Dimensional Selling: Using the Breakthrough Q4 Approach to Close More Sales

By Victor Buzzotta and R. E. Lefton

A powerful, behavioral-based approach to closing sales

Called dimensional selling, the Q4 model evaluates customers' specific behavioral patterns. It enables sales professionals to tailor presentations to personality traits, thereby forging strong bonds of trust and enduring relationships with customers. Psychologists Victor Buzzotta and Robert Lefton present this proven sales approach based on behavioral science that is guaranteed to give sales professionals an unbeatable competitive edge. Drawing upon their work with Citicorp, Hyatt Corp., Merrill Lynch, Warner Bros., and other top companies, the authors show readers how to:

• Pinpoint what motivates individual buyers
• Work more effectively with customers by understanding their basic behavior patterns
• Adapt selling strategies on the fly
• Manage problem customers--regardless of their issues
• Plan sales calls that optimize the chances of success

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: Jan 21, 2005
• ISBN: 9780071465151

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Selling, People Skills, and You

If you think of selling as a form of persuading, you realize it’s something we all do. Although salespeople and sales managers are paid to do it, just about everyone who works for a living must occasionally sell to (or persuade) others.

For example, Helen Wright manages the accounting department at a trucking company. You won’t find selling in her job description. Today, however, she wants to talk to her company’s data-processing manager to persuade him to process cash-flow reports semiweekly instead of weekly. Because the manager thinks his department is already overloaded, he won’t be enthusiastic. Helen has some selling to do.

Or consider Lou Parrish. He’s the shipping foreman for a major shoe manufacturer. Sales work is not usually part of his regular duties, either. However, today he will try to persuade one of his packers to change the way he packs shoe boxes into cartons so more boxes will fit into each carton. The packer is a hothead who doesn’t take advice well. He’ll probably argue. So, Lou has some selling to do.

Similar examples happen all the time at work. In fact, to go even further, nearly every day we all have to do some selling off the job as well. We try to persuade family, friends, or neighbors to accept our thinking. We may not see ourselves as selling, but that’s what we’re doing.

Although this book is directed mainly at people who sell for a living or who manage those who sell, it should be useful to anyone who wants to become more persuasive. For those involved directly in selling, this book has two goals:

1. To explain how salespeople can use people skills to build relationships that will improve sales results, no matter how those results are defined.

2. To explain how sales managers can use people skills to get improved sales results from their salespeople, no matter how those results are defined.

Throughout the book, we will use the terms salesperson and salespeople. Your company may use the terms account executive or sales representative, but we chose these words because they are widely accepted.

People Skills

People skills is an umbrella term for four related sets of abilities that are indispensable for maximizing sales results:

1. Sizing-up skills. Sales are always made to particular individuals with specific personal characteristics. When you call on a customer, you always call on someone who is unique. This person is sarcastic. That person is defensive. Still another person is genial and apparently has all day to talk.

Sales managers are in exactly the same situation. Each of their salespeople has special characteristics, such as confidence, arrogance, insecurity, and so on.

Whether you’re a salesperson on a sales call or a sales manager in a coaching session, you want to keep some key questions in mind: What’s this particular person in front of me like? What obstacles can I anticipate? Sizing-up skills help answer these questions. They help you observe the people as objectively as you can to make sense of what you see so you can pick the best way of dealing with them.

2. Strategy-planning skills. The difference between sizing-up skills and strategy-planning skills is the difference between a diagnosis and a prescription. Whereas sizing-up skills are for analyzing, strategy-planning skills are for determining what to do. What is the best way to deal with the other person? How can I overcome the obstacles she’s likely to place in my path? How can I most effectively respond to her needs, concerns, doubts? How can I persuade her without wasting time and energy?

Strategy-planning skills help you lay out the right plan of action for dealing with each individual. They enable you to deal flexibly with people, personalizing your approach. Your strategy for customer A will differ from your strategy for customer B or C. The same goes for each of your salespeople. Planning a strategy makes persuasion a great deal easier.

3. Communication skills. Once you’ve planned the right strategy, you’ll have to get through to the other person and also find out what she thinks. Before she can be persuaded, she must understand what she’s being asked to do. Before buying, a customer wants the answers to certain questions: Why should I spend money on this product or service? What will it do for me? Why should I prefer it over competitive products/services?

Similarly, before your salespeople exert themselves to change and improve, each one wants the answers to certain questions, too: What exactly am I being asked to do? Why should I bother? What’s in it for me? Responding to these questions so the answers are really understood takes communication skills.

4. Motivation skills. Generating understanding isn’t all there is to persuasion, however. Understanding must be followed by action. When a customer says, I see what I’m being asked to buy, but I want to think about it for six months, he may understand, but he’s not committed. A salesperson who tells the boss, I know what you mean, but I just don’t see the value in doing that, may understand, but she’s not committed either.

Understanding means I get it. I catch on. Commitment means I intend to do something about it, to follow through. Generating commitment takes motivation skills.

Are People Skills Enough?

By themselves, people skills won’t produce better sales results. They’re no substitute for product knowledge or good management of time and territory. However, if you have the other things it takes to produce results — technical and administrative skills and the drive to succeed — people skills can make selling more effective. They can mean the difference between success and mediocrity.

What’s In It for You?

Because we said that people want to know what’s in it for them before they commit, you may be asking what you will get out of reading this book. We’ve already said that whether you’re a salesperson or a sales manager, this book will help you get better sales results. But it will help you get other results, too:

1. Tangible results. Whatever tangible rewards for which you are working — more money, a promotion to sales manager, a bigger district to manage, an achievement award — you’ll improve your chances with people skills.

2. Intangible results. By using people skills, you can also get more satisfaction from your job. The ability to persuade a wider range of people should help you feel more secure, develop smoother working relationships, win new respect, and enhance your feelings of competence and accomplishment.

How It Started

How do we know people skills can do what we’ve said? We have seen them produce better results for thousands of salespeople and sales managers in hundreds of companies.

Our training organization, Psychological Associates, has been conducting seminars since the 1960s. As people attended these seminars, returned to their jobs, and then used their people skills, they provided a natural laboratory in which to study the effectiveness of the skills. The skills have had to be proven in real-world tests.

And they have. A whole series of follow-up studies by client companies has shown that, by and large, people skills do boost sales results and pay off as we’ve described. So, you can be assured that people skills are likely to help you get better results — for your company and yourself.

The Scientific Background

Where did the ideas in this book come from? And why did we believe the ideas would work?

The ideas came from psychologists, communication specialists, marketing and management specialists, and researchers in related fields. They all spent years testing the ideas. Although these researchers are too numerous to mention here, the key contributors are listed in the bibliography. By the 1960s, they had developed a large body of evidence to prove that people skills work. Of course, much more evidence has been added since that time. Follow-up studies in companies with employees who use the people skills set forth in this book only confirmed what we and most behavioral scientists already knew.

The evidence for our belief in these ideas, then, comes from two sources: the scientific community and our own experience. In the end, of course, you must judge their validity for yourself. We predict that they’ll match your experience and your common sense.

People Skills Can Be Learned

Nobody is born with people skills. They are learned by people willing to expend the necessary time and energy.

This means there’s nothing mysterious about people skills. They are not vague, indefinable qualities like charm or magnetism. They are techniques that have been learned effectively by countless numbers of people. So, you shouldn’t say, I don’t have what it takes to size up people, or I’m not the sort of person who can motivate others. It doesn’t take a special kind of person. What it takes is learning the necessary skills, practicing them, getting feedback, and then using the skills until they become second nature. This book focuses on what the skills are. Practicing and using them are up to you.

A Benchmark Profile

Before you can plan a strategy for yourself to build on your people skills, you need to size up where you are now in terms of your own sales behavior. How do you typically act during a sales call? How do you approach the potential customer? If you’re a sales manager, the question becomes, how do you relate to your sales force?

We want you to complete a short profile (see page 8) that should stimulate you to think about these questions. Before you start, realize that our assumption is that you are already selling or managing effectively. If you weren’t, you probably wouldn’t be in your present job or bothering to read this book. The profile will give you an overview of your behavior. Once you have sized up your present skills, you can begin building on them.

Complete the profile as objectively as possible. Although this profile will only give you a rough view of where you stand, the more candid you are in assigning points, the more valid it will be. The only right answers are honest ones.

When you finish this book, you may want to go back and complete the profile again. We hope the insights you gain in reading the book will give you a truer profile. That doesn’t mean your first responses are worthless. They are true for how you perceive yourself right now. Complete the profile now to compare it with how you respond later. Here’s how:

1. Read each of the profile’s four paragraphs. As you do, compare them with your own behavior as a salesperson. The statements are extreme. Your own behavior may not coincide exactly with any of the statements.

2. After reading the four paragraphs, distribute 100 points among them so that the points reflect the extent to which the paragraphs describe your behavior. The number of points you assign to any paragraph should be proportionate to how descriptive that paragraph is of your behavior.

For example, if you think the first paragraph describes your behavior perfectly, whereas the others don’t describe it at all, then distribute points this way: 100-0-0-0. However, this is unlikely. You’ll probably see something of your behavior in several or all of the paragraphs. If so, your point distribution might look like this: 10-30-30-30 or 25-25-10-40 or 60-0-10-30. Whatever combination on which you decide is your estimate of how you sell. Be certain your total adds up to exactly 100 points.

3. Don’t assign most of your points to what you consider the ideal or best paragraph unless it really describes your behavior. Pick the honest answer, even if it does not seem complimentary. What you want is a realistic portrait of how you interact with your customers. There are no right or wrong answers, only more descriptive or less descriptive statements.

Summing It Up

Below is a form for rating your behavior. The Q in the tables stands for quadrant. This term will be explained in the next chapter. The top rating chart is for the profile you’ve just developed. The second one is for the profile you’ll develop if you complete the profile again after reading the book. We urge you to complete the second rating. You’ll find it instructive to compare the two ratings.

Transfer your numerical ratings into the quadrants below to facilitate comparisons in the remainder of the book.

What’s Next?

In the next chapter, we introduce what will be the foundation for using relationships to sell more effectively. This is the Dimensional Model of Interactional Behavior.

CHAPTER 2

Four Patterns of Behavior

Research shows that the behavior of people when they are dealing with others usually falls within one or more of four basic patterns. This chapter describes all four, by using what we call the Dimensional Model of Interactional Behavior. It’s a tool to make it easier to size up the behavior of customers and salespeople and to prescribe behavior on your part that gets results. The model is the basis for this chapter and most of this book.

What a Model Does

Like all models, the Dimensional Model is a way of organizing our observations. We constantly make observations, and our minds seem to categorize people on the basis of their behavior. We say someone is easy to get along with. Another person appears pushy to us. Still another acts friendly, and so on.

Because of this, the Dimensional Model is useful for two reasons:

1. By systematically describing patterns of a particular kind of behavior, the model helps us understand why some interactions go well and others don’t. With this information, we can then prescribe behavior that will improve the opportunity to make the interactions go well. Thus, it’s a valuable tool for improving results.

2. The model categorizes behavior, not people. Putting a label on a customer or anyone else is almost certain to be misleading, because it reduces a complex human being to a mere stereotype. Moreover, people are changeable and may behave differently at different times. A label tends to be permanent. Once we categorize a customer as a loudmouth or a cheapskate, we tend to dismiss him and stop recognizing that there is an intricate person behind our arbitrary label. Because we have stopped interacting with him as a person, we may cut off opportunities for communication.

The Basis for This Model

Before we get to it, you may be asking what the basis is for the Dimensional Model.

First, the model is based on empirical research. This research was originally done by psychologists in the late 1940s and 1950s. (See the Appendix for details.) Since then, many behavioral scientists have enlarged and validated that data. The Dimensional Model makes use of this research and applies it to the world of sales. We think you will see how good the fit is between it and your own observations of people with whom you deal. Any model that meets this test of experience is an empirical model.

Second, the model meets the test of common sense. Psychology is sometimes called tested common sense. So, it’s not surprising that most of its models verify our everyday experience. They are based on observable behavior. The Dimensional Model probably won’t teach you any facts you didn’t already know. It will, however, help you see those facts in a new way to derive more meaning out of what your own common sense already tells you.

The Basic Dimensional Model

We’ll begin by picturing the basic Dimensional Model in Figure 1. Now, you can see why this is called a dimensional model. It is illustrated by two dimensions, shown as intersecting lines. Each is a continuum of behavior. One dimension is represented by dominance at one end and submission at the other. The second dimension is represented by hostility at one end and warmth at the other.

Figure 1

These are the four characteristics that research has found most important in explaining how people interact.

Let’s define these terms, beginning with the dominance-submission dimension.

Dominance is exercising control or influence. It means being assertive, putting oneself or one’s own idea forward and striving to influence the way others think or behave. People displaying dominant behavior take charge, guiding, leading, persuading, and moving other people to action.

Submission is following the lead of other people. People who act submissively are passive, reluctant to speak out. They readily give in, with little or no attempt to have influence on the course of events.

Dominant behavior tries to make things happen, whereas submissive behavior is inclined to let things happen.

Now, let’s define the terms in the hostility-warmth dimension.

Hostility combines self-centeredness with a lack of regard for other people. Hostile behavior is unresponsive and insensitive to other people’s needs, feelings, and ideas. It is doubtful about other people’s motives and abilities. Although people displaying hostile behavior may be angry, they may or may not show their anger openly.

Warmth is concern and regard for other people, coupled with an open-minded attitude. Warm behavior is responsive and sensitive to other people’s needs, feelings, and ideas. It’s optimistic about other people’s motives and abilities. It’s possible to show warmth without being openly affectionate.

A good distinction to make is that hostile behavior is based on a negative or pessimistic view of others, whereas warm behavior is based on a positive or optimistic view. Thus, hostile people don’t expect much from other people and offer little in return. Warm people approach other people at first in an open, receptive way. Hostile people see most other people as undependable, even threatening or hurtful. Warm people take a favorable view.

These four behavioral characteristics are never displayed all by themselves. They are always expressed in combination with others, and when combined, each characteristic is changed to some degree.