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Ed Albertson
Vice President - National Accounts, Carew International, Inc.

"Whole-Brain" Selling

Post #57 - 07/15/2010

“Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think.”

- Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight, A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey
(London, England, Penguin, 2006) 17.

 

Often, selling is described as the combination of art and science, or more aptly, consisting of functional activities made more or less effective by the application of interpersonal skills. But what does that really mean to us as sales professionals? What “mix” of art and science is optimum and in what circumstances should any mix be applied?

In her book, My Stroke of Insight, Dr. Taylor describes the experience of having a stroke and the long journey of recovering from the stroke. What makes Dr. Taylor’s story so compelling is the fact that she is a neuroanatomist (brain scientist) who was working at Harvard Medical School at the time of her stroke. Dr. Taylor understood better than most, what was happening to her brain as the left hemisphere shut down, drowned in a major hemorrhage, causing her to not be able to walk, talk, read, write or recall her life’s memories. During her eight-year recovery, she documented not only the experience, but provided a lesson in the interrelatedness of the left and right hemisphere’s of the human brain and insight into how we might choose to have those hemispheres work for us as thinking, feeling beings.

In a simple but easy-to-understand explanation of how the human brain functions, Dr. Taylor details how the left hemisphere tends to deal with the logic, organization, details and language linear thinking. The right hemisphere complements the left by constructing a big picture of our interconnectedness with the rest of the world and, unlike the left which divides our sense of time into past, present and future, the right deals only with the immediate present and allows for spontaneity and imagination, free of inhibition and judgment. Our right brains suspend judgment of good and bad, right and wrong, while our left brains are all about making judgments and organizing all the information available to us. Left is linear and logical, right is relaxed and related. Viewing our brain as two complementary halves still allows for the distinction of what each half contributes to the seamless processing of the world in which we operate.

This “separate-but-equal” operation of the two hemispheres of our brains might just reinforce the necessity for engaging in call planning activity to prepare us for improved call execution on sales calls. By applying more left-brained effort during the call planning aspect of selling, we might free ourselves for a more satisfying and effective interpersonal interaction with our customers on a sales call. Perhaps a defined process for optimal call execution would create a road map with which we can navigate the extremely complex avenues of human communication and emerge with better-than-satisfactory results.  Lacking that left-brain planning activity, we risk needing to engage more of that functional “science” during our sales call and potentially robbing us of our natural inclination to want to pay more attention to our customer as a person.

With planning drawing heavily on our left brains, we can take the time and make the effort to thoughtfully and purposefully rehearse the sales call and explore alternative paths to take, precise words to use and outcomes we seek to achieve. Once completed, that planning exercise offers maximum flexibility to work with our right brains and engage our customer on a more human level.  Sales process and supporting models that simplify our understanding of the complexity of human communications and decision-making can go a long way toward enhancing the efficiency of call planning, which in turn enhances the effectiveness of a sales call. This observation also seems to nicely complement the adage that “if we fail to plan, we plan to fail.” By using our left and right brains together it results in making the most of the Art and Science of selling.

 

 

 

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