By Joe DiDonato | Chief of Staff | Baker Communications, Inc.
If salespeople do not panic in the heat of battle or become too excited when they hear what they want to hear, their chance of closing their deal successfully improves exponentially. Of course, that’s much easier said than done. We all have pressures on us, and that’s no different when you’re in sales. There are quota pressures, bills to pay, timetables to meet, as well as a host of other product or service-related issues that may be outside of your control.
When it comes to controlling emotions, there is one story that I think is worth retelling. Hopefully, it will help you master this competency as much as it helped me in an unfortunate situation with an old boss. For sure, the story helped me understand that I could actually manage a lot of the emotions that were feeling totally unmanageable.
The story is about flying, which I did a lot of in the earlier part of my career. And more than once, I found myself stuck in the bulkhead row. With the bulkhead divider less than 3 feet away, it was an impossible place to stretch your legs. For me, the best seat in the bulkhead row was the aisle seat, where I could stretch at least one of my legs in the aisle.
As luck would have it, I sat next to a family therapist on one flight. We both shared our discomfort with the bulkhead row, but he said that he often used the bulkhead row as an example of how to control your emotions. Well, that got my interest, and so I asked him, “How so?”
He said, “Image that you’re sitting in the aisle seat – exactly where you’re sitting now. You’re reading a book and you’re completely immersed in the story. All of a sudden, you feel the heel of someone’s shoe digging into your shin. What’s your immediate reaction?”
My answer was, “I guess the pain would trigger a strong negative reaction, and I would be angry with the person who was causing the pain.” The family therapist then said, “But what if you looked up and saw that it was a gorgeous woman? And how about if it was a blind person? What if it was an elderly person that didn’t want to disturb your reading? What if it was an overweight angry person who was showing displeasure at your being in his way?”
As I thought about it, I was sure that my reaction would have been different in all those situations. His explanation was that in each of those situations, there was a “thought process” that was connecting the cause with the resultant effect. He explained that we learn those reactions over time. And after we learn them, we then bury that thought process in our subconscious mind. Our reaction is then the result of a subconscious thought process that links the cause with an effect. It could be a look that comes across someone’s face or a phrase that creates the reaction from us. It could be someone repeating your name over and over again to rudely silence you.
He said that the secret to getting your “arms around your reaction” is to try to elevate the subconscious thought process that’s linking the cause to your reaction. He said that once you elevate that thought process to your conscious mind, it will be something you can relearn and eventually change.
That made a lot of sense to me. In fact, there was one very tricky situation that was causing me a lot of grief back then. Every time it happened, I’d lose my temper. The underlying problem? It was a former boss who was the perpetrator.
The problem situation was the disapproving frown he kept giving me if he didn’t like something I was saying. In addition, he was a very arrogant person, who felt he was smarter than everyone else on the team. He also had no problem telling you that. Following that judgmental frown, a diatribe of verbal abuse about my personal intelligence usually followed. The only comforting thought was that I wasn’t the only one being singled out. However, coming up with a substitute thought process was unbelievably hard. My real desire was to put him in a WWE chokehold.
The solution was pretty straightforward. The challenge was to recognize when he was about to start his abuse. The next step was to learn to be completely silent while he filled the room with his venom. That was the substitute thought process. Hear the verbal abuse equaled going silent. Ideally, I tried to view his outburst as a clinician would observe it – completely detached as if you were observing a verbal outburst from a terrets patient. At the end of the outburst, I would simply ask if he’d like to see me alter my approach or if he had any other advice to offer.
The satisfaction was that everyone who witnessed the exchange become a supporter. They viewed him as a very sick person who was totally lacking in interpersonal skills. Which he was. In today’s world, he would have never gotten away with that behavior. But still, you’d be surprised how often a Seller sees that type of behavior in a customer. We see it all the time.
So, the bottom line is to quickly catch yourself becoming emotional – either on the negative or the positive side. Detach yourself from the situation and imagine yourself as an observer. Substitute the thought process that you’re not there to sell the customer anything. You’re there to help the client solve their problems. So simply go silent and listen. Use curiosity and empathy as your substitute thought process. Start asking open-ended questions. That curiosity will help you uncover the root cause of your customer’s reaction, and your empathy will help you understand why the customer reacted that way when you hear his answers.
If you would like to learn more about using competency data to drive your hiring, training, and coaching efforts, we invite you to watch one of our recent webinars: How to Implement Data-Driven Sales Enablement. View the webinar for free here: https://www.bakercommunications.com/webinars/How-To-Implement-Data-Driven-Sales-Enablement.html.
