What Star Trek teaches us about the selling process

Selling, the personal interaction between buyer and seller, is a key part of the marketing process. In many businesses it is the final link. Whatever other marketing activity has been undertaken, selling must convert that interest, turning it into an action to buy.

The sales task is to communicate clearly and persuasively, and very often to differentiate a product or service from that of the competition. It is a fragile process: results can be changed, for good or ill, by small changes in approach. This may even go down to the use of one word rather than another, certainly to one description or another.

As we emerge haltingly from recession, markets are becoming increasingly competitive, customers demanding and fickle. Selling success will not "just happen" because you have a good product or the "gift of the gab".

Selling success can be made more certain if those doing the selling adopt an active approach. This does not just mean becoming customer oriented, communicating persuasively, descriptively and memorably. Too many sales people are effectively in a rut and more is necessary. Rather it means adapting approaches day-by-day and customer-by-customer and thinking creatively about different ways of doing things that enhance persuasiveness, yet remain acceptable and interesting to the customer.

The archetypal "born salesman" is rare. Good sales people, however, are much more common. And the best of them have a secret. They understand how customers make buying decisions and see their job as helping them to do so. They adopt a conscious approach in the light of that understanding, and they deploy well-chosen techniques that are in turn well matched to each individual customer or prospect.

Sales people must always be truly descriptive. The trick is to find the right way to do it, and that starts with the customer. Consider the now legendary television series Star Trek. A slow start preceded cult status. Additional series, spin-offs and films extended the brand's success over many years and financially it is one of the most successful TV franchises ever.

It may now be difficult to remember how different Star Trek was at its inception from other programmes broadcast at the time. Gene Roddenberry had to find a way of pitching his programme idea to the networks. He thought he had (and pushed persistently) a truly novel idea, yet initially there were no takers.

One of the most successful series at the time was the programme Wagon Train, a western. But the circumstances of the characters, a tight-knit group, who with each episode moved on to pastures new, were very similar to Roddenberry's idea for a space odyssey.

Roddenberry perceived this as a weakness, but in the end only sold Star Trek when he stopped telling essentially conservative producers his new show was "new and different", realised they were most likely to buy a classic "known quantity" and described it instead as "Wagon Train in space".

This is a good example of a considered, creative approach. Whatever is to be sold, just one phrase may enhance a sales approach and create success. Selling is dynamic and changing market situations demand a varying and flexible approach. The best sales people do not operate by rote, they do not "script" their presentation and they are always conscious of the fine detail of what they do.

A specific and individual customer focus is essential to everything in the sales process if it is to be successful. Only by careful consideration and thinking outside of the routine can such changes be incorporated.

Patrick Forsyth is the author of 100 Great Sales Ideas, published by Marshall Cavendish

Posted 15 December 2009 : Director.co.uk