What Do Other's Want?
by Stanley Bronstein on November 24, 2008
Talk In Terms Of The Other Person’s Interest. (Dale Carnegie)
Other – Some person or thing else. Different or distinct from the one mentioned or implied.
Interest – Something that concerns, involves, draws the attention of, or arouses the curiosity of a person. The feeling of a person whose attention, concern, or curiosity is particularly engaged by something.
How To Get Things Done
If you’re like me, you want to know how to get things done.
As you have no doubt figured out by now, it’s hard to get everything done by yourself. In other words, you need the help of others.
Bottom Line – You need friends and you need them to help you.
So How Do You Get Others To Help You?
You get others to help you by talking in terms of what they’re interested in.
What do they want?
What needs to be done in order to help them get it?
The Flip Side
There’s a flip side to this whole discussion.
You CAN’T get others to help you by talking solely in terms of what YOU’RE interested in.
You CAN’T get others to help you by talking solely about what YOU want.
You CAN’T get others to help you by talking solely about what THEY need to do to help YOU get what YOU want.
In other words, it has to be about them, NOT about you.
An Example From The World Of Sales
Like many of you, I get probably 5 to 10 phone calls weekly where the caller wants to talk to the “Owner of the Business”. Obviously it’s to sell me something.
Has it ever occurred to these salesmen to phrase their “pitch” different? As Dale Carnegie would say, I’m a busy person, why should I be interested in what YOU want.
Instead, talk about what I want.
Good salesmen know this and apply it constantly.
When this happened to me once last week, I replied by asking to speak to the owner of THEIR business.
The telephone salesperson was dumbfounded. They didn’t know how to respond.
After I kept pressing, they told me the “owner” of their business was in a meeting and couldn’t be disturbed. I replied, well if I can’t speak to the owner of YOUR business, because they’re unavailable, they probably have a lot of nerve asking me to make the owner of MY business available with no advance notice.
In other words, I got them to think about what I wanted, instead of what they wanted.
However, as we all know, telephone sales is a numbers game, so I’m quite sure that after they hung up, they’ll probably go right back to making the same sales pitch and try to get someone else interested by talking about what THEY (the salesman wants).
Real Life
While talking about what you want might work in the “numbers game” that is telephone sales, it’s not going to work in the real world. If you want to get somewhere, you are going to need people to help you. If you want people to help you, you’re are going to need to be concerned about what THEY want.
It’s just that simple.
What Do You Think?
What do you think about these thoughts? Please share your comments below.
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Until next time, take care, my dear friends.Mr. Achievement
Stanley F. Bronstein
Attorney & CPA
November 24th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
In your example of the sales call it sounded like neither of you got what you wanted. I don’t understand how this is a good example.
November 25th, 2008 at 6:40 am
The example was that the salesman was calling me to get what HE wanted, but never taking into account what I wanted . . .
Stanley Bronstein