When selling your team on the benefits of safety, you must remember this one key element that is more likely to create buy-in than any compelling argument you may have for safety. Watch the video.
Safety shouldn’t have to be sold. People get hung up on the word selling like it’s a bad thing.
But selling happens everywhere. An innocent man shouldn’t have to sell a jury to stay out of prison. But he does. You sell if you want a raise. You sell when you try to convince your kids to clean up their room. You sell your spouse on what movie you want to watch.
However, no one buys-in to anything that doesn’t make their lives better in some way.
It’s why you buy cars, vacations, education, insurance, investments. You buy-in when you figure out how your life will be better.
Safety is sold the same way too. It’s not about shoving safety down the throats of your people. It’s about helping them see that safety improves their lives in a way that perhaps they are not seeing it.
Back in 1997, in my very first book (Knock Knock! Who's There? The Out-Of-Your-Mind Approach to Cold-Calling - no longer in print), I wrote about the 2-sales rule.
In every sales situation, there are two sales. The first sale is you: the salesperson. The second sale is whatever is in the briefcase – the product, point-of-view, or idea.
The 2-Sales Rule says: If you don’t make the first sale, you will never make the second sale.
People buy the salesperson before they ever buy what that person is selling. We don’t buy from people we don’t trust. Your people must buy-in to you before they will buy-in to your ideas.
We buy from people we trust. And if the person we trust and respect asks for our buy-in to safety, we are more likely to give it.
Remember, you don't need more rules and reminders in safety. You need more of your employees to buy-in. And that takes a very different approach.
