Scientific Selling: Creating High-Performance Sales Teams Through Applied Psychology and Testing

Chapter 1

The Science of Selling

We are focusing on cultural and structural change because our business is growing and changing all the time, and the economy has forced some changes and we're expecting more in the future. Our business used to be a low-level sale, and we had a “one sales style fits all” philosophy. Over time, though, there emerged many different customer types, who wanted to interact with us in different ways. As a result, we've had to change the way managers recruit and design their team, all based upon a better understanding of the work that needs to be done.

—Shane McCarrey, Manager of Human Relations and Development, ABS Global

This book is about the application of science to the business of selling. There are many other books about selling that have “science” in their titles. However, in every case that we've examined, the science was simply that: part of the title. The term was tacked onto the title in order to give those books some borrowed credibility, even though they were full of the same “how I sold a million-dollar deal in a day” anecdotes that are, unfortunately, common to the genre.

By “science,” we mean real science that is based on gathering observable, empirical, and measurable evidence and analyzing that evidence according to specific, generally accepted principles of reasoning and logic. We mean real science that follows the scientific method, consisting of the collection of data through experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses. ...