Remember when we were kids and Mom used to bake those great cakes? What a wonderful event. We got to lick the bowl and the mixing spoon, go crazy with anticipation as the baking smell filled the house and if we were lucky…witness the cake coming out of the oven. How did Mom know when the cake was done? It was all about the toothpick! She would stab the cake with the pick and if it came out gunky she knew the cake wasn’t done and needed to go back in the oven. On the other hand, if the toothpick came out clean…. Hooray! The cake was ready. Pretty simple method. The only thing needed was the toothpick!
As I look back at those childhood memories some 50 years later after having spent much of my adult life as a saleperson and sales trainer I realized that that little toothpick was a great metaphor for the sales process. In sales we are taught that our customer is in charge and buys for their reasons and not ours. Keeping that in mind, it does us no good to plow on through a sales presentation unless we are sure that our customer is up to speed with us and is ready to move ahead.
How do we know?
Stick a figurative toothpick in them! It’s all about the questions we ask. Selling is not telling…it is asking. (At least professional selling is asking). Throughout our presentations we need to constantly be taking our customer’s temperature to see if they are following us and if we are staying on track with those things that are important to our customer. If we get the right answers (clean toothpicks) it is OK to go forward. If we get the wrong answers, or resistance (gunky toothpicks) we need to back up and find out why we are not in agreement. No sense in going forward.
Some sales trainers call these questions trial closes. Others prefer the term button-downs. I call them toothpicks! Whatever you call them, you had better be able to ask clear and concise questions throughout your presentation. Questions are the keys to sales and, for that matter, the keys to any interraction between people.
When you think about it, life is nothing more than our interactions with others. We need to go through life with a sense of wonderment and awe and probably more importantly we should travel through life with a child’s curiosity. We need to educate ourselves and be constantly inquisitive.
The toothpick analogy works for life every bit as well as it does with sales. Sales, after all, is nothing more than a transference of feeling and we should always have our toothpick handy to check where we are on our life’s journey as we exchange feelings with others. Everyone with whom we come in contact throughout our day is a “customer.” Hopefully our customer will feel a little bit better about themselves for having had the pleasure of meeting us. Our meeting may be as brief as a smile in passing or just a few words of greeting. It could also be a life-long relationship. I sure don’t have all the answers but after 6o some years on this planet I can be a great tour-guide for you. Nobody is smarter than all of us together so we can share our toothpicks and learn to experience life the way we want it to be. This will be a work in progress.
| Don’t leave home without your toothpicks! |
