The Endgame to Selling

In golf, there is a saying that, "You drive for show, but you putt for dough." In selling, you prospect and present for show, but you overcome customer skepticism and gain commitment for dough. Your ability to answer objections and get the sale is the true test of how good you really are as a salesperson.

The True Test of Selling

This is perhaps the most stressful and challenging part of the sales process. It's where the rubber meets the road. It is your ability to answer the questions that the prospect puts to you and overcome his natural reluctance to make a commitment that wraps up the sales process. It is also the part of the sales process that salespeople dislike the most and which customers find the most stressful.

Plan It in Advance

The end game of selling must be carefully thought through and planned in advance so that you are thoroughly prepared to bring the sales conversation to its natural conclusion at the earliest and most appropriate moment. Fortunately, this is a skill, like riding a bicycle or typing with a typewriter, and you can learn it through study and practice.

Handling Objections Comes First

Handling objections and closing the sale are two different parts of the sales process but they are so close together that this chapter will discuss them as a single function. Just as there are reasons why people buy a product, there are reasons why they don't. Often answering an objection or removing an obstacle is the critical element in making the sale. You can answer the objection and close the sale simultaneously.

Make It a Reason to Buy

Objections can be turned into reasons for buying. Just as there is a primary reason for buying a product, a hot button, there is a primary objection that stops the person from buying it. If you can emphasize the one and remove the other, the sale falls together naturally.

Smaller Products Versus Larger Products

In selling smaller products or services, where you can prospect and make a complete presentation in the first meeting, your approach to closing will be different from that required if you are selling a larger product in a multi-call sale that stretches over several weeks or months.

Ask For the Order

In the shorter, smaller sale, the prospect knows everything necessary to make a buying decision at the end of your presentation. Your aim should be to answer any lingering questions and then ask for the order. In the larger sale, you may have to meet with the prospect several times before the prospect is in a position to make a buying decision. You will have to be more patient and persistent.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, prepare yourself in advance for the endgame of selling by anticipating anything the customer might offer as a reason for not buying. Be ready.
Second, look for the hot button, the reason the customer will buy, and press it. Meanwhile, find out his major reason for not buying and remove it.

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The Key to Sales Success

Learn to Listen Well

A vital key to sales success is listening. The ability to listen well is absolutely indispensable for success in all human relationships. The ability to be a good listener in a sales conversation is the foundation of the new model of selling. It leads to easier sales, higher earnings and greater enjoyment from the sales profession.

Being A Good Talker is Not Enough

Many salespeople have been brought up with the idea that, in order to be good at your profession, you must be a glad-hander and a good talker. You have even heard people say, "You have the 'gift of the gab'; you should be in sales!"

Focus On the Other Person

Nothing could be further from the truth. As many as seventy five percent of all top salespeople are defined as introverts on psychological tests. They are very easy going and other-centered. They would much rather listen than talk. They are very interested in the thoughts and feelings of other people and they are quite comfortable sitting and listening to their prospects. They would much rather listen than talk in a sales situation. Poor salespeople dominate the talking, but top salespeople dominate the listening.

Practice "White Magic" With Everyone

Listening has even been called "white magic." It is too rarely engaged in by business people. When a salesperson develops a reputation for being an excellent listener, prospects and customers feel comfortable and secure in his or her presence. They buy more readily, and more often.

Practice the 70/30 Rule

You've heard it said that Allah gave man two ears and one mouth, and he is supposed to use them in that proportion.

Top salespeople practice the "70/30 rule." They talk and ask questions 30 percent or less of the time while they listen intently to their customers 70 percent or more of the time. They use their ears and mouth in the right ratio.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, resolve today that, from now on, you are going to dominate the listening in every sales conversation. Become comfortable with silence.

Second, practice the 70/30 rule in every sales conversation. Listen 70% of the time and only talk and ask questions 30% of the time.

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Programming Yourself for Success

Your mission statement is always written in the present tense, as though you have already become the person that you have described. It is always positive rather than negative. And it is always personal.

Program Yourself Correctly

Your subconscious mind can only accept your mission statement as a set of commands when you phrase it in the present, positive and personal tenses. "I am an exceptional salesperson," is a perfect example. After every sales call, you should quickly reread your mission statement and ask yourself if your recent behavior was more like the person you want to be, or less? As a top sales performer, you are always comparing your sales activities against a high standard and adjusting your activities upward. You're continually striving to be better. Every day in every way, you are deliberately working to become more like the ideal person you have envisioned.

Determine Your Mission Statement

Your goal is that, a year from today, when one of your customers has lunch with one of your prospects, and your prospect asks your customer to describe you in detail as a salesperson, your customer will recite your business mission statement voluntarily. The way you have treated your customer will have been so exemplary that your customer will describe you in the most glowing of terms.

Compare Yourself Against Yourself

Once you have developed a mission statement like this, you can read it, review it, edit it, and upgrade it regularly. You can add additional qualities to it and more clearly define the qualities you've already listed. It becomes your personal credo, your philosophy of life, your statement of beliefs and a guide to your behavior in all your interactions with others. Each day, you can evaluate your behaviors and compare them against the standard that you have set in this statement.

Shape Your Own Personality

Over time, a remarkable thing will happen. As you read and review your personal mission statement, you will find yourself, almost unconsciously, shaping your words and conforming your behaviors so that you are more and more like the ideal person you have defined. People will notice the change in you almost immediately. Over time, you will find that you are actually creating within yourself the kind of character and personality that you most admire in others. You will have become the molder and the shaper of your own personal destiny. After you have applied the ABC Method to your list, you will now be completely organized and ready to get more important things done faster.

Action Exercises

First, imagine that one of your customers was going to meet with one of your prospects. What would you want him to say about you? How could you behave with your customer to assure that he says these things?

Second, talk to yourself positively all the time. Feed your mind with positive messages that describe your goals and the person you want to be.

The Toughest Job

There Are No Buffers

Selling is one of the toughest jobs in the world. There are no buffers between you and the reality of daily difficulties, delays and disappointments. You often ride an emotional roller-coaster, up and down, that never seems to stop. You are all alone.

You Must Motivate Yourself

Like a front line soldier, you must get yourself up every day and go out to where the bullets of rejection fly. You must continually deal with the possibility that all your sales efforts could turn out to be in vain through no fault of your own. And you must keep on going in spite of this because your profession of selling requires it.

Face the Facts of Selling

Selling is hard. It always has and it always will be. Even for the best and most experienced salespeople, it is a continual effort. You can make it easier by developing your skills in the critical areas of prospecting, presenting and closing sales, but you can never make selling an easy profession. However, once you accept that selling is a hard way to make a living, it somehow becomes a little easier. When you stop expecting it to be something other than it is, much of the stress of selling goes out of it. As William James said, "The first step in dealing with any difficulty is to be willing to have it so."

Open Unlimited Opportunities

Selling is also a wonderful profession. It offers opportunities for the average person that are unimaginable in most countries. Your potential earnings are beyond what 95 percent of the world's population could ever hope for or expect. Because selling is difficult, your activities are valuable and important and they have to pay you very well for carrying them out. As you move to the top of your field, you can earn more than a person with ten or twelve years of university education. You can eventually become financially independent. Fully five percent of self-made millionaires in America are salespeople who do their jobs extremely well.

Make a Wonderful Living

As a salesperson, the reason that you can make a wonderful living for yourself and your family, achieve your goals and fulfill all of your aspirations, is because making the sale is difficult, and often, extremely difficult. And the longer the sales cycle, or the larger the dollar amount involved, the more that companies have to pay salespeople to do the work. When you are selling complicated or expensive products in a highly competitive market, and you do it well, you can become one of the highest paid people in your field, if not the world.

Be the Best at What You Do

You should get up every morning and give a silent prayer of thanks that selling is so difficult. If it was easy, the field would be flooded by amateurs and the amount you could earn would be greatly reduced. But because it is hellishly hard, by becoming very good at it, your future can be unlimited!

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, dedicate yourself to getting better and better at selling. The better you get at selling and closing, the easier and more enjoyable it is.

Second, be grateful that selling is a tough job. It keeps the weaklings and the mediocre out of the field and enables you to be even more successful.

Relationships Are Everything

Your Foundation for Success

Relationship Selling is the core of all modern selling strategies. Your ability to develop and maintain long-term customer relationships is the foundation for your success as a salesperson and your success in business. Relationship selling requires a clear understanding of the dynamics of the selling process as they are experienced by your customer.

Propose a Business Marriage

For your customer, a buying decision usually means a decision to enter into a long-term relationship with you and your company. It is very much like a "business marriage." Before the customer decides to buy, he can take you or leave you. He doesn't need you or your company. He has a variety of options and choices open to him, including not buying anything at all. But when your customer makes a decision to buy from you and gives you money for the product or service you are selling, he becomes dependent on you. And since he has probably had bad buying experiences in the past, he is very uneasy and uncertain about getting into this kind of dependency relationship.

Fulfill Your Promises

What if you let the customer down? What if your product does not work as you promised? What if you don't service it and support it as you promised? What if it breaks down and he can't get it replaced? What if the product or service is completely inappropriate for his needs? These are real dilemmas that go through the mind of every customer when it comes time to make the critical buying decision.

Focus on the Relationship

Because of the complexity of most products and services today, especially high-tech products, the relationship is actually more important than the product. The customer doesn't know the ingredients or components of your product, or how your company functions, or how he will be treated after he has given you his money, but he can make an assessment about you and about the relationship that has developed between the two of you over the course of the selling process. So in reality, the customer's decision is based on the fact that he has come to trust you and believe in what you say.

Build a Solid Trust Bond

In many cases, the quality of your relationship with the customer is the competitive advantage that enables you to edge out others who may have similar products and services. The quality of the trust bond that exists between you and your customers can be so strong that no other competitor can get between you.

Keep Your Customers for Life

The single biggest mistake that causes salespeople to lose customers is taking those customers for granted. This is a form of "customer entropy." It is when the salesperson relaxes his efforts and begins to ignore the customer. Almost 70 percent of customers who walked away from their existing suppliers later replied that they made the change primarily because of a lack of attention from the company.

Once you have invested the time and made the efforts necessary to build a high-quality, trust-based relationship with your customer, you must maintain that relationship for the life of your business. You must never take it for granted.

Action Exercises

First, focus on building a high quality relationship with each customer by treating your customer so well that he comes back, buys again and refers you to his friends.

Second, pay attention to your existing customers. Tell them you appreciate them. Look for ways to thank them and encourage them to come back and do business with you again.

Self-Image in Selling

Why Your Self-Image is a Key Part of Your Personality

Your self-image is the way you see yourself and think about yourself. It is often called your "inner mirror." You look into this mirror in every situation to see how you should perform on the outside. You always behave on the outside in a manner consistent with the picture you have of yourself on the inside.

How Do You See Yourself

For example, if you see yourself, as calm, confident and competent in any aspect of selling, when you are engaged in that activity, you will feel calm, confident and competent. You will be positive and happy. You will perform well and get excellent results. If, for any reason, it doesn't go well at that time, you will throw it off and dismiss it as a temporary situation. Your self-image is clear. In your mind's eye you see yourself as good and capable in that area, and nothing can interfere with your mental picture.

Change Your Self-Image

The most rapid improvements in sales results come from changing your self-image. The moment that you see yourself differently, you behave differently as well. And because you are behaving differently, you get different results.

My Own Story

Some years ago, when I was selling mobile phones over the phone in the UK market, I would end my pitch by emailing the prospect an outlining of the package benefits and encourage him to "think about it." My self-image was such that I could not bring myself to ask the prospect to make a buying decision. All day long, I would call different people pitching my product and leaving an email with descriptions to read. And as you might imagine, I was not making any sales. When I called people back after they had time to think about it, they would invariably say that they were not interested.

The Turning Point

I was getting desperate. I was living from hand to mouth at the time. Although I was seeing lots of prospects, I was making very few sales. Then I had a revelation which changed my career at the time. I realized that it was my fear of asking for the order that was causing all my problems. It was not my prospects. It was me. I needed to change my self-image and thereby change my behavior if I wanted results to improve.

Make A Decision

The very next morning, I made the decision that I would not call back on a prospect. The size of the purchase was small and, when I had completed my pitch, the prospect would know everything that he needed to know to make a decision. There was no benefit or advantage of leaving material over the email or giving the prospect several days to think about it. At my very first call, and I still remember it, when I had finished my presentation, the prospect said, "Let me think it over." I smiled and told him that I did not make call backs because I was too busy, and then I said, "You know everything you need to know to make a decision right now. Why don't you just take it?" I remember him shrugging his shoulders and saying, "OK. I'll take it. How would you like to be paid?"

Double Your Earnings

I walked out of that sales floor on a cloud. That very day I tripled my sales. That week, I sold more than anyone else in the company. By the end of the month, they had made me a Team Leader with 20 people under me. I went from making one or two sales per week to making ten or fifteen sales per week. I went from worrying about money to a large salary with an override on the activities of all my salespeople. My sales life took off and, with few exceptions, it never stopped. And the turning point was that conscious choice to modify my self-image and make it more consistent with the results I wanted rather than the results that I was getting.

Action Exercises

Now, here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, begin to see yourself the way you want to be. See yourself as strong, confident, competent and professional in every way. The person you see is the person you will be.
Second, identify an area of selling where your own ideas about yourself and the situation are holding you back. You always perform on the outside the way you see yourself on the inside.