Mike Clark's Business Bites: Know the three mental essentials

By ensuring your sales journey incorporates what the mind needs you can help your clients to feel empowered and engaged. Photo / Unsplash

Do you tell or do you sell? Do you know the difference?

Do you guide and assist or push your point?

Sales is about service, helping people get what they want or need. When this is done well customers enjoy the experience, they appreciate your input and are more likely to return and refer others to you.

There is no magic elixir to make this happen - good process and a keen, real desire to help mixed with hard work are far more likely to breed success than some mystical shortcut. Knowing how people think and what they need can help the process to go smoother.

Your body needs three essential ingredients to fully function the way it is designed to: fat, protein and carbohydrates. In a similar vein your mind has three essential ingredients it also requires. By understanding these and ensuring your sales journey incorporates these elements you can help your clients to feel empowered and engaged.

The first thing every human needs is autonomy. The sense that you have a choice. The Webster dictionary describes it as "the quality or state of being self-governing - self-directing freedom and especially moral independence personal autonomy".

According to an I.Family paper, in its simplest sense autonomy is about a person's ability to act on his or her own values and interests. Taken from ancient Greek, the word means self-legislation or self-governance.

"Looked at psychologically, autonomy is made up of a set of skills and attitudes. Relevant skills include the ability to reason, to appreciate different points of view, and to debate with others. In order to do these things, the autonomous person must have a sense of self-worth and self-respect. Self-knowledge is also important, including a well-developed understanding of what matters to him or her."

Do you educate your clients and let them make a choice? Do they feel in control?

The next thing we need is to achieve. People like to win. People like to feel a sense of achievement. This is why people can spend years developing mastery at specific things that interest them.

Do you help your client to feel like they are winning? Do you get them to focus on the value, the experience, the matching of a desire or need? When a salesperson focuses on price they can fall into the trap of the customer only feeling like they have won if they get a discount. This can be a massive disservice to the customer as well as their business.

Help the customer to focus on what advantages and benefits they can enjoy, on how well what is being offered meets their requirements and avoids/overcomes their pain points.

The third mental essential is relationship. We are social creatures - we need human interaction. One only has to look at prisons and the military, where the worst legal punishment is solitary confinement - the removal of autonomy, achievement and relationship - to understand why it is so effective.

People buy from people. Connect with the person/people in front of you. Connect with them as a human being not just an object or number - that makes them feel worthless, like the only thing you are after is their cash.

In the famous words of Maya Angelou, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

• Mike Clark is director and lead trainer and facilitator at Think Right business training company.