Introduction ears ago I was selling an office equipment solution to the CEO of a 100-person company. I was selling to him the way I had been taught: I established comfortable conversation while building trust, asked questions to diagnose his needs, then pre- sented my solution as an answer to his needs. Everything appeared to be going along as planned. Suddenly he leaned forward and asked, "Aren't you going to close me now?" Why is it that customers know more about selling techniques than most salespeople know about buying behavior? That's not right. An understanding of buying is where selling should start. We need to redefine "selling" to mean helping people buy. What might "helping people buy" actually mean? The HR Chally Group, founded in 1973 through a grant from the United States Jus- tice Department to create validated assessments that accurately pre- dict on-the-job effectiveness--including sales performance, has a lot to say. For their most recent report Chally interviewed over 2,500 cus- tomers who provided opinions about more than 4,000 salespeople. The results appear in The Chally World Class Sales Excellence Research Re- port. Among their findings was that "customers usually award the prize to the salesperson who has been there through every step of their buying process, meeting customer need after customer need by presenting the right information at the right time. To win a sale, then, a salesperson's sales process must match perfectly with the customer's buying process. The two should be mirror images." 1 We can take a lesson as well from Dr. Steven Covey's classic Y