Too Many Salespeople Make it About Them

August 30th, 2010

Around this time every year my wife and I usually reminisce on the chaos from the past few summer months.  We both have fairly large extended families so this creates hectic weekends of weddings and birthday/graduation parties.  During some of these gatherings there are “outsiders” as we like to call them who attend.  These “outsiders” are friends of other family members who were invited to join in on the fun.

At a recent wedding we were seated at a table with people who we didn’t know.  Much like every social situation we covered the basics (weather, sports, kids) for about 3 minutes then you could quickly tell the standard conversation topics were ending.  I knew this was going to be a long dinner so I dug a little deeper and decided to ask more questions in a very conversational way.  “Tell me more about that..” or “What does that mean…” etc etc etc.  What I found out is the more he talked the more animated he became with his answers.  He didn’t realize I was asking him one question after another because he was talking about him.  It helped he was an interesting person with a unique profession which helped my questions because I was indeed genuinely curious.

As we finished dinner and prepped for parting ways he says to me “It was nice to meet you, I really enjoyed our conversation.”  Conversation?  I don’t know about that, it was more along the lines of questions and he gave me the answers.  I could pretty much give you Jeremy’s life story but he knew very little about me.  I would have answered any question in return he just didn’t ask any.  Why?  Because people love talking about THEMSELVES.

The problem here, too many sales people make it about them (let me tell you about our company, here is what I am looking to get out of the meeting….me, me, me, me, me).  Take the pressure off yourself and make it about your prospect.  You won’t have to get creative and people will  “enjoy the conversation” more.

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