CHAPTER
Emotion versus Logic in Selling
Zig
According to my good friend and fellow sales trainer Merrill Frazier, in the next twenty-four hours, your prospect’s heart will beat 103,689 times. His blood will travel 168,000 miles. His lungs will inhale 23,240 times. He’ll eat three and a half pounds of food. He’ll exercise only 7 million of his 9 billion brain cells. He’ll speak 4800 words, of which 3200 involve something about himself, and not a single one will be about you, your products, or services unless you figure out a way to involve him emotionally with your sales situation.
The only way you’re going to get your share of his attention and his words is to use your sales skill and the imagination to make yourself a part of his world.
In selling, preparation is often the key. In my early days as a speaker, I had a mentor named Dr. Emol Fails, at that time a professor at North Carolina State University. Dr. Fails was conducting sales training seminars for the various Chambers of Commerce, particularly in the North Carolina area.
I vividly remember one of the ways he prepared for a sales call. He would take his wallet, tie a string around it, and attach it to the back bumper of his car. He would ride that wallet around town for several days until it absolutely was at the point of collapse. Then he would put his credit cards, his driver’s license, and his money in it, and he would have to almost tie a string around it in order to keep it together.
When he would go into a town to sell a Chamber of Commerce on sponsoring the seminar, which was a three-evening training seminar for retail merchants, he would always go in to three or four local stores before he went to see the Chamber. He would go in and buy a necktie or a belt or some item that was right there at the counter where they sell wallets.
He’d get ready to pay, and in every case, he would drop that wallet. The sight was something to see. Credit cards, driver’s license, money, and billfold would scatter all of the place. The people were always nice. The clerks would invariably get down on the floor and help him pick up the scattered things, but interestingly, not a one, not one ever, suggested that in addition to the necktie or the belt, maybe, just maybe, Dr. Fails would be in the market for a new wallet.
We often run right by sales situations because we’re not prepared. I know you heard the story of the woodcutter whose production kept going down because he didn’t have time to sharpen his ax. Abraham Lincoln put it this way: “If I had to cut a cord of wood and only had eight hours to do it, I’d spend the first three hours sharpening my ax.”
A lot of times, preparation is entirely in the mind. In 1986, my good friend Jay Messenger, from down in Houston, Texas, who sells executive aircraft, sold one to Bob Hope. It is big, it is a $2 million deal, and obviously he took a picture of this transaction. Wouldn’t you have done the same thing?
When he took this picture, he showed it to a friend, who said, “When did you make the sale?”
Jay said, “Four months ago.”
The guy said, “I know better than that. Just last week you made that sale.”
“No, it was four months ago,” Jay said. “Four months ago, when I conceived the idea of selling this to Bob Hope, that’s when I made the sale. Not selling was not an option. It was not an alternative. I planned it carefully. I visualized it. I took all of the steps, and missing the sale just simply was not an option.”
That’s professional selling. Jay’s been selling very successfully for twelve years, but with the application of some of these principles, his success has moved forward at a much faster rate. Sometimes imagination is the key in closing the sale.
When I was in the insurance business, this one came out, and I used it, obviously because it worked. You know, according to the psychologists, we have a tendency to repeat pleasurable experiences. Since making a sale is a pleasurable experience, I used it dozens of times after that.
One evening I was not really making any progress on a presentation. I’d covered the standard objections. I’d answered his questions. The man could give me no legitimate reason for not buying it, yet I was no closer to the sale than I had been when I walked in the door.
In desperation, I reached up and grabbed this one. I said, “Mr. Prospect, perhaps I have been showing you the wrong program. Maybe what you need is our new twenty-nine-day agreement.
“Let me explain this agreement. It gives you the same, identical face amount of insurance. The retirement benefits are exactly the same, and you have been very clear that these are your first two considerations: first for the protection of the family, and second for your later use yourself. You also get a waiver of premium with this one, and you also get the double indemnity in the event the death is accidental. One of the beautiful things about this twenty-nine-day agreement is the fact that your monthly investment is only 50 percent as much as it is on the other agreement. Would that suit your needs better?”
The man grinned and said, “Well, it sure fits my pocketbook better, but what is this twenty-nine-day bit?”
“It means that you’re covered twenty-nine days out of every month, and the company will let you choose the two days, or the one day, you do not wish to be covered. You might want to choose a weekend.”
Then I said, “No, really, you’d probably be at home on the weekend, and that’s the most dangerous place of all.” I had to work at not laughing when I was doing this.
Then, I’d get real serious, and I’d say, “You know, Mr. Prospect, in all reality and fairness, if you were to run me out of here at this moment, I could understand because I’m making light of something which is very, very serious, and that is the protection and security of your family. To put your mind at ease, let me say this. There isn’t an insurance commissioner in the world that would approve the sales of any such contract as that—no way. I know what you were thinking as I presented it to you. You were thinking to yourself, ‘With my luck, something would happen to me on that one or two days each month that I’m not covered.’ I simply used this method to alert you to the fact that if you would not leave your family unprotected one or two days out of the month, there is no way you are going to fail to protect your family the 365 days that are in the year.
“Now, Mr. Prospect, the beautiful thing about the program you and I have been talking about is that it covers you twenty-four hours a day, seven days out of the week, regardless of where you are and what you’re doing. In reality, that’s the kind of coverage you want for your family, isn’t it?”
It’s amazing what an impact that had. All I had done was to dramatize his situation, and a tremendous number of them responded in a very favorable way. You need to adapt that to your own situation.
This next one also is an insurance example, but as you’ll see, it can easily be adapted to whatever business you’re in. When I was in insurance, we did the two-part sales approach. We went in and got the interview, got the basic information, and did an appraisal on the family needs. Then our people would put the proposal together, and we’d go back for the presentation. There was a substantial amount involved. The final presentation generally took about forty-five minutes. Counting driving time and all, you have to figure on about two hours and a half for each call. So they were significant calls.
One thing that used to bug the life out of me—to tell you the truth it made me mad—was the fact that a lot of times after making a presentation, the prospect would say, “Mr. Ziglar, we obviously need the insurance. We recognize that, but I’m a little embarrassed that I permitted you to come back. You see, my wife’s second cousin has a boyfriend whose neighbor’s cousin has an uncle whose son is in college, and his roommate’s best friend’s brother is in the life-insurance business. If we bought, we’d have to buy from him.”
Obviously it wasn’t quite that bad, but it was bad enough that they knew, and I knew, and they knew that I knew that they weren’t going to buy any insurance from anybody if they didn’t do business with me. People are inclined along those lines. So I had to come up with something that would help me to overcome that objection, which I was getting pretty regularly. Then I thought of an idea as a result, incidentally, of reading Frank Bettger’s book How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling.
I’d read that book ten years earlier. It is still a classic in the world of selling. It’s one of the major reasons I spend so much time selling you on the idea of growing and learning and staying abreast. Anyway, I came up with an idea. The next time one of them hit me with that, I smiled all over. I couldn’t wait. I almost planted the objection myself, as a matter of fact.
When they came up with that one, I said, “Well, Mr. Prospect, I’m confident that the individual you’re speaking about is a fine person. I know if they’re licensed in this state, they’re OK. I know that if their company is licensed here, and obviously it is, that’s fine. There’s nothing at all wrong with either that individual, so far as I know, or with that company, but I can do something for you that no other insurance man alive can do for you.”
“What’s that?”
“Mr. Prospect, I can marry you,” and with that I reached down, and I pulled from my briefcase a marriage certificate. It went something like this, beautifully done on parchment paper: “Certificate of Marriage. I, Zig Ziglar, on this eighteenth day of January, 1976,” or whenever it was, “agree to the marriage between myself and John and Mary Smith.” I’d already typed in their names in.
“By this agreement, Zig Ziglar agrees to stay abreast of all the trends in the industry as it relates to Social Security and other programs which directly relate to the lives and fortunes of John and Mary Smith. I agree to be available in time of need. John and Mary Smith agree to give Zig Ziglar the privilege of earning the right to serve.”
Then I would say, “Now all it needs, Mr. and Mrs. Prospect, is your OK right here, and the marriage will be official.” The response to it was absolutely amazing, mostly hilarious. They’d always laugh, and say—old boys especially would—“Ziglar, now is this a legitimate marriage? I mean, you’re not going to get me involved with the law. This is not going to be bigamy or anything like that, is it?”
I’d laugh. I’d say, “No, I cleared it with the governor of the state. The insurance commissioner says it’s fine. I’ve even gotten approval from my brother-in-law.”
The prospect would just about always turn to his wife and say, “Honey, what do you think about it? Do you want to marry this fellow?”
She’d say, “Well, he wants to marry us both, and he looks like an all-right guy to me. Why don’t we do it?”
The old boy would say, “Yes, let’s go ahead,” and he’d take his pen. Now you’re talking about a signature. It’d be all over the page—laughing all the time.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the bank. I never once got the OK on the marriage agreement when I did not get the OK on the application for the insurance. See, it really was a trial close, wasn’t it? A lot of people also like to do business with those who are just a little creative and a little different. Now you can get out in left field, and I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about within the bounds of good taste.
How do you use this in your particular industry? How can you translate it and make it work? One of our outstanding clients are Hockfield & Associates, the manufacturers’ reps, just outside of Chicago—very successful.
Their salesperson had been calling on this particular company. His name is Wes Fenster, and Wes and Ed Hockfield got to debating on this particular one. It was a big account. They wanted the business, felt like they had a better program, a better product to offer, but the competition was just twenty-one miles away, right in the back door.
Wes stressed the quality of the product they were selling, stressed promptness and dependability of delivery, expressed the marketing ideas they had behind it, the reputation of the manufacturer, all of these things, but they were still making no progress.
Then one day Ed and Wes had a sales meeting. They said, “Which of this stuff that old Zig’s been talking to us about can we use here?” They agreed that the marriage certificate would be the proper approach, and here’s the way it came out:
“Certificate of Marriage terms of agreement: When you buy a private-label program from Hockfield & Associates and the Nice-Pak Company, you also buy me. I am literally going to be married to the Shopko account. I will see that you will receive the following: the finest products, the best possible service, the fairest price, to be kept on top of current trends, your personal representative, the highest quality, the best packaging,” and right down the line.
Then, “By this certificate of marriage, Wes Fenster agrees to always be available for any event or need for service of any kind. Dennis Ruble and Shopko stores only agree to give Wes Fenster the privilege to serve.”
The first year, that’s approximately a half-million dollar account. Does imagination work? Does creativity work? Does really getting involved in what you’re doing work? I say that it absolutely, emphatically, and positively does. Incidentally, the head honcho, the president of the company from whom they had taken the business, really got involved, and he went back to make the call to try to recapture the business, but it was no deal.
Imagination helps sometimes. More often, it will simply be an old standby that will produce the business. I’m going to tie two closes together here to show you what I mean: the tennis racket and the Ben Franklin. The first one you might not have heard of. The second one you undoubtedly have heard of, if you’ve been in selling very long at all.
Sometimes we’re involved in a sales situation where you have two people who are going to be making the decision. It could be two partners. It could be husband and wife. They’re tossing it back and forth, and one says, “What do you think?”
The other one says, “Well, it’s up to you.”
“No, you have to earn the money.”
“Well, you’re going to have to use it.” Back and forth they go. They’re batting that ball back and forth. What they’re really saying is, “You decide.”
“No, you decide.”
“No, you decide.”
That can mean one of two things. Both of them want to buy, but don’t want to make the commitment, or neither one of them wants to buy or make the commitment. Or it could be the third one. One does and one doesn’t, but neither one of them wants to say.
Now, particularly if it’s between a husband and wife, and they bat it back more than twice, sure as shooting, one of them is then going to then knock it out of the ballpark, and it is generally the husband. He’ll smile ever so pleasantly and say, “Well, I’m sure that we’re going to end up getting it, but she can’t make up her mind.”
Bless his heart. How do you handle that? When the ball is passed across that net a couple of times, you hold up your hand and say, “’Scuse me.” (In some parts of the country, they would say, “Excuse me,” but that’s wrong. It’s “’Scuse me.”) “I should not say this, perhaps, but I’m going to. I believe, Mr. and Mrs. Prospect, that neither one of you should make this decision. The reason is simply this. You’re emotionally involved, and regardless of what you decide, if you decide yes, then later one of you might say, ‘I tried to get you not to do that.’ If you say no, the other one might say, ‘If you’d have gone ahead and gotten that thing, we wouldn’t be having this trouble.’ When you’re emotionally involved, it’s not a good time to make a decision. Let me be so bold as to suggest that instead of letting emotion decide, why not let the actual facts make the decision?”
Now you’ve set it up for the Ben Franklin close. “Here’s what I mean by letting the facts make the decision. Many years ago, one of the wisest men our country ever produced was a man named Benjamin Franklin. When Franklin was confronted with a decision which was very difficult, what he would do is take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle.” Again, let me remind you that you need to be working on your pad at the same time. We are utilizing the prospect’s sight—seeing is believing—and the sound of our voice; hearing is emotional. We’re tying emotion and logic together.
“On one side Franklin would put for, and on the other side, he would write against, and he would go down the line listing the reasons for. That’s what you want to do. For example, one reason you want to go ahead and make this move is that you really like the product. You like it, and you want it.”
Let me tell you something. People are going to buy what they like and what they want. They’ll figure out a way. You might have to come up with some creative financing for them, but they’re going to work at buying what they like and what they want. Then you go right on down the list, and there should be a number of reasons for them to go ahead and buy.
Do not put numbers by them. That’s important. The reason is this: you might get involved in a contest with your prospect. When they move to this side, they might say, “Now, you have seventeen or thirteen. Let me see if I can come up with more.” They come up with some of the most asinine things you can possibly imagine.
You go down the list with some reasons you definitely should not make this move. Now I feel very strongly about this particular point: you need to list the one or two things that have been dominating the conversation.
If the prospect, for example, has been protesting, “We just don’t have any money,” you need to write that down yourself. Don’t wait for them to tell you. If you do, then it has more impact. It has less impact if you acknowledge what they have already said. It indicates that you’ve been listening. It indicates that you have empathy. It indicates you understand, and people do always want to be understood.
So you come up with one or two things that have dominated the conversation. Then you don’t say another word. The prospect begins to list the other things. If you’ve done your job, you’re going to have substantially more fors than reasons against.
When you finish that, then you count. “Let’s see, there’s one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten reasons why you should go ahead,” and you write out a 10 and circle it several times. “There are several reasons why not. There are one, two, three, four, five, six,” and you make a big 6 and circle it.
Then you look directly at the prospect, lower your voice, and say, “You know, Mr. and Mrs. Prospect, if all of the people I deal with took this logical approach to making the decision such as you have, my business would be even more fun. We can have this installed within the week, or if you’re really in a hurry, I’ll have the serviceman out tomorrow afternoon. Which would suit your needs better?”
Let me stress a point. The prospect can come up with one reason against, and you still could miss the sale. I also want to stress that they’re not going to buy for ten reasons. They’re going to buy for one or two reasons. If you can give people a reason, or an excuse, for buying—like, for example, it will pay for itself, it really is more convenient for me, or whatever—your chances of making the sale are dramatically enhanced.
If they’re going to decide only on one or two reasons, why do we list ten and six? Very simple. This helps to keep it sold. When they explain to their friends, relatives, and neighbors why they bought, they’ll say, “Just look at all the reasons why we bought.” You’re giving them a logical explanation for it, and that is important.
Always remember—weave it into your presentation—that the fear of loss is greater than the desire for gain. If in your presentation, if in your close, you can make it clear that they’re going to lose if they don’t buy, that’s more powerful than just concentrating on the gain if they do buy. The fear of loss is greater than the desire for gain.
I’ll close with what I honestly believe is the most powerful single sales close I have ever heard. I’m going to modestly admit that I originated this close. I want to tell you something about the close before I share it with you. This is the close of last resort. This is when you’ve covered everything else.
We know 114 closes and have documented them and have written them out in Secrets of Closing the Sale. I said earlier, it’s not how many you know, but you need to know a number of them, and you need to know them well.
One thing that used to happen to me is that when you get down to the nitty-gritty, and they have to make that decision, the prospect would say, “I just don’t sign anything until I sleep on it, talk to my husband, or talk to my wife, or talk to my banker, or check with a CPA. I don’t buy anything or I don’t sign anything until—” and they would always bring that in the picture. They want to think about it.
You need to understand something about that. Have you ever had a prospect tell you they want to think about it? Have you ever told another salesperson you wanted to think about it? And when you told another salesperson that you wanted to think about it, did you really did think about it? You know what the basic fact is? You did that because of your soft heart and because of your compassion. You really had no intentions of buying, and you wanted to be kind to the salesperson, so you just said, “I’ll let him down easy. I’ll tell him I’m going to think about it.” That’s not being kind. That’s being cruel.
In most cases, if they don’t go ahead or if they give you some of these excuses and say, “I will buy later,” they’re trying to let you down easily. But if the sale is there, why not explore every avenue to make the sale while you’re there?
With the signature close I’m going to share with you, if there is a sale there, I believe this one will get it. You don’t use this to sell a small $15 or $50 order. This is something that you would use on a major purchase. Also, if you do a lot of recruiting, you can also, with adaptation, use this, and our support material shows you how. Use this as a close for recruiting.
As I give you the close, I’m going to grossly overdo it. I’m going to give you a smorgasbord of things to choose from.
You must use no more than three—probably two would be better—and your own comfort zone would dictate which ones you would use. The customer says to you, “I just don’t sign anything until—” then they enumerate or give you the reason.
You start your answer with the oldest one of them all. “I know exactly how you feel, Mr. Prospect. For years and years, I felt the same way, but when I really dug into it and explored the facts, I found”—feel, felt, found.
Then you go into this part. “I found that everything I own or have which has any value at all, I acquired only after I had signed my name. For example, Mr. Prospect, I’m one of those extremely lucky men. I’ve been married for well over forty years, and I can honestly say I love my wife today infinitely more than I did the day I got her. I got her because one night, in the presence of the minister and some friends and Almighty God, I signed my name.
“I have four beautiful children. They’re all mine, but before I could even take them out of the hospital, the doctor required that I sign my name. I have a beautiful home. I love that home with an absolute passion, and I got that home because one day in the presence of the builder, the savings and loan people, the insurance people, the attorney, and half the city of Dallas, I signed my name.
“I have an enormous amount of insurance, I really do. I got the insurance, and I’ve always had lots of insurance from the beginning. I got it because I wanted to make certain that should something happen to me that my wife would never have to go to work a day in her life if she did not want to. I wanted to ensure that my children would have a chance to get their education if they wanted it and that their standard of living would not suffer just because old Dad was not around. I got that insurance because on many different occasions, in the presence of a skilled life-insurance representative, I signed my name.
“I have a number of investments. I have them because I want to make absolutely certain that when I reach that point in life when I can no longer do what I am doing that I will not be a burden on anybody, that I can be entirely independent and self-supporting. I was able to do that because on a number of occasions, in the presence of a skilled counselor, I signed my name.
“As a matter of fact, Mr. Prospect, everything I have which has any value or significance to me at all is mine only because I signed my name. If I’m reading you right, and I believe I am, you’re the kind of individual who likes not only to do things in the proper manner, and do things for his family or his business, but he likes to make progress at the same time. You can do all of those things right now by signing your name.”
You say absolutely nothing else. Nothing. Now I didn’t always make the sale when I did that, but I always felt good about it. Why? Because I felt that I had done everything I could in order to get the sale.
I want to stress something here. If you’ve been laughing and kidding and playing and backslapping all the way through the interview, and you try to use this one, I can assure you it’s not going to work for you. But if it’s a serious product, and you’ve been sincerely concerned that you buy this one, it can make a difference.
Yes, I believe skills and techniques are some of the secrets of successful selling which you must learn and relearn and update and use all of the time. Do those things, and you’ll have a much richer, more exciting, and more rewarding sales career.