Human behavior plays a huge role in sales and understanding what makes people tick is one of the most important concepts sellers in all industries should seek to learn. Joe Sweeney has worn a variety of different hats over the course of his career, but he loves human behavior and he says it's the key to success in sales. Buyers You must understand why someone would buy your product. Joe's philosophy, as described in his book Networking Is A Contact Sport, is that networking, business, and sales are about giving and serving rather than getting something. People ask about the number one mistake that salespeople make, and it's believing that the process is about us. We think it's about our product. It's not. Joe gives talks all the time and he starts by saying, "You don't sell anything. What we do is help people get what they want." Instead, sellers tend to take the opposite approach and we talk about ourselves and our product. But your buyer doesn't care about that. All he cares about is whether your product can solve his needs and relieve some of his pain points. Criticism Joe said he spent a portion of his life criticizing other people because he represented a lot of high-net-worth people who did stupid things. When, for example, he encountered a woman outside a hospital dying from emphysema and smoking a cigarette, he made the connection. The pleasure she got from nicotine was greater than the pain she experienced from emphysema. The takeaway is to get good at understanding what makes people tick without criticizing them. All human behavior makes sense, even when we don't. Don't be critical of their actions. Understand people's needs and wants. Keep everything simple. 3 Common Needs Although we could all likely point to hundreds of needs, we really have three basic, common needs. We need to belong to something bigger than ourselves. We need to love and to be loved. Finally, we all want to know that our life has meaning and that we've made a difference. The greatest sales companies in the world have understood that. Perhaps our greatest need is the first one: the need to belong to something bigger. It's counter-intuitive today because with all the social media we falsely believe we're all connected but the truth is that we're less connected than we've ever been. Stated another way, we're more isolated now than ever. Need to belong The company that really understands this concept is Harley Davidson. Its number one competitor is BMW which far surpasses Harley, but Harley outsells everyone. The Harley Ownership Group, or HOG, makes its owners part of something bigger. It's about belonging. Remember the old TV show Cheers? Its tagline captures this desire. Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name. In this technology world, we pretend that we're connected to a massive network but we aren't. Need to be loved Coca Cola marketed to this need with the ad about teaching the world to sing. It was kind of a kumbaya moment with people holding hands singing together. They portrayed the feeling that if you drink Coca Cola, you'd feel all this love. Coca Cola understood the Maya Angelou quote: People will forget what you say. People will forget what you do. People will never forget the way you make them feel. Joe asks his groups, "What are you doing to answer the needs of these people? The belonging needs and the love needs." Need to make a difference We all want to know that our lives have meaning, and Mastercard captured that with the ad campaign that assigned prices to

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