What behavioral science can teach retail professionals about sales — Jeremy Miner | 7th Level

Are your sales teams effectively meeting the needs of today’s changing consumers? Today on Inside Automotive, we’re pleased to welcome Jeremy Miner, internationally recognized sales trainer and the Founder and Chairman of 7th Level, to discuss how managers and salespeople can adapt to the market. Miner has been featured in Forbes, USA Today, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Yahoo Finance, to name a few. Miner also has a large following on the social platform TikTok (@jeremy_miner), where he shares daily sales tips and motivation.  

Miner got into sales over 20 years ago as an admitted broke, burnout college student. He got his first job selling home-security cameras door-to-door, but the training he got right before canvassing the neighborhood for the first time was not very helpful. Miner’s trainer encouraged him to be enthusiastic and excited, but he was met with several objections. After seven or eight weeks of rejection, Miner reached the point where he considered getting out of the sales game altogether.

That’s when Miner’s sales manager played a Tony Robbins CD one evening after work. Robbins’s words resonated with him. To paraphrase, Robbins’s message was that most people fail because they don’t have the proper skills necessary to succeed. When Miner heard that for the first time, he realized that his lack of success might be due to sub-standard or outdated training. At this time, Miner was also studying behavioral sciences in college, and he wanted to find a way to integrate psychological principles with the sales process. This desire led him to develop neuro-emotional persuasion questioning (NEPQ). Miner began learning techniques that work with human behavior.

It’s essential to determine what triggers a customer to open up and what triggers a customer to go into fight or flight mode. Many salespeople are still taught to be enthusiastic when talking to prospects, but the harsh reality is that consumers don’t care.

Over 3 billion content creators are trying to attract your prospect’s attention every day. Many businesses are even competing with 13-year-olds on TikTok. With the power of the internet and social media, salespeople must understand that their prospects are being sold 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Miner explains that salespeople must start thinking like problem and solution finders, not product pushers. Problem-finders ask the right questions at the correct times during the sales process. The goal is to assist customers with identifying problems they didn’t even know they had.

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