What a Rattlesnake Outside My Front Door Taught Me About Sales

Most people don't walk up to their front door, glance down and to the left, and see a sleeping diamondback rattlesnake curled up there.

I have.

Twice.

And I do it automatically. Nobody trained me to do this. I didn't decide to start doing it. Two rather jarring personal experiences took care of that for me.

Which got me thinking about something that's incredibly useful in sales about how to get people to change their mind about fears and beliefs.

There's a name for this. Vicarious experience.

It's what happens when you watch somebody else go through something, and it changes what you think, feel, or believe, even though it never happened to you.

Psychologist Albert Bandura proved just how powerful this is, working with people who had severe snake phobias. (I wasn’t one of them.)

He didn't sit them down and explain why snakes aren't so bad. Can you imagine?

"I understand you're terrified, but let me walk you
through this deck with 17 compelling reasons your fear is irrational."

Nobody's buying that. Literally or figuratively.

But isn't that basically what we do in sales every day?

Prospect's skeptical. Reluctant. Worried about what could go wrong. Maybe got burned before.

And we respond by explaining harder. More facts. More features. More ROI. More reasons their concern isn't really a concern.

Sometimes that works. Usually it doesn't.

There's a better way. Bandura found it by putting his snake-phobic subjects behind a glass wall and having them watch other people calmly handle the very thing that terrified them. Not argued out of their fear. Not thrown into it either. They just watched somebody else go first.

That's exactly what a good sales story does. And it's why the right story can move a skeptical prospect further than another round of facts and features ever will.

I get into exactly how to use this on a call, the research on why stories beat data even with people trained to trust numbers, and a simple way to dig your own best sales stories out of your own selling history, in today's episode of The Art of Sales.

One more thing. The rattlesnake removal guy told me something about striking distance, and the number one way people actually get bitten by these things.

There's a shovel involved. And let's just say I now have the rattlesnake guy's number saved in my phone.

I'm saving that one for the podcast.

Listen the The Art of Sales Podcast Episode Here

Actually, that headline isn’t entirely accurate.

Let me clarify: I'm getting out of the physical book self-publishing business.

Not my flagship book, Smart Calling. That's published by Wiley, and thankfully they're the ones printing, storing and shipping that one.

I'm talking about the books I self-publish, inventory, and pay (a big number) to store and fulfill. I'm done with that part of the business after 30+ years. Oh, I’ll still be selling the digital copies of the books, since the material in all of them is as valuable as the day they were released.

So Monday I'm going to start liquidating my remaining physical book inventory at a crazy price in order to move them out, and quit paying exorbitant warehouse rent to store them.

(Whispering secret voice) And I'm throwing in an extra physical-book bonus for the first 60 sets sold. I have a smaller number of these…exactly 62 left. Once those are gone, they're gone. Might even be before we announce on Monday.

If you're a physical-book actual turn-the-pages and mark things up with a highlighter person and would like to see the offer and get the ordering link before I release it to everyone Monday morning, and have first shot at getting the extra free bonus book, just click the link to get on the Early Notification List below.

YES, NOTIFY ME ABOUT EARLY ACCESS

Go make it your best week ever!