Prospect’s know immediately when you drop into sell mode. As soon as they recognize that you are selling they get defensive, deny the existence of problems and actively try to extricate themselves from the sales interaction. So what triggers the sales shield? Anything that appears to be aggressive will do it. Asking direct probing questions will do it. Asking leading questions will do it. In fact, anything that sounds like a traditional feature and benefit sales pitch will do it. The optimal sales approach is to be consultative. This means you must break the traditional buyer-seller relationship and establish an open trusting relationship where the prospect trusts you enough to share what is really bothering them and what they are really going to do about it and what they might really like to spend to get it done. This is not easy since they come to the interaction from a position of distrust. That is due to the hundreds of salespeople they have interacted with in the past. It is a gradual process but one that needs to begin from the very first interaction you have with the prospect.
