ISM Book Review 2016

There’s nothing quite like appealing to be the very best and to stand out from the crowd, and this book series has the magic word – genius – that sounds like it will set off more than a few lightbulb moments. We got hold of two of the volumes most suitable for selling, namely Sales Genius and Presentation Genius – will they really help you be an Einstein among your sales colleagues?

SALES GENIUS Taking Sales Genius first, it’s written by Graham Jones, who has an interesting background, to say the least – he started off in biology, then worked in the music industry and as a journalist, before going back to college to specialise in psychology. It’s the latter domain that he now uses as a self-styled ‘Internet psychologist’, where selling is just one of many business-related issues he turns his hand, or rather his mind, to.

In Sales Genius, he sets his approach apart from most other books by saying it’s based on science, which a number of other Winning Edge article authors also major on, and we must say that solid evidence is what we should be looking for in sales if indeed we are to see it as more of a science than an art. Jones’s pitch is that it’s no good desperately reading sales book after book where clearly you aren’t getting the nuggets that stick, so instead he mines for real rather than fool’s gold, and gives 40 short, evidence-based chapters with references. (And 40 seems to be the magic number as the other Genius titles also have the same chapter count – the blurb says this is about assembling a ‘fast track MBA’.)

LOSS ADJUSTER (SALES GENIUS)

One chapter that stands out is entitled “Customers have no idea about prices”, in which Jones discusses studies from two psychologists, one of whom won a Nobel prize. “When we are deciding to buy something we are calculating whether we will lose something by purchasing it, or lose something if we don’t buy it,” writes Jones. At the same time, we are working out what we gain from buying it or gain by not buying it. Price is a small factor and it’s “loss aversion” that’s key. But salespeople are often concerned about their prices rather than the risks and losses their customers are weighing up. Having a price range rather than one fixed price is also advantageous to the psychology of pricing which, although being a well-researched area, is not one that always gets a good airing in sales.

Sales Genius is not so much a book as a set of articles, and not surprisingly is aimed more at the behavioural side of selling, with some topics that will appeal to managers. The first chapter is “Consultative selling is expected”, in which the key is that buying things entails risk and salespeople are still pivotal to this in the Internet age. Customers are turning to chat rooms and review sites, where they want guidance, and salespeople should act as problem solvers, also using the Internet to do research and knowing that the customer isn’t always right…

Adaptive selling, covered next, is about listening, bearing in mind that you may think you’re adapting to customers but evidence suggests you may be using an inflexible formula to pigeonhole people, who are more complex than standard training will prepare you for.

There’s a chapter on why direct selling still works, but this is mainly about consumer selling –

the book does rather chop and change without much reference to B2B and B2C, which is a shortcoming of writing it in self-contained chapters. Jones is especially strong on how technology has changed buying and selling, and moves on to an interesting look at why email matters more than the web, why most sales journeys start online (and he notes that salespeople are often unable to influence what their own websites look like), and how the Internet is creating niche areas of profitability, as online retailers can stock specialist lines that traditional ones can’t.

There’s a good chapter on time management and making more time for appointments, referencing a study that’s shows that people who are able to switch between tasks (not the same as multitasking) are more effective. A chapter on getting past gatekeepers is also interesting but Jones can only find one small study here (and a note about science – some of the evidence that he cites certainly isn’t anywhere near the level of being peer reviewed and published in a journal).

Dipping into the rest of the chapters, we find how persistence pays off, and that salespeople often give up after only one or two calls; that too much eye contact with customers is not good; that selling to men is not the same as to women (women want complete solutions, while men are not so specific); how to spot buying signals; and that you need to move away from the process of closing to being better prepared and building supportive relationships (here Jones could have cited some more up to date studies – indeed, quite a few he references are fairly old now).

The book is probably stronger in chapters that play to Jones’s own strengths, such as on “power posing” in negotiation, and getting inside the mind of buyers. An unusual take on handling objections is to be “kind”, and of course there’s a study – “When people raise objections the crucial thing to do is to be kind to them, see things from their perspective and avoid trying to ‘prove’ your product or service is what they really want.” (This came from a study on life insurance sales.) Being “mindful” and “in the moment” are also important to focusing on the customer and avoiding conflict.

There is also material on commissions, promotions, forecasting and training, aimed more at managers.

Each chapter also has a short list of further reading, and bullet points of three big takeaways, so the material is pretty digestible. The production level is not that high and there are no graphics. Perhaps the best value of the book overall is to show that selling is a good deal more complicated than most think if there 40 topics to juggle, and that there’s a big library of books and papers should you have the time… GORILLA IN THE ROOM

(PRESENTATION GENIUS)

Can you get your audience to notice the rather large gorilla? You’ve probably seen that famous video where some people don’t notice it because thy were busy concentrating on something else. It’s called attention blindness and could mean your audience can’t be relied in to see what you think is obvious in your presentation. You need to make it obvious, especially if it’s something unusual. But thankfully, by the same token most won’t notice your mistakes. “Make a point of drawing your audience’s attention to anything that may be counter to what they expect,” says Raybould.

“You need to move away from the process of closing to being better prepared and building supportive relationships”

Sales Genius by Graham Jones and Presentation Genius by Simon Raybould are published by John Murray Learning. Both are available on Amazon for about £12 (£9 for Kindle versions). PRESENTATION GENIUS The second book, Presentation Genius, is on the well-trodden subject of presentations, and is by Simon Raybould, who also started out as a scientist but is now a trainer. Like Sales Genius, it has 40 self-contained chapters and the same references and takeaways format, and of course it’s all founded on research. Raybould has mapped his chapters into how people learn, how to get yourself ready, tools you can use, and techniques to use in your design.

Getting stuck in with a big message in chapter one, he shows that you should present your most powerful arguments first, owing to the “primacy effect”, but you’ll also need to make it clear to your audience that they have some responsibility for making the right decisions, and deliver your message in a “likeable” way. There’s some pretty heavyweight material here already from a study on how people judge whose guilty or innocent, which is where the responsibility angle comes in.

The book continues in the vein – what seems like simple chapter titles, such as “Clarity is king”, “Fast and hard”, and “It’s not what you say it’s the way that you say it” reveal a lot of research that most of us probably haven’t heard of – how about the assertive evidence method in PowerPoint (it involves using a single sentence supported by spoken detail and a large graphic).

The book is good because it also asks questions you may not have thought of, such as how to use a metaphor (answer: carefully and early); how to greet your audience (best to say hello with a handshake if you can); and avoiding overloading your audience (put their minds at rest about the quality of your content).

Further: try and get yourself introduced, present in chunks, use stories, be persuasive – and more persuasive still (such as by getting your audience “to agree the rules upfront”, and give your audience the tools to take notes.

Presentation Genius is actually a more substantial book than Sales Genius, and we’ll revisit both with some of the themes in more depth in another issue of Winning Edge.