You’re watching the Super Bowl when one of those unforgettable commercials comes on.  You grab your sides with laughter.  How do they come up with these things?

The next day everybody at work is talking about that great ad for…

What the heck WAS the product?

We’ve all seen those ads—so much wall-to-wall cleverness and funny characters that there’s no room in your head to notice and remember what should be the one thing that 10 million bucks was supposed to achieve:  the purchase of the product.

The same thing applies to the sales process.  Who hasn’t seen a salesperson, fresh from a seminar on cross-selling, suddenly spread a dozen different account options like a Japanese fan in front of a poor customer, whose expression falls into a blank and frightened stare?

A confused mind never buys.  Tattoo that axiom on your brain.  Choice is a lovely thing, but give people too many options, shared with unclear thinking, causes a client to make no choice at all.

Barry Schwartz drives this point home in The Paradox of Choice—Why More is Less. More couples decide to date again in speed dating events with six options than with twelve.  More customers buy jam from a street market vendor with four choices than from a similar stall with eight choices.

Even if a customer does manage to make a choice, they are likely to be less happy about the one they selected because they know about the advantages they turned down in the other options.  People who were offered a plane ticket to Las Vegas valued the gift more highly when it was offered in isolation than when it was offered with several choices.

You confuse ’em, you lose ’em.  So, keep it simple.

Use fourth-grade language. Make your suggestions in chunks. For example, “I’m going to recommend three steps. The first step is to better align your deposits by setting up a Financial Freedom savings account, another for your 2^nd home, and another for a college-savings account for your son. We’ll set up an automatic sweep as money comes into your account to each of these savings accounts. Then, your second step is to set up your loan structure, I’m going to recommend…”

Bring everything into a few small chunks and explain it in a way that makes it easy for your client to understand and to buy.

Remember, a confused mind never buys.

Your ability to help people requires you to demonstrate clear thinking so you can articulate the best options with the least number of steps and words.

This will make purchasing your product or service easy for the client and will create a mind more ready to buy.

You’re watching the Super Bowl when one of those unforgettable commercials comes on.  You grab your sides with laughter.  How do they come up with these things?

The next day everybody at work is talking about that great ad for…

What the heck WAS the product?

We’ve all seen those ads—so much wall-to-wall cleverness and funny characters that there’s no room in your head to notice and remember what should be the one thing that 10 million bucks was supposed to achieve:  the purchase of the product.

The same thing applies to the sales process.  Who hasn’t seen a salesperson, fresh from a seminar on cross-selling, suddenly spread a dozen different account options like a Japanese fan in front of a poor customer, whose expression falls into a blank and frightened stare?

A confused mind never buys.  Tattoo that axiom on your brain.  Choice is a lovely thing, but give people too many options, shared with unclear thinking, causes a client to make no choice at all.

Barry Schwartz drives this point home in The Paradox of Choice—Why More is Less. More couples decide to date again in speed dating events with six options than with twelve.  More customers buy jam from a street market vendor with four choices than from a similar stall with eight choices.

Even if a customer does manage to make a choice, they are likely to be less happy about the one they selected because they know about the advantages they turned down in the other options.  People who were offered a plane ticket to Las Vegas valued the gift more highly when it was offered in isolation than when it was offered with several choices.

You confuse ’em, you lose ’em.  So, keep it simple.

Use fourth-grade language. Make your suggestions in chunks. For example, “I’m going to recommend three steps. The first step is to better align your deposits by setting up a Financial Freedom savings account, another for your 2^nd home, and another for a college-savings account for your son. We’ll set up an automatic sweep as money comes into your account to each of these savings accounts. Then, your second step is to set up your loan structure, I’m going to recommend…”

Bring everything into a few small chunks and explain it in a way that makes it easy for your client to understand and to buy.

Remember, a confused mind never buys.

Your ability to help people requires you to demonstrate clear thinking so you can articulate the best options with the least number of steps and words.

This will make purchasing your product or service easy for the client and will create a mind more ready to buy.

You’re human. Can we assume that? If so, you’ll always make mistakes. You can count on that.

You’ll miss deadlines. You’ll disappoint people by not meeting their expectations and failing to live up to your commitments.

If there are people who evolved beyond their ability to display complete integrity at every waking moment, I haven’t yet met one.

Knowing that, it is critical to sustaining great relationships that you possess the ability to clean up your messes as you make them.

Ron, a marketing specialist, missed deadline after deadline. Suddenly, his entire team felt that he had let them down. They began to work around him whenever they could.

Sharon, a loan processor, repeatedly made mistakes in the loan documents she handled. Nobody ever closed a loan without having to spend extra and wasteful time checking her work. Sharon couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t getting promoted or earning bonuses like the others. After all, she had been at the company longer than most of the others.

Tim, a teenager, told his mom that as a contribution to the family, he would weed the flower garden every week during the summer. But more often than not, he skipped a week. Soon, dandelions outnumbered daffodils.

All of these flaws, taken from the viewpoints of Ron, Sharon, and Tim, aren’t very big. Heck, they did many other tasks quite well.

What each of them missed is this: they consistently defied the trust of the people around them. But relationships are built on trust. Without that foundation of trust, there is no basis for a relationship.

What each of them didn’t understand is that they breached the trust each time they didn’t do what they said they would do. And, of course, they never bothered to come back and clean up the mess.

A cleanup has two parts—acknowledge that the results are not OK, and understand that there must be a commitment to take corrective action.

So, when Ron missed a deadline, he owed it to his team to go to them and say, “I blew it. I missed that deadline. There’s no excuse. It shouldn’t have happened. I’m putting a tickler system in place to remind myself earlier in the process so it won’t happen again.”

Sharon should say to her boss, “I can see that I made mistakes in this document, and I know that’s not acceptable. I will put a reminder at my desk to checklist each document before I submit it to make sure each of these is accurate. I want you to be able to trust me.”

Tim can mend his problem with his parents by saying, “I blew it. I know we had a deal, and I didn’t follow through. That’s not okay with me either because I want you to know you can always trust me. I’m going to set a deadline that I will make sure the garden is weeded by each Saturday afternoon. I won’t miss that deadline again.”

People will always make mistakes. But others will forgive us if we simply come clean and show we understand that we did not demonstrate integrity in our actions and that we care enough to fix the situation.

When we don’t, not only do others lose faith in us, we lose faith in ourselves.

In the end, every agreement that isn’t properly followed through ultimately weakens our own self-esteem. Our self-esteem tumbles into a downward spiral which, once begun, leads to more unkept promises and an even lower sense of self-worth.

What you don’t want is to be an “apologetic liar”—someone who says, “I’m sorry” but then repeats the same outcome. The words, “I’m sorry” are often empty and meaningless for many people.  

Alternatively, a short message of “I blew it, and it isn’t okay. Here’s what I’ll do to correct it” is all people need to hear to restore their faith in us and to have us restore faith in ourselves.