Selling with the Right Side of the Brain
Anybody can draw. That was the claim of the book Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. The part about the brain’s left side being more categorical, and the right more artistic, that part’s probably a myth. But the book still had a point: learning how to draw is less about learning how to draw specific shapes, and it’s more about drawing the shapes (and the shades, and the colors) that you see. Drawing is about seeing.
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“I don’t know how to sell”. “This client is trying to get me into an agreement”. “He’s not interested in my proposal.” “I’ll just lower the price and I’ll get the gig.” “I’ve been trying to convince the customer but they’re not interested.”
Learning how to sell might be, for you, akin to learning how to draw. You’ve never been good at it, and never will be.
And yet, it’s likely that you can learn how to draw, and learn how to sell, simply by flipping things around.
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In the book, we’re shown two pictures: a first picture that looks like it was drawn by a kid. You clearly see a house, drawn first as a box, with then a triangle added for the roof, and a rectangle for the door. And a tree: a sort of fluffy cloud mounted on top of the trunk’s two curvy lines. And then, another picture, in fine detail, as if drawn by an artist: a face, proportioned to look real, with shades and character: you can tell the drawn face caries an emotion. The two pictures, we then learn, are drawn by the same person. They went through the following transformation: to unlearn something about drawing (that a house “looks like this”), and learn something about seeing (there’s a darker area next to that highlight).
Later, there’s a brilliant exercise for you to try, which is to take a photo you’re trying to reproduce, and to turn it upside down. This will force you to see, not what the categorical part of your brain will associate (“oh, this is an eye, I know how to draw an eye”), but the raw elements: a line that’s curvy, going this long, and then shading, from here to there. You’ll quickly develop the right habits, the right practices, to draw what you really see.
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When it comes to selling, there’s also something we should flip. Selling is about the other person.
It’s not about what you think the person wants. It’s not about your beliefs about the person. It’s not about the certainties you hold (that selling is about convincing), and the judgments you made (this client isn’t interested). Selling is about seeing the person’s hopes, their journey up to this point, the choices they’re considering, and the progress they’re trying to make. It’s about learning to map out the internal back and forth they’re going through. It’s about seeing whether they’re close to making a decision, or just looking, whether they’re eager but just early, or more advanced and decided. It’s about seeing them as they are.
The equivalent exercise you can do is to pay attention when you, yourself, are making a purchase. You might notice how you were looking at options like “I’m just going to do it myself”, before hitting a sort of natural deadline, an urgent date approaching, and noticing how your options are changing in real time. You might notice how at first you outweigh the role of the price in your decision-making, and at the end, you chose an option that was way over-budget, but clearly did the job better than anything else. In the end, you chose the option that helped you make progress. And so it will be for the clients and customers you’re trying to serve. And all this you can learn.
Anybody can sell. Selling is about seeing.
