Book review: Helen Kensett,Sales Mind: 48 Tools to Help You Sell,2016

This is an important book for the marketing students and sales professionals in a technology-enabled world. The book is designed to help sales personnel combine their observations with thought processes to continuously improve their professional outcomes. The book approaches sales as a set of skills, and not as a single skill. It provides conceptual drivers for the different skills and practical tips on how to develop those specific skills.

This book starts with the premise that sales person needs to have mastery over the ‘sales mind’, which can be achieved by training it to see, think and improve. The human mind has two parts, one involved in feeling and the other in thinking. The individual customer uses these two parts in different ways and to different extent, creating innumerable combinations of perceptions. Observing and sensing the buyer’s reality can help achieve success in sales. Sensing the buyer can be structured into three components, understanding ‘Active Buyer’s Impression’, at the organizational and personal level and ‘Passive Buyer Impression’.

After understanding the buyer’s reality, the sales person has to think about synthesizing the sales pitch. This ability is enhanced by the use of empathy, being in customer’s shoes and simplifying. The outcome of these activities is arriving at a clear point of view about the specific customer and an approach to sell.

The next step is to communicate to the customer. This requires choice of right words in right sequence. Typically, the communication would provide the customers answer to why, when, where, what, who and how the product and service helps in meeting their needs. This can be written as well as verbal communication. A killer subject line is likely to increase the probability of winning the order by getting the attention and setting the appropriate tone. Visual supports in the communication enhance the power of the communication by making it easier to comprehend, as well as its retention by the customer.

The book also deals with overcoming one of the biggest reasons for failure in sales, the ‘fear of failure’. The attitude that can help overcome this problem is to develop a ‘learning orientation’, where meaning is derived even from mistakes or failures. The author also recommends developing a ‘process’ focus as against an ‘outcome’ focus. These remove the disappointment of the loss of sales and fills in the void with the learning achieved in the process, even if the sales did not materialize.

The challenge faced by the sales person in developing the sales skill is to sustain the learning and improvement orientation in situations of disappointment, which is quite common in sales function. To mitigate this challenge, the author explains that learning is not a secularly increasing function of time. There are stages of growth, followed by stagnation and even some decline in learning over time, but if persisted upon, the learning would definitely increase over time.

The sales person can use their individual creativity to improve their sales outcomes by delivering an ‘aha’ moment to the customer. This can be harnessed by preparing, playing with ideas and pondering over the same. Since the idea can strike anytime and it can be fleeting in nature, one needs to train the mind to recognize such inspirations and secure the same by writing it down.

Finally, the closing of sales becomes obvious end point. It requires the use of the identified skill set of seeing, thinking and improving. The focus has to be on ways to tempt the buyer to purchase, using the predominantly rational left hemisphere or the irrational right hemisphere of the brain.

The book gives an easy account to understand pathway about the changes required in the way the sales is to be orchestrated. The ideas shared are conceptual in nature and provides specific and practical tools and techniques required for executing the ideas in the sales roles. It, however, does not shed light on the changes required in the sales practice that are dealing with increasingly digitally connected consumers. It also does not focus specifically on the areas of customer retention through engagement, which many sales persons face. It does not give any specific input on handling customers, who have distinctly different internet and social media usage patterns. Incorporation of such emerging trends in the next book would be a great contribution.