"How many phone calls have you made today?"

I met a great person Tuesday at the eWomen lunchon in Euless. Her name is Alicia Hicks and her company is "SellingWoman". Alicia's pedigree is beyond impressive. You can get to know her here: www.dailysalesnugget.com

I love her approach to helping women find their "natural sales woman" inside each and every one of us. It is pretty simple: stop selling.

I am going to put that in all caps:

STOP SELLING

I think women (like me) are often paralyzed by the whole sales game that men seem so adept at playing. I can't count how many times my husband has called me and asked "how many calls have you made today?" To which I answer ZERO. "And before you ask about tomorrow, my answer is ZERO for tomorrow as well". I don't like to cold call. It is painful. I hate it. The person on the other end of the phone hates it. Why then would we subject ourselves to this torturous activity? I am sure that cold calling leads to new sales. I get that. But aren't there other ways we can accomplish this--getting more sales? There has got to be.

Alicia believes (and I do too) that women are natural born sales people. If we accept the premise that sales is about relationship building, who better to accomplish that then women--the sex who is 9 times out of 10 more likely to focus on the dynamics of the relationship. And for us it is a natural strength that we all have.

I think for men it is a game. If potential client does A then you respond with B. If he does C then you close in with D. Yuck! So inauthentic.

Martha Barletta, an expert on how women sell points out that we tend to use different methods she calls Same-Same, Scoop and Gift Exchange to connect. She writes:

"Same-Same is the verbal scanning we do to find similarities with another person. Scoop is the opposite of men’s Put-Down, where we try our hardest to support another person when we sense they might feel badly about something. Gift Exchange is the perfect example of how women communicate in full context in order to build connections. In the middle of a business conversation one woman may say to another, “I love your purse.” The other woman might respond with, “Oh, my sister bought this for me in East Hampton for my birthday in August.” The second woman has just given a gift of information which the first woman can use to establish connections, such as, “Isn’t East Hampton beautiful?” or “My sister always gives me nice gifts too.” Now to men, this is more personal information than they’re comfortable with. They prefer to stick to the facts and features, and avoid the stories and personal details."

That is me in a nutshell.

So what if....(brace yourself for impact) we stopped trying to "play the game" and instead drew on our natural strengths as communicators and relationship builders to make more sales? Hmmmmmm.....that's bordering on revolutionary. I am going to chew on it and revisit this issue. Let me know your thoughts.