Heavy Hitter Sales Blog

The Wrong Stuff (Drunken Astronauts & Peer Pressure)

NASA, America's space agency, was shaken Thursday by a startling report: astronauts were drunk before flying!  Aviation Week & Space Technology reported on its Web site that on two occasions astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so drunk they posed a safety risk. An independent panel also found "heavy use of alcohol" before launch — within the standard 12-hour "bottle-to-throttle" rule, the magazine reported.

The Associated Press quoted retired NASA executive Seymour Himmel on the latest bad news, “Let's face it. Astronauts are a bunch of brothers and sisters, OK, and they'll cover each other's backsides because they're part of the team," he said. "And who knows what the role of the particular ones was to be. If he was just to sit in the middle seat somewhere and just be a passenger, you kind of say, 'Well, gee, I hope he doesn't vomit on the way up.'"

Obviously, there is intense peer pressure among astronauts not to embarrass one another. The same type of peer pressure is also an important influencer over customers. Peer pressure plays a powerful role during the decision-making process. People naturally don’t want to look stupid or embarrass themselves in public. Most technical people are very reluctant to publicly admit they don’t understand something. Peer pressure prevents them from doing so. Doing so could affect their position within the group, particularly in a presentation environment that includes their peers and management.

Selection team members constantly monitor the attitudes of others. Most of the time they will acquiesce to peer pressure in public but disagree in private. Therefore, when you ask at end of your presentation, “Does everyone believe we are the best solution?” even though everyone nods, the audience probably includes objectors who will try to sabotage your deal later on.

   

SALES TIP: The corporate sales presentation is a key moment in most every deal. It is the pivotal event where all the vendors are asked to present their advantages and why they should be selected over everyone else. Usually, it is the deal’s turning point. It is also the most complex environment a salesperson faces during the entire sales cycle. The entire event is influenced by politics and peer pressure. Audience members have different agendas. Roles and titles do not clearly define power and responsibilities. Attendees not only have different reasons for attending the presentation, but have also planned in advance to use peer pressure to achieve different outcomes as well. 

How to Use Intuition to Become a Heavy Hitter

I'm very excited about the four page article on the Heavy Hitter Sales Philosophy in the current edition of  Selling Power Magazine. The article, titled "How to Use Intuition to Become a Heavy Hitter," truly captures the essence of my philosophy and the importance of the human nature of sales. Click here to read the entire article. Here's a short excerpt:

"This quest for predictability lies at the core of most sales training and sales automation efforts.  Sales training almost always involves the creation of a process or the development of specific skills required to drive a process.  Similarly, CRM (originally called “Sales Force Automation” in imitation of “Factory Floor Automation”) is almost always concerned with gathering data that will make the sales process more quantifiable and hence more predictable.

Unfortunately, the quest for sales predictability is quixotic, because selling and buying are very human activities that are manifestations of very human emotions.  The core of a sales rep’s work consists of four, essentially unquantifiable activities: building relationships, understanding how others think, predicting future behavior, and persuading customers to think differently.  From this perspective, the attempt to build a predictable, automate-able “sales process” is as misguided as a geeky engineering student trying to build a computer program that will tell him exactly what to say in order to get a date with a popular cheerleader."