The Hidden Picture of Selling

Have you had the experience, either as a parent or as a kid? You are looking for the hidden picture within another picture in a children's magazine. A quick search on Google "find things in a picture game" will find you hundreds of these. You are provided a scene with a room or landscape setting. The caption reads like this: "Hidden somewhere in this image is a dentist pulling a tooth with a gold filling in it. Can you find it?" Try as you might, usually after half an hour or so you resign yourself to the probability that you have received an incorrect image. So by turning to a back page in the magazine, you find how cleverly the artist had hidden the image from us. When you study the model, you realize that the whole painting was created in such a way to conceal the real picture within. Once we have seen the "real picture," it stands out like the proverbial painful thumb.

We believe that picture painters of the mass media are artfully creating scenes for us to hide the real picture deliberately. In this post, I show you how to discover the "hidden picture" in the room or landscape settings of the sales calls that we make to our prospective clients. Once you see through the camouflage, you will see the dentist pulling a tooth with a gold filling in it, which has been there all along.

Thousands of salespeople are concerned and frustrated over not making quota or locating the next prospect. They feel that something is wrong, but because of the picture painters, they can't quite put their fingers on it. Some steps are below the surface of all sales calls. These are gates that need to be accomplished to "perfect the sale."

The gates that need to "be cleared" in a sale fall into four major categories. The "gates" include:

1.   Change readiness

2.   Ideal Customer Profile

3.   Company Buying Process

4.   Competition

As salespeople, we must learn more than just the essential selling skills, and we need to map the course of accomplishing each of the requirements of the gates to achieve the sale. What are the factors that make up the hidden picture of selling your current customer? In all cases, it begins with the understanding that there must be a compelling event that would drive your prospect to invest in a solution.

Watch for more details on the details of each "gate." Those that have "perfected" this understanding are seeing over 40% increases in their sales results!