24Jan2018
“The big lie told all around the world is that sales is a numbers game,” said BANKCODE Founder and bestselling author Cheri Tree as she addressed the Nordic Business Forum Sweden crowd during the first afternoon session. “They say to get more people to say yes in sales, you have to get more people to say no. Actually, to get more people to say yes – you have to get more people to say yes. My journey has been to find out how to make that happen more often.
“The secret is that sales is a people game. Companies generally focus their energies on gathering sales leads but don’t get the results they want. Instead of spending on acquisition, more companies need to find out why their customers buy,” she continued. “According to Salesforce, 2 out of 3 sales professionals miss their quotas, and 9 out of 10 feel inadequately prepared for meetings. Conversely, Two-thirds of customers feel turned off by the presentation delivered by a member of the company sales team.”
Her major discovery, in-line with Hippocrates’ development of the four temperaments in ancient Greece and modern personality tests such as Meyers-Briggs, was that personality – both of the salesperson and the customer – is the biggest factor in developing a more streamlined, Lean sales process.
“We’re all different, so it stands to reason we make buying decisions differently”, she continued. “There are more than 300 triggers and tripwires that make or break the sales process. With 24 different possible personality types available, a salesperson using the same presentation repeatedly would have a 4% chance of saying the right thing to win a customer.”
BANKCODE was founded to help sales teams decipher their own personalities, and its personality profiling system has been scientifically proven by the University of San Francisco to accurately assess personalities in under 90 seconds. In practice, everyone is a combination of 4 different personality types – Blueprint, Action, Nurturing, and Knowledge. By sorting these personality types into order of importance, customers and salespeople can generate their own BANK code.
“Only 18% of customers will buy from a salesperson who doesn’t match their personality type, whereas 82% will buy from someone who is a match. By cracking your and your customer’s BANK code, you can begin to understand their Buyology, and you can change the way you engage with their values,” she concluded.
By shifting from a process-driven, brute force style of sales process to a personal, emotive and tailored approach, Cheri Tree has given sales teams a Lean tool for overhauling their work and producing better, smarter results, from root to fruit.
