I think that one of the things that I have picked up on the most so far in sales is not trying to read the minds of the people that you are selling to. When you try to be a mind reader in a sales situation it becomes very likely that you may misread what the needs of your prospective customer actually are. The more that you assume what a person wants the more room there is for error when it comes to trying to actually figure out the needs of the customer. A good way to not be a mind reader is just to ask questions. Asking good questions helps you as the sales person to better be able to understand your customer which will then help you figure out their needs. I think that one of the things that has stuck out to me with how to get a better understanding of the customer is to use leading words. These leading words are a great way to get the customer to continue to tell you about the problems that they are having. As you learn more and more about their problems you can begin to see places of pain. Once you see and understand their pain you can then do a better job at figuring out how you can help to create a solution to fix their pain. At the end of the day the most critical part of sales is finding the pain points in a customers life. Once you have found those points you can offer help if you are able to or you can help the customer find someone who can help if you cannot. Staying away from assumptions about what the customer needs is a huge part to be able to correctly find the problems that the customer may have.
taylorjt23 
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I agree that not reading minds is a necessary skill to learn in order to be successful in sales. I really liked the example that Professor Sweet gave of a manager hearing “I really like your product” and “We are ready to make big changes.” Both these cases appear to be fully positive, but in reality, the salesperson cannot know whether these big changes are small compared to what you want, or if the customer is just using you for a free evaluation. Using leading words and pushing the conversation forward will help you find out what they really mean or care about.
Do you have any examples of leading words? Or favorites? I find that some of them can come off as unnatural, but “tell me more about that…” seems to work well.
Not being a mind reader is super important in sales. Like Prof. Sweet has mentioned, being a mind reader can lead to you jumping the gun on your customers’ wants and needs. Jumping the gun on them can cause them to totally disassociate from the sales conversation. To avoid this, we must dictate the conversation via questions. Using “what” or “why” questions allows us to extract the most information possible.
In sales, this is so important. Not being a mind reader is so crucial. Professor Sweet has talked a lot about being able to listen and not jump to assumptions in a sales conversation, because that can set off the relationship between the buyer and salesperson. Jumping to an assumption is just wrong because we must build a relationship and a connection. We need to work down our sales funnel and start with the general open-ended questions to further build a relationship, rather than just being a mind reader and jumping ahead. Good job on this post.