2 The Trick to effective Telephone Sales Skills
Alan Stewart on Aug 05 2007
Inside the Client’s Head
(Representational Systems)
There are 6 ways that people represent things in their minds.
- Visual (pictures)
- Auditory (sounds)
- Kinesthetic (feelings)
- Olfactory (smells)
- Gustatory (tastes)
- Auditory Digital (self talk or internal dialogue).
There is a tendency for people to process information with a bias towards one or two of these modalities.
A witness of a car accident who has a visual bias will describe what the accident looked like. “You should have seen the crumbled mess it made of the cars.”
An auditory person would be inclined to tell you about the sound of the screeching brakes and huge bang of the impact.
A person who processes kinesthetically will often relate how bad they felt for the occupants of the cars.
Whilst the person who has an auditory digital (self talk/internal dialogue) bias may want to understand and think about how the whole thing happened.
Can you guess someone’s bias if they said, “The whole thing stinks!” or “It left a bad taste in my mouth”?
Have you ever had something you’ve said taken out of context? The American Psychiatrist, William James, wrote, “The greatest lie is the truth misunderstood”.
Having things ‘taken out of process’ can equally create misunderstandings.
If you are visually inclined and ask someone to ‘show’ you directions, and they ‘tell’ you (rather than ‘show’ you) how to get there… you’ll probably get lost!
Exceptional Teleprofessionals stay ‘in process’ with their client. After years of trial (and a whole lot of error!), they have developed unconscious competence at doing this. The trick is to model their excellence.
You’ll find out how over the next few posts.