Say Hello to Your Intuitive Self
Years ago a wise man by the name of Ray Overdorff mutual this thought with me:
“Agreed sufficient information, your intuitive self is usually validated.”
Courtesy www.wisdomdigest.org
How many era do we ignore our gut feelings when speaking with a potential client and follow the sales process because that is what we have been trained to do? Shame on us!
Or maybe we listen to some sales experts or gurus who tell us to question this question when that small person is sitting on our shoulders or something surrounded by us says “Don’t do that?” Again, shame on us!
All of these feelings, these “Danger, Danger” alerts are coming from our intuitive self or the second of our four brains. In the book Get out of Your Own Way by Robert K. Cooper, Ph.D. identified 4 brains:
- Your head (intellectual)
- Your gut
- Your heart
- Your vertebrae
He referred to Aristotle who wrote in 350BC “The brain is not solely in the head. The brain is in the heart and more.” And for those engaged in sales, this “and more” is your gut brain or your intuitive self.
Each of these brains is responsible for directing chemical interactions. Within the intestinal tract, there are 100 million neurons along with 30 uncommon chemicals. Additionally, your gut brain is quicker than your intellectual brain. This speed is estimated to be a million era quicker.
As you grow in experience, so does your intuitive self. This progression has been documented by G. Klein in his book, The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings for Better Decisions at Work.
This intuitive progression helps to give reasons for why top sales performers are usually seasoned sales people who have walked the various land mines, survived and have lived to tell about it through their results. After nearly 35 years in sales, I truly do not know any salesperson who was a top sales performer over night. Experience is required and from that experience grows your intuition.
Of course, many sales people (myself included) have occasionally drank the “Kool Aid” by embracing this new selling strategy or sales approach. After all we are told it has worked for hundreds to thousands of other people. Being reasonably intelligent individuals, we look forward to decreasing our learning curve time while increasing our revenue. In this process we let the number one brain, intellectual, override the number two brain.
In many cases, this new selling methodology may conflict with what has worked for the experienced us as salespersons in the past. All during the sales training, there are small “beeps” going off, butterflies fluttering, all coming from the gut brain. But the salesperson wanting to increase his or her own sales skills ignores these intuition signals and continues to embrace this new knowledge at the direction of the intellectual brain.
The intuitive self is related to emotional intelligence as prominent by Daniel Goleman and many other researches. In sales, there is now augmented accent on how to use emotional intelligence within the sales process such as in the book, Emotional Selling by David Yule.
Zig Ziglar defined sales as “the transference of feelings.” If you believe this definition to be right, then ignoring those gut feelings may be a recipe for disaster meaning the goal to increase sales is not achieved.
By saying yes to your intuitive self allows you to truly leverage all of your experiences and work with both your own emotional intelligence and the emotional intelligence of your potential customer. And who would be willing to say No to such a Win-Win situation?