Ken Rutsky, Founder & President, KJR Associates, Inc.

In the late 1980s I had the privilege to attend IBM’s vaunted sales training.  We learned techniques for rapport building, need finding, objection handling, and closing, even including, and I kid you not, the highly praised “assumptive/alternative close” which went something like, “Do you want that mainframe cabinet in White or IBM Blue?”

But most of all, we learned and practiced the hallowed technique of  “NFAR”, or Need, Feature, Advantage, Reaction. The idea being – question until you understand need, then describe your feature and its advantage, then wait for the reaction.