I was training clients earlier this week and a realisation came to me right in the middle of the session. We were talking about the importance of asking questions and the danger of answering questions when it occurred to me that I was asking my delegates to learn a new language.

Regular readers and subscribers will know that I am extremely insistent upon any sales person not answering customers questions directly, rather I’d want them to acknowledge their question and ask a clarification question instead.

Much of my sales training involves delegates getting a real understanding of what really happens in the sales process and how their behaviour directly affects the outcome.

Many delegates can take the ideas form the sessions away into their personal lives with some very interesting positive results.

The new language I was referring to at the top of this article is the real language of sales.

To elucidate, I think a little background information might be in order first. Let’s look at the language we are speaking at the moment. I am not referring to English, rather the secret hidden language that we are conditioned to speak by ‘the system’. Perhaps the phrase should not be language at all. Maybe I should use the phrase; ’operating system’. In computer terms (and let’s be honest, our brains are organic computers) your machine uses a type of computer language and runs on an ‘operating system’ or OS, for short.

So whether  we use the term language or operating system, I am really talking about the same thing. I like the term OS and we’ll use that for this article.

The OS that most sales people (and actually most people) run on is one that I’ve called AS. AS is the operating system that our parents installed in us when we were children. AS was modified and revised by our teachers whilst at school, with quite a lot of input from our peer group. Later on, we modified it ourselves when we left school and further upgrades and revisions happen throughout life, sometimes provided by employers and other authority figures. AS stands for Answering Service. People who have AS installed will do their utmost to answer any question that anyone asks them. They will try very hard to answer and will find it very hard to ask any questions themselves. The ability to ask questions is inhibited by AS. Your parents and your teachers told you to not ask too many questions, you were rewarded by your parents and by teachers for knowing the answers, the academic system is set up to reward people who can demonstrate their knowledge by having the ability to answer large numbers of questions, in fact we are told daily when at school that employment prospects are enhanced by having a university degree (gained by having the ability to answer really complex questions), job interview success usually depends on being able to answer the questions that the interviewer throws at you and if you are ever in a court of law, it’s a crime NOT to answer their questions.

With all that programming going on, is it any wonder that most people have the AS operating system installed?

That’s all well and good if you want to be an ordinary citizen who is working in administration, academia or any role that means you don’t have to ask many questions.

However, should you want to be successful in sales, you will know that you will have to ASK questions, not answer them. So, if you’re going to be a great salesperson, we need to install a different OS.

I call the new operating system QA which stands for Questioning and Acknowledging system.

With this new operating system you can ask questions to your heart’s desire with no inhibitions. You can help customers buy from you really quickly, you build trust with clients fast, you become an adept ‘closer’ and you can control every conversation you have with customers, suppliers, friends, family and ever with strangers. It is particularly effective to use the QA system on people who have the AS system installed.

Unfortunately, un-installing the AS operating system and replacing it with the new QA can’t be done in one article! There will be more about this in the coming weeks on my blogs, newsletters and twitter feeds.

If you sign up to my monthly newsletter, you’ll be taken through this step by step process over the coming months. Alternatively you can sign up for the Cellular Selling book, which will be published at the end of the year. If you really want to rev up your selling skills, earn higher commissions and be more successful you can sign up for one of my Cellular Selling sales training seminars happening in London this Summer.

If you want to really get fast results for your company and your sales team, look at bespoke in-house training sessions.  My Cellular Selling training programme effectively uninstalls AS and installs the new programme into your brain. By the end of the programme you and your team will be getting sales results that could well be 300% higher than you’re getting now. Although I deliver most of my sales training in London, I do regularly cover the entire South East and will work with clients nationwide.

If you’d like to find out more, sign up, email me, follow me on twitter, befriend me on LinkedIn or through Facebook and you’ll be in the loop.

I look forward to seeing you soon.