Divorce Balance

Negotiation > Recovery > Enhancement

Saturday, May 14, 2005
Develop Sales Skills

If you could become more proficient at just one thing in response to your divorce, what would that be?

Before you answer, don't limit your thinking to any one particular area of life. Ditch the temporal box as well. Let's talk about something that will be valuable to you in the face of divorce, in moving through the divorce processes, and into the coming years — when divorce is no longer on your mind.

Regardless of who you are when you walk though my door, I'm convinced that you'll always benefit from developing sales skills.

The product is you. That includes your ideas and the way you'd like to see things go.

You're skeptical, and I respect that. So let's look at just six of Zig Ziglar's twenty-five "Selling Skills" to see if any of them might help us with the challenges we're facing today.

• 3. "Character. I carry out my plan even after the emotion of the moment in which I made the commitment has passed. I do what I say I will do. I persevere."

• 6. "Motivation. I know why I am doing what I am doing. I have carefully considered my motives, reasons, and purposes for all action steps."

• 7. "Positive Expectancy. I look for the best in all people and situations. I expect to be treated fairly and with respect. I expect to treat others the same way."

• 10. "Organization. I know how I use my time. I know which tasks and activities have the highest payoff based on my goals."

• 19. "Handling Rejection. I know the difference between a personal rejection and a business refusal. I de-personalize turn downs and often use the prospect's reason for not buying as the reason for buying."

• 21. "Closing. I know how to close sales, when to close sales, and which closing techniques are most effective for me and my product or services. I always ask for the order."

Any of this whet your appetite for more in preparation for the next pitch — er, I mean, "presentation" — you have to make at the Friend of the Court?

Putting your best foot forward through the online dating service you're trying out?

Come on, surely your parents must have used selling skills to argue the merits of eating your peas as a kid.

How about your last job interview? Or are we denying that we sell ourselves there, too?

After an organizational development meeting for Johnson Controls in 1988, one of the participants told me this: "I never trust a salesman who isn't married. If you can't sell yourself, how can you sell my product?"

(Note to self: Leave "retention" for a future Divorce Balance; work on personal CRM skills before remarriage.)

By definition, sales people and their customers are always on opposite sides of the table. Yet their very livelihoods depend on creating agreements from those positions. Each party must freely choose to participate.

Much like good divorce negotiations, wouldn't you agree?

—posted by Dell Deaton @9:00 PM EST 5/14/2005 [500]

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