After going home this past weekend, I was faced with a roughly five-hour drive back to campus, and my goodness was I fighting the weather! After going from dense fog to pouring rain and hitting 75 miles of unplowed snow on Rt. 80, all I wanted to do was relax by watching a few episodes of the show Modern Family. As I was half paying attention and half scrolling on my phone, a line in the show caught my ear.
One of the main characters, Phil Dunphy, who works as a real estate agent in the show, brought up the acronym ABC: Always Be Closing. I immediately backed up the episode and gave the show my undivided attention. In the scene, Phil is trying to close on the sale of a house but is struggling with the potential customer. Although he is giving it his best effort to close the deal, he is making zero headway. When it seems as if he is about to lose the sale, his son Luke bursts in the back door raving about how awesome the house is and how he wishes they could live there. The buyer ends up deciding to move ahead with the deal and Phil makes the sale.
During this scene, my mind immediately jumped to the revised sales ABC we learned in class: Attunement, Buoyancy, and Clarity. Rather than focusing on the close the whole sales pitch, Pink’s new ABC method works to build trust, reveal pain, and ultimately solve client’s problems. Attunement focuses on the ability to get out of one’s own head and inside the head of the person being sold to. This is extremely important to see where the customer is coming from and understanding if their business will be a good fit. Buoyancy measures a person’s ability to “float in a sea of rejection;” another very important thing to have in sales. Clarity refers to someone’s ability to see a situation in a fresh light and help surface problems someone may have. This new set of ABCs allows much more effective selling which focuses on the person instead of the close.
I was unable to find the clip from Modern Family online, but if you want to check out the episode, it is Season 1 Episode 7: “En Garde”
williamsef24