The crucial sales choice between ‘I’m ready when you are’…and ‘I’m ready! Are you?’

The tentative, reactive business attitude of ‘I’m ready when you are’ is one that everyone suffers from, either now and then or virtually all of the time. This weak stance is alive and well in many private accounting practices, where the onus is almost always on clients to ask for ideas and help, and it exists at retail level with the use of power phrases such as ‘will there be anything else?’ The world of selling has been constrained by this attitude since business began, and no amount of sales training will change the situation…except to make it worse by asking people to behave in ways that are alien to them! And yet…the people held back by this mind-set are quite often the opposite in their private lives.

For example, at a training course I ran not long ago, one of the weakest sales people there got talking to me at the lunch break about ‘comedy’. Using the proactive attitude of ‘I’m ready! Are you?’, he said ‘John, you obviously enjoy humour; have you seen the New Zealand duo called The Flight of the Conchords on SBS?’ I told him I didn’t know of them and so he continued, ‘They are fantastic and I’m sure you’d love them!’ I made a point of watching the show the following week and he was right, and even if I hadn’t enjoyed the act, it was very good of him to tell me about it. Now, the question is ‘why doesn’t he use this positive approach when selling to customers and prospects?’ The answer is simple: he does not feel that what he has to sell is worth telling people about in a manner that is ardent, convincing and contagious.

In my own case, I have enjoyed a successful career as a professional conference speaker and trainer, but I never had a lesson about how to perform these demanding duties. What drove me from the start, and drives me still, is a feeling of great distaste at what passes for education and motivation in the sales sector. Determined to offer alternative, truthful and much better ways of doing business, based on my own experience and the knowledge of great professionals I had encountered, I entered the speaking circuit with a series of urgent messages that I thought business people ought to hear…for their sake and for the benefit of their customers and companies. To create the conference presentations, I thought about the right ways to communicate with people, and I also considered the wrong ways to communicate…based on the agony of listening to so-called ‘motivators’, who would deliver patronising messages about ‘how to be a success’. Finally, I had to learn how to deliver the messages that I had created, using evidence, ideas, humour, etc., so that I could stand before an audience for 90 minutes…without notes.

So, to be driven by the attitude of ‘I’m ready! Are you?’, the first task is to design your message so that it is more valuable and urgent than those delivered by your competitors. With a different, better, more interesting ‘message’ you can go to market with the approach of ‘I’m ready! Are you?’ Without such a message you will be compelled to go to market and say ‘Can I help you’, or ‘Do you want anything at the moment?’…both of which are aligned with the attitude of ‘I’m ready when you are.’ Once the message is created, the next challenge is to ‘present’ the message in the best possible way, otherwise you will have a superior proposition delivered in an inferior manner. My weekly article is a simple example of ‘I’m ready! Are you?’, meaning that no one requested that I write such an article; no one asked me to write one every week, and no one tells me how to write it…and with every issue I have to think carefully about the message and the way that it is written (presented). On behalf of your customers, your prospects and your company, I hope that you will adopt the attitude of ‘I’m ready! Are you?’