Recently I was in a sales conversation where there were multiple people from two different companies brainstorming. I say brainstorming because it was a fantastic conversation where both groups shared ideas, asked insightful questions, and were engaged through-out.
Which got me trying to figure out what the DIFFERENCE was between that meeting… and the not so great ones: proposal presentations that fell flat, sales pitches that felt like a slap, cold calls that never warmed up.
I’m sure you’ve been in all of those types of meetings: ones that felt conversational – and times when it was adversarial – along with disinterest or disengagement of one or more people involved.
As I was working on figuring out the difference – it hit me, everyone was thinking together in that sales conversation: coming at the topic from diffferent persepctives, certainly. I’m not saying they all agreed with each other, that wasn’t true either.
Maybe our job as salespeople is to figure out – what we can do to have people start thinking together!