In one of my favorite sales books, yes – I treat this as a sales book, The Adaptive School: A Sourcebook for Developing Collaborative Groups, discusses how to place inquiry at the center of effective change. For sales people, this is a topic that should resonate with you. The latest research and one of the bestselling sales books of the year, The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results, reinforces the power of managing change as an effective sales tool. Sales is getting less and less about about those elusive closing tactics of yesteryear and more facilitating group decision making or as we called it before managing change.
One of the buzz words or topics of today’s sales world is collaboration. However, it is a skill that is seldom developed and if we do develop it as a skill, seldom practiced as “normal” behavior. The “Seven Norms of Behavior” provides us an excellent set of guidelines to strive for in group behavior. And, for a salesperson, a set of skills that can certainly use for their work when involved with customer groups. The authors give credit to this work to Peter Senge and Bill Baker drawing from their cognitive coaching model.
Below is a mind map of the 7 Norms of Collaboration and a downloadable PDF.
