DISCLAIMER: Not literally, “Leave Your Child in the Car”! But this may be something we hear in Sandler from time to time. It all has to do with the psychology of selling. So, what does it mean?
It’s easy to get “emotionally involved” in sales. This is a result of our “child ego state,” which is one of three ego states that we as human beings walk around this earth with (Berne, 1957). It’s our child ego state that affects us (from a sales perspective) in several ways:
- It allows us to become “emotionally involved”
- It allows us to become distracted during the sales call
- It causes us to act smarter than the prospect or client
- It has us trying to convince them that we know more than what we do
- It causes us to talk way more than we listen
- It causes us to want and need
- It causes us to count our commissions before they are realized
- It has us telling our managers that “we got one” when we really have nothin
- And about 100 other things that are counter-productive in the selling process
I’m not going to get into the whole theory of Transactional Analysis today, or fully explain that there are four Child sub-ego states (Natural/Rebellious/Adaptive/Little Professor), but what I will state emphatically is that each one of them causes us trouble in the sales process.
If you look at each one of the 9 examples above (there are MANY more), each one of them causes us to be “self-centered” and not “client or prospect centered” when dealing with others.
When you think about children, the world is about them. Maturity leads us to realize that there’s more to the world than our own wants/needs. This is where David Sandler (through his relationship with Dr. Berne) realized that we need to learn to identify our own “inner child” and remove him/her from our sales process and “leave him/her in the car” when we go in to call on our prospect or client.
“Leave your child in the car.” This is one of the most profound things that I heard early in my experience as a Sandler Client. Nine out of nine things above affected me back then in my selling career. Figuring out the ability to manage my own wants/needs/desires in the sales process has paid off in spades.
Do you have trouble being emotionally involved? Are you counting “wins” before the ink is even on the paper? Still talking more than you listen? Give us a call… we know a thing or two about the psychology of selling.
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