Brent Hodgson, Copywriter

Have you ever thought about what happens when someone makes a decision?

I mean physically, what happens.

Synapses flare, neurons pulse, and an electrochemical chain reaction is set off in that person’s brain.

With all the books on selling and copywriting and influence, we might be mistaken for thinking we can actually “make” people change their mind, “make” them decide on a course of action, or “make” them come around to your point of view.

But really, we can’t “make” people do any of these things.

The decisions are out of our control.

Although we might be in a position where we can influence the sale, as salespeople we do not control the sale ourselves, and we cannot “make” a customer decide to buy.

I recently finished a book that I’d been meaning to read for some time: Wombat Selling by Dr Michael Hewitt Gleeson.

Dr Gleeson Co-founded (with Edward De Bono) the School of Thinking and is a fellow Melbournian.

Because salespeople aren’t able to physically “close the sale”, Gleeson suggests a logical alternative: Stop putting so much effort into the close.

Instead, Gleeson suggests focusing effort at the beginning of the contact with the client, making contact more frequent, and using the number of client contacts (check moves) as a measure of sales team effectiveness rather than counting the number of sales closed.

(If you only skimmed the paragraph above, you’ll want to re-read it… You just missed three big concepts.)

The book also goes into ideas like how to create word of mouth selling opportunities, and achieve true viral marketing. In fact, the title of the book is to illustrate Dr Gleeson’s ideas around this - Word Of Mouth, Buy And Tell

I’ll be honest… It’s a great book - but I hated reading it.

It’s about twice as long as it needs to be, repeats key messages in detail long after they’ve become redundant, includes several patriotic odes to Melbourne and Australia (yes, I live here, and even I wanted to throw up), uses endless acronyms and buzzwords, and the book is as much a diatribe about organized religion as it is on effective marketing and salesmanship…

…So if you choose to read the book based on my recommendation, then let me apologise to you now.

I’m sorry.

I truly am.

My apology is sincere.

It’s a painful reading experience. But if you’re in marketing or sales (particularly online marketing and sales), then suck it up. Get a copy of Wombat Selling, and read it. Then put it on your bookshelf next to other great books like “Influence” by Robert Cialdini.

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