Learning Your ABCs [Part 1] – Attunement

For years, salesmen have commonly been viewed as tenacious in the extreme, bloodhounds after the scent of the sale. Sales training for decades has taught salesmen to target the sale, to push for commitment. In the 1990’s, this trait was exemplified in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, when salesman Blake taught the mantra “Always Be Closing,” the salesman’s ABCs. However, in recent years sales experts such as Daniel Pink have applied a new form of the salesman’s ABCs.

Attunement. Buoyancy. Clarity.

In this series of posts, I will examine the salesman’s ABCs in depth, taking a look at the benefit they bring to the sales process and applying them to real world situations.

Attunement is the capacity to take another persons interests, to understand their point of view and interpret there needs. In some ways, it’s remarkably similar to empathy – the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. The key difference, however, lies in the way you can align yourself with others. Attunement is more than sharing the frustration or annoyance of a customer, it’s being able to place yourself in their shoes, to understand the needs and why’s behind their actions, seeing the world the way they see it – sometimes even to the point of finding a problem they themselves were unaware of. In today’s selling world, persuasion isn’t about overwhelming someone with information, about never giving up until you get the sale; it’s about understanding the customer. To achieve this, ask questions about the customer, understand their desires and motivations. In your sales conversations your listening to talking ratio should be somewhere around 70/30 – listening is far more important to the sale than your pitch. Assume that you don’t know everything. We’ve all heard the saying about assuming, and it holds true in selling, always focus on the customer. Ensure you understand the person before you try and give any sort of spiel about the product.