Sensing what the customer is feeling, he is able to change pace, double back on his track, and make whatever creative modifications might be necessary to home in on the target and close the sale. He is not simply bound by a prepared sales track, but he functions in terms of the real interaction between himself and the customer. He senses the reactions of the customer and is able to adjust to these reactions. On the other hand, the new missiles, if they are anywhere near the target, become attracted to the heat of the target’s engine, and regardless of its evasive action, they finally home in and hit their mark. He aims at the target as best he can and proceeds along his sales track but if his target-the customer-fails to perform as predicted, the sale is missed. If the shell missed by just a few inches because of a slight error in calculation or because the plane took evasive action, the miss might just as well have been by hundreds of yards for all the good it did. With the old type of ballistic weapon, the gunner would take aim at an airplane, correcting as best he could for windage and driftage, and then fire. But a salesman simply cannot sell well without the invaluable and irreplaceable ability to get a powerful feedback from the client through empathy.Ī parallel might be drawn in this connection between the old antiaircraft weapons and the new heat-attracted missiles. One can know what the other fellow feels without agreeing with that feeling. Having empathy does not necessarily mean being sympathetic. Our basic theory is that a good salesman must have at least two basic qualities: empathy and ego drive.Įmpathy, the important central ability to feel as the other fellow does in order to be able to sell him a product or service, must be possessed in large measure. How Well an Instrument Measuring Empathy and Ego Drive Predicted Sales Success Two Essentials What accounts for this expensive inefficiency? Basically this: Companies have simply not known what makes one man able to sell and another not. the vast costs caused by lost sales, drop-outs, reduced company reputation, poor morale, permanently burned territory, and the like.the staggering company costs, in time, money, and energy, of recruiting, selecting, training, and supervising men who inherently do not have the ability to succeed and.the substantial sums paid new salesmen as salary, draw on commission, expense accounts, and so on, which are wasted when those salesmen fail to sell.What is the cost of this turnover? Nearly incalculable. After the expenditure of millions of dollars and 35 years of research, the turnover in the insurance industry remains approximately 50% within the first year and 80% within the first three years. Estimates at that time indicated that there was a turnover of better than 50% within the first year and almost 80% within the first three years. More than 35 years ago, the insurance industry embarked on an intensive program to solve the problem of costly, wasteful turnover among its agents. Test takers could easily give answers they knew the test givers wanted to hear, in part because the tests sought to identify particular psychological traits rather than the personality type most capable of selling. Why did the executives that Mayer and Greenberg studied continue to hire salespeople who did not have the ability to perform well? The companies were hindered in the preselection process by flaws in the prevailing forms of aptitude testing. In the dynamic relationship between empathy and ego drive, each must work to reinforce the other. For sales reps with strong ego drives, every sale is a conquest that dramatically improves their self-perception. The authors define the second of the two qualities, ego drive, as the personal desire and need to make the sale-not because of the money to be gained but because the salesperson feels he has to.
They discovered flaws in the established methods of selection and revealed the two basic qualities that any good salesperson must have: empathy and ego drive.Įmpathy, in this context, is the central ability to feel as other people do in order to sell them a product or service a buyer who senses a salesperson’s empathy will provide him with valuable feedback, which will in turn facilitate the sale. The authors devoted seven years of research to studying the problem of the ineffectiveness of large numbers of salespeople. Despite millions of dollars spent on combating the high turnover rate among insurance agents, the rate-approximately 50% within the first year and 80% within the first three years-had remained steady for the more than 35 years preceding the publication of Mayer and Greenberg’s 1964 article.
0 kommentar(er)
