They are thought out and have a grounding effect when we acknowledge them.   

Get in touch with your underlying intention before acting. 

2. Understand the other person. Stephen Covey says to 'Seek first to understand, then to be understood.' Do it. Ask what their HIP is before sharing your own agenda. Ask what they heard or saw. It may be a different perception than what you heard or saw. What are their thoughts and perceptions about it? How did it make them feel? What do they want now? what is their intention? 

3. Clarify: Use discovery questions. Make sure you got it clear and right. The most important part of any selling process is discovery. Find out what’s driving the person you are selling too and make sure your interpretation is correct. Paraphrase or parrot - repeat back what you heard with your perception and ask if its the same as what they intended? Make sure you understand each others interpretations. This is critical in Socratic selling. 

4. Connect: Find common ground. Relate to their feelings and intentions. The feeling spectrum that humans access is common ground. We all feel the full spectrum of emotion. Different situations trigger different emotions, but each emotion a person feels the other person has felt at some point. Different circumstance, but same feeling. Relate to the feeling. Its called being empathetic and the best sales people I’ve met have a high degree of empathy. Get in touch with your empathy and you will be better at selling. Tune into your empathy if you want to influence. 

Tune into common underlying intention. People are basically good from an underlying intention perspective. They want peace of mind and they want to feel good. Relate to their good intention with your own good intetnion. 

At work, people want to do a good job, feel part of a good team. Things happen that clutter the basic desire. Get back in touch with their basic desires, and your own basic goods intentions. Guide them to those good intentions when you have to. .Ask about them. 

5. Execute: Close the sale. After you’ve found common ground, suggest a commitment. Ask if they will agree to a process or a solution. Get agreement on going forward. Ask for the buy in, agreement or go forward process.  

When you say to your friend, let’s go for a drink, you get agreement before you do it. Don’t leave conversations without agreement even if it has to be agreeing to disagree. This build a habit of successful selling. A good habit to get into. 

6. Survey: Check in to make sure things haven’t changed. Manage expectations and keep your agreements. When you can't keep an agreement, renegotiate. If you notice the other person can't keep the agreement, renegotiate right away.  Check in every once and awhile to make sure things haven’t changed. People change, plans need to be renegotiated. Re-negotiate as soon as you can using the first 5 steps here. 

7. Solidify your relationships: Use positive affirmation. Tell people good things about them. At work, people want to feel like they’ve contributed. Tell them when they’ve done a good job. In your personal relationships people want to feel appreciated. Tell them you appreciate them.

When you build the habit of communicating using these 7 steps you will be really good at selling yourself and your realizing the desired outcome of your intentions. 

Search inside. Become aware of your HIP before sharing your own agenda.

Understand the other person.  Ask what their HIP is before sharing your own agenda.

Clarify: Use discovery questions.  Make sure you got it clear and right.

Connect: Find common ground. Relate to their feelings and intentions.  

Execute: Close the sale, ask for the buy in, agreement on solution or go forward process and manage expectations.  

Survey: Check in to make sure things haven’t changed. Keep your agreements. Renegotiate if you have to.

Solidify with positive affirmation.  

Good luck. Have a wonderful day and thanks for reading. 

Mike