Sst®: Succesful Selling to Type

By Dr. Arnold Tilden

SST ®: Successful Selling to Type, is based on the time-honored principle that relationships are crucial to successful selling. Even at the highest business-to-business levels, people still buy from people. But, people have different personalities and approaching them as though they are all the same is like a skilled craftsman using a single tool, the hammer. The single tool approach works well if all of your clients and prospects are nails. We know they are not.

SST the Book provides an overview of this powerful business development model that has led to staggering improvement in sales performance. One client experienced a nearly 500% increase in sales with an experimental group using SST as contrasted to a control group without it.

SST has been delivered around the globe (US, Europe, Asia & Persian Gulf) and clients cover a broad array of industries as reflected in this partial client list: AccuWeather, Barclays Global Investors, Credit Suisse, Fortis Bank, KPMG, Gettysburg College, Johnson Controls, Johns Hopkins University, Perkin Elmer, QlikTech, Penn State University (Smeal), Trane, United States Federal Reserve System and Wachovia.

Chapters are dedicated to the essential SST tools as well as the core skills of questioning, listening, and customizing communication. The concluding chapter consists of drills and exercises to help you master SST and successfully implement it in the field.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 16, 2009
• ISBN: 9781796024616

Dr. Arnold Tilden

Dr. Arnold J. Tilden, Jr. has combined his background in psychology with his expertise in high value consultative selling to develop the break through sales education model SSTÔ: Successful Selling to Type. “Fundamentally”, he observes, “counseling and selling require the same three skill sets: asking questions, listening and proposing solutions. However, the counseling profession has long recognized the importance of communicating in the preferred style of he client and the success of the counseling to type approach is well documented.” In his powerful Successful Selling to Type program, Dr. Tilden teaches professional sellers what professional counselors have practiced for decades: how to understand their own natural preferences and to customize communication to appeal to those of the client. Prior to launching his consulting practice and becoming a partner in PfP Consulting, Tilden taught psychology and management at the college level where he also served as a dean and vice president.

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 by Arnold Tilden.

Library of Congress Control Number:        2009900977

ISBN:               Hardcover                       978-1-4415-0894-2

                         Softcover                         978-1-4415-0893-5

                         Ebook                              978-1-796-02461-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Xlibris Corporation

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Contents

Introduction

I      The Evolution of SST

The MBTI

Make it and Sell it

Counseling to Type

Selling to Type

Balance & Shade

A Trusted Adviser

The Final Nudge

SST Highlights

The SST Five Point Foundation

The Logo

II    SST® Tools

Industry Profiles: Birds of a Feather Flock Together

Behavioral Cues

Beyond the Golden Rule Implications of the Four—Part Framework

Balance Worksheet

III    The Investigation

Rackham the Revolutionary

Easy to Comprehend, Hard to Do

An Ironic Obstacle

Too Prescriptive

Lose Client Focus

Too Uncomfortable

The Problem Dump

Rackham Only Got It Half Right

Leading a Dialogue

Know What, How, and Why Questioning Model1

Objections: A Symptom of Ailing Investigation Skills

Summary

IV    Balance & Shade

Perceiving: Taking in Information

Judging: Organizing & Deciding

Balance Worksheet

V     STs: The Stabilizers

STs in the Field

ISTJ Buyer Profile

ISTP Buyer Profile

ESTP Buyer Profile

ESTJ Buyer Profile

VI      SFs: The Cooperators

SFs in the Field

ISFJ Buyer Profile

ISFP Buyer Profile

ESFP Buyer Profile

ESFJ Buyer Profile

VII     NFs: The Catalysts

NFs in the Field

INFJ Buyer Profile

INFP Buyer Profile

ENFP Buyer Profile

ENFJ Buyer Profile

VIII    NTs: The Visionaries

NTs in the Field

INTJ Buyer Profile

INTP Buyer Profile

ENTP Buyer Profile

ENTJ Buyer Profile

IX       Four Buyer Influences

Economic, User, Technical and Sponsor Influences

Economic Buyer

User Buyers

Technical Advisers

Sponsor or Coach

Wins, Results & SST

X        Sales Success Formula

Sales Success = Ability X Motivation

Ability: Talents & Skills

Motivation: Extrinsic & Intrinsic Rewards

XI      Breaking the Rules of Management

Select Talent

Define the Right Outcomes

Focus on Strengths

Find the Right Fit

XII     Seller Profiles

STs: Stabilizers

SFs: Cooperators

NFs:Catalysts

NTs: Visionaries

XIII    SST in Practice

The World Isn’t Flat Summer 1997

Counseling & Selling Summer 1997

Sighted Squirrels Find More Nuts Spring 1998

Preparing Holiday Turkeys Fall 1998

Duh What Is Really Wrong with the Auto Industry Winter 1998

What’s Wrong With One Guy’s Opinion? Fall 1999

Listening Fall 1999

What if Willie Loman, Blake & Lou Gehrig Had Power Point? Winter 2000

Introversion and Selling Fall 2000 Co-authored with Harry Koolen

Top Ten Reasons Why Sex and Selling Are Alike Fall 2000

Selling to Santa Winter 2002

Five Rules of Relationships Winter 2003

No Such Thing as an Indiscreet Question Fall 2006

Presidential Politics 2008 My Predications Based on Personality Type

Spring 2008

President Obama’s Personality Type Winter 2009

XIV    SST Sales Leadership

Sales Management Diagnosis Fall 1998

Kirkpatrick’s Model Fall 1998

Silver Bullets Fall 1998

Paradox II: Soft Skills Make a Hard Difference Winter 1999

Lombardi on Leadership Winter 2000

Sales Teams & User Manuals Summer 2002

Tell Me What It Means to the Customer Spring 2003

I Know It When I see It … Pornography Perhaps, but Not Sales Talent Summer 2003

Michael Dell & Adaptable Leadership Fall 2003

All Marketers Are Liars Fall 2005

Applying SST to Reduce Sales Force Attrition Fall 2007

Pipeline Management Spring 2008 Co-authored with Harry Koolen

Selling in an Economic Crisis Winter 2009

XV     The SST Practice Tee

Questioning

Listening

Balance & Shade

Implementing SST

Taking it from the Practice Tee to the Course

SST Training

References on Personality Type

References on Selling and Sales Leadership

Acknowledgements

To my father, Arnold Sr., a retired career salesperson who started every work day with a pre-dawn commute to Manhattan from our Long Island home. From him I learned to love work and the disciplines it requires to succeed. To my mother, Elaine, who taught me to love language.

2000

I wish to acknowledge my friends and family, especially my wife Rebecca, for their continuing support with SST and this, its second edition. Further, to all SST users who have thanked me for the success and improved interpersonal insights they have acquired since being introduced to SST: we all owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the genius of Carl Jung.

2009

Introduction

It is hard to believe that nine years have passed since the first edition of SST: Successful Selling to Type. The world was different in back in 2000. It was before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Bill Clinton was president; we had a record surplus; the Euro had yet to debut; Enron had a baseball stadium named for it; Arnold Schwarzenegger was a private citizen; the internet was in its infancy; few people knew the meaning, nor the implications, of sub prime and Barack Obama was a little known Illinois state senator.

With all those monumental changes, it was time to make our modest contribution and prepare the second edition of SST®. After all, it is not as though the program has been stagnant. SST® now holds a registered trademark from the United States Patents and Trademark Office, and has been delivered in Europe, Asia and the Persian Gulf. The book has been translated into Lithuanian where Versse Consulting is certified to offer SST in the Baltic region.

There are a number of significant changes to the second edition, not the least of which is the inclusion of Sixteen Seller Profiles in Chapter Twelve. The first edition of SST provided profiles of how the sixteen types buy, but not how they approach selling. Further, we added a chapter (eleven, to be precise) on Breaking the Rules of Management which we recommend reading prior to studying Seller Profiles. It makes the case for not only managing weaknesses, but also for leveraging strengths. Finally, we have selected articles from the last nine years of the SST Newsletter to provide background reading on both sales and sales leadership. They comprise chapters thirteen and fourteen.

Some of the articles go back to the early days of SST and provide an interesting historical context. For example, the CEO of Chrysler is quoted in the 1998 Duh: What Is Really Wrong With the US Auto Industry as saying, "Something on the order of 65% of customers don’t like the car buying process … If they don’t like it we better change." Well, they didn’t change and at the date of this writing (January 2009), Chrysler just received a $1.5 billion loan from the US Government in an effort to bail them out. If only they had heeded their own advice.

Chapter One describes the Evolution of SST and how it has grown from the recognition that counseling and selling require the same basic skills of: asking good questions, listening and helping clients choose solutions.

Chapter Two introduces essential and necessary SST Tools to sell successfully to type. They are Industry Profiles, Behavioral Cues and Implications of the Four Part Framework.

Chapter Three treats The Investigation. SST is an eclectic approach integrating principles of personality theory with two other consultative selling approaches. The first is influenced by Neil Rackham’s research demonstrating the importance of asking good questions. While Rackham’s Spin Selling deals with questioning, we also treat the other essential investigation skill of listening. The second sales method SST incorporates is Millers & Heiman’s Buyer Influences, the topic of chapter nine.

Chapter Four, The Four Languages of SST, covers how each of us combine a preference for taking in information (what Jung called Perceiving) with one for organizing and deciding (what Jung called Judging) that determines one of four natural orientations for thinking and communicating. Once we know our own preferences, we can be more effective communicators by simply balancing messages we send to ensure that they appeal to all types. This is the SST default position and can be easily mastered in as little as a half-day of training. When we know the preferences of the person with whom we are communicating, we can shade the messages we send to appeal to their particular personality type. Balance and Shade are core SST concepts.

It is important to emphasize that while Chapter Five through Eight profile sixteen personality types (Four for each language of ST, SF, NF & NT) the real thrust of SST is to better understand one personality: your own. Enlightened self understanding helps us see that we tend to send messages to others the way we, but not necessarily they, would like to receive them.

Chapter Nine addresses Miller & Heiman’s Buyer Influences model. SST offers essential tools for gaining insights to what represents not just business results but personal wins for our prospects and clients. After all, as Heiman and others (1998, p. 198) assert, It is never enough to sell results alone.

Chapter Ten proposes our Sales Success Formula which is Sales Success = Ability X Motivation. It can be a very helpful diagnostic tool, both for understanding the dynamics of individual performers, as well as team level functioning. The formula is also serves to remind us that, just because a salesperson has acquired great skills from SST, that does not mean he or she can ignore the daily disciplines that are influenced by the Motivation part of the equation. The formula is multiplicative which suggests that a wonderfully skilled person with zero motivation to succeed will deliver zero level performance.

Chapter Eleven is new to the second edition. It advances the proposition that SST users and their leaders begin Breaking the Rules of Management by focusing, not just on managing weaknesses, but leveraging strengths as well.

Chapter Twelve lists the Sixteen Seller Profiles and is another addition to this edition of SST. Edition one was restricted to sixteen buyer profiles.

SST is organic and continues to evolve and improve as it is applied in the field. We reinforce its growth and the skills of its practitioners with quarterly newsletters. Archived articles from SST Newsletter serve as the content for Chapters Thirteen and Chapter Fourteen. Respectively, they are titled SST in Practice and SST Sales Leadership.

Chapter Fifteen, The SST Practice Tee, is for those of you who want to close the gap from knowing to doing. There are no real secrets to mastering SST. Like everything else, practice is the key and this chapter provides drills to help you convert what you learn in SST to improve your sales performance.

Perhaps you will be inspired by a few reviews of the first edition posted at a third party cite.

Average customer rating: ★★★★★

Top customer reviews:

What is brilliant about this book is the way he combines psychology with selling. It is a must for anyone who sells anything anywhere.

This book improved my communication skills better than any other training method I have tried. I now consistently meet my sales goal each and every month. The strategies which the author recommends are pertinent and highly applicable to many situations. I found that I was able to adopt these techniques and incorporate them into my own style in a seamless fashion. Best of all, the text was easy to follow and provided an abundance of examples and explanations. Thanks Dr. Tilden!

For those of you looking for the real short version of SST®, we illustrate it in just ten words below:

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Chapter One

The Evolution of SST

In the early 1990s a faculty colleague, Ron Cherry, invited me to help a consulting client of his improve teamwork through the use of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). At the time, I was teaching psychological testing and assisting Ron with his innovative approach to teaching management skills to undergraduates. TQM, or Total Quality Management, was taking off and long time hierarchical organizations were seeking to flatten their structures and catch-up with the Japanese. That introduction to consulting was the impetus to my career transition and the development of SST®, a selling relative to the MBTI.

The MBTI

The MBTI is the world’s leading personality inventory and has been completed by millions of people since its inception in the 1940s. It is based on Carl Jung’s theory of personality types and enables its users to determine natural preferences for thinking and communicating. The Jungian model, upon which both the MBTI and SST are built, is illustrated in Table 1. Jung’s theory holds that each of us has a natural preference for one behavior over the other on each of four scales. The pattern of those four preferences identifies a personality type that is communicated by a four-letter code. Mine is ENTP, or Extraverted Intuitive Thinking Perceiver.

TABLE 1

The Four-Part Model

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Like to Know Your Type?

If this is your introduction to type theory and you would like to have a preliminary hypothesis of what your type might be, using the Behavioral Cues tool illustrated in Table 3 of Chapter Two will be a good exercise. Simply place a check mark adjacent to the phrases that sound like you and tally them for each of the four scales. Then read the corresponding Buyer (chapters five through eight) and Seller (chapters twelve) profiles to determine the type that seems to be the best fit. A fuller understanding of your true type would require participation in a program like SST or an MBTI seminar.

Make it and Sell it

Business theories can become quite elaborate. But, fundamentally, starting a business enterprise comes down to two prerequisites. You must be able to:

1. Make it

2. Sell it

Given the success Ron Cherry and I enjoyed helping clients realize their teamwork objectives, I was confident in our ability to deliver effective consulting and training. In other words, we could make it. However, the question of being able to sell it was an untested proposition.

This prompted an investigation of what the state of the art was in selling. Remember this was the early 1990s, when the internet was in its infancy and before there was an Amazon.com. When I resorted to the low-tech means of visiting business section of bookstores, most titles I found were by the likes of Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins. I read both authors and was left with the sense, to be kind, that the body of selling literature was quite shallow.

Further, when I contemplated applying the Hopkins and Ziglar methods on real life sales calls I was completely uncomfortable. Their tactics were both manipulative and transparent. Prospects were (and still are by too many) viewed as adversaries to be overcome with clever closing scripts by salespeople with enough testosterone to use them. Even worse, they do not work in the kind of selling I was doing with sophisticated buyers who were looking to make pretty healthy investments to correct complex business problems.

Counseling to Type

Instead of using popular methods, I naturally gravitated to communication skills I had learned and used as a professional counselor. I:

1. asked good questions

2. listened carefully

3. helped clients choose solutions

When I reached the third level, what Steven Covey has called seeking to be understood, I relied on principles of Counseling to Type. In this approach, counselors are influenced by research (Yeakey, 1984) indicating that their effectiveness improves when they use the communication style of their client instead of their own. For example, an Extraverted career counselor might assume that the best way for a client to gather career information would be to network. That is, of course, unless the client happens to have an Introverted orientation. To an Introverted client the word networking can sound like running fingernails across a blackboard. In Counseling to Type, the counselor, regardless of his or her own preferences, would offer an Introverted client options that would allow him to process information in his private space like