How To Beat The Bots and Keep Your Sales Job with Anita Nielsen #293

Our guest Anita Nielsen is a sales performance consultant with over twenty years of experience in B2B sales and support. As an advocate for salespeople, she is dedicated to coaching and equipping these professionals for success. With a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s in business administration from the New York Institute of Technology, Anita is uniquely positioned to help salespeople adapt and thrive. Anita lives in Chicagoland so we met live at the NIU campus to discuss her new book Beat the Bots –How Your Humanity Can Future-Proof Your Tech Sales Career

Sales is Human to Human

According to Forrester artificial intelligence will eliminate millions of B2B sales jobs by 2020. Anita disagrees. Complex sales is not automatable. B2B sales is nothing like order fulfillment with a finite set of decisions. Complex sales is as defined, complex. The way to beat the bots is to leverage vulnerability and empathy. People want authentic relationships and sales people can do that in a way no algorithm ever can.

Value Matters

According to Anita, the best way to keep your sales job is to focus on value. She breaks value down into three layers:

1. General Layer – the value inherent to the product or service
2. Company Layer – the value the company adds beyond the product or service
3. Personal Layer- how the seller adds value to the experience of the product and company

People purchase from those who have their best interest in mind. This is not automatable and the path to beat the bots.

Motivating Elephants

Jonathan Haidt studied how humans makes decisions. He breaks this into two parts: a Rational system and an Emotional system. Consider this in the context of an elephant and a rider. The rider is the rational system, the elephant is the emotional system. The rider needs to persuade the elephant where to travel. The way to move the elephant is to focus on both, realizing the elephant (the emotional side) is very very large. Start with the emotional, then move to the rational.

Remember you’re selling to a human, not a company. Don’t assume you know their values. Instead discover with questions and authentic conversations before taking action. Being genuine, is what differentiates you from the rest. This kind of behavior makes you irreplaceable.

Take Action

Anita believes that both delighting AND endearing selling makes you indispensable. Relationships with customers that are true and authentic pay off. Your customers will have your back when it comes time to change and make buy. Focus on endearing.

How to Find Anita Nielsen

This is her company LDK Advisory Services

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitanielsen/
- https://www.facebook.com/LDKAdvisory/
- Twitter: @anielsenldk

This is her book Beat the Bots –How Your Humanity Can Future-Proof Your Tech Sales Career

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Past Episodes on Building Relationships with Sales

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