Sales in the Sweet Spot

Our opportunity for influence increases when we are open and ask great questions, listen to others with receptive minds, and offer playful ideas and novel perspectives.
— Dacher Keltner

Workshop Description

A sales relationship is a series of conversations. So the question becomes, what sort of conversations are you having?

It’s All About Influence

The primary competence in sales is the ability to influence. But not all influence is cut from the same cloth. Some efforts to influence are defensive, myopic, and self-serving. Others are generous, broad-minded, and service-oriented.

Conversational Capacity and Sales

This is why, when it comes to sales, your conversational capacity makes a pivotal difference. The farther you get out of the sweet spot the less productive the influence you’re going to wield. It’s hard to influence a sale if you’re minimizing and being overly guarded, acquiescent, and cautious. And it’s even harder to influence a sale if you’re triggered to “win” and being arrogant, closed-minded, and argumentative. So building your conversational capacity – the ability to balance candor and courage with curiosity and humility – is key to influencing in a constructive way.

Managing a Sales Team

If you’re a sales manager, building your conversational capacity, and that of your team, can help with you essential aspects of your job, including:

  • Setting clear performance goals and expectations.
  • Holding people accountable for performance.
  • Creating a constructive work environment.
  • Investing in your team’s performance by coaching, educating, and providing useful feedback.

Learning Outcomes:

In this workshop participants will learn to:

  • Establish loyal sales relationships based on trust, rapport, and respect.
  • Be more flexible and learning-focused when things aren’t going as expected.
  • Skillfully explore objections to turn them into opportunities for more learning and influence.
  • Approach difficult situations and people in a more balanced and effective way.
  • Recognize when a frustrating short-term loss on a sale is worth a stronger long-term relationship with a client.
  • Respond in a beneficial way when your product or service isn’t the best option for your prospect.
  • Build a sales team that is more collaborative, focused, flexible, and smart.
  • Be more focused and confident even when others aren’t making it easy.
  • Turn themselves into a valuable conduit of business intelligence by gathering and sharing useful information about customers, the product, the market, and the competition.
  • Do all this as a way to strengthen your individual and collective conversational capacity.

Complementary Courses

Length: 2 hours +

Format: Virtual or in-person