In my second sales job, at the age of 24, I was about to get our company’s first order from IBM, when I received an answering machine message from our president saying that he was going with me to IBM to help me close the sale. I called the top salesperson in our company and told him about it. He said, “You probably won’t get the order if he goes with you, and he will blame you for not getting it.”

Here is a question that we’ve heard hundreds of times. I heard it again, when Shawn called and said, “I have always been told that you should talk about benefits, not features. Why do you teach salespeople to do the opposite?”

At the end of one of my training workshops on High Probability Selling (HPS), I asked the participants what they were going to do with what they had learned. After some discussion, one of them asked another what she was going to do.

This is a recent email conversation between Kirk Mousley of Mousley Consulting, Carl Ingalls of Embossing Technologies, and Jacques Werth of High Probability Selling.

In trying to learn what we now call the High Probability Selling (HPS) paradigm, I found that it works to understand how most people think and/or intuitively react. Security and Reliability are the most important motivations of most people who have a need that they are ready, willing, and able to satisfy.

It is very difficult to hit a baseball, thrown at over 80 mile per hour, with a regulation sized bat. You get to swing the bat at the ball up to three times, each time you get up to bat. If you get a hit one out of every four times at bat, that’s up to twelve attempts to hit the ball. Almost any team will pay you $2,000,000 a year to do that. You also get a three month vacation and free coaching. If you can get a hit one out of every three times you go to bat, you can make upwards of $5,000,000 per year. That is the sports entertainment business.

People don’t buy because you convinced them. People don’t buy because you think they need what you are selling. People don’t buy because you create an urgency. People don’t buy because you need to make a sale. People don’t buy because they are interested.

For most salespeople, establishing a relationship with someone is the most difficult and confronting aspect of High Probability Selling. It requires the salesperson to forget about selling and just be a person. It’s also the single most important step in High Probability Selling.