The Law of the Customer
The customer always acts to satisfy his or her interests by seeking the very most and best at the lowest price possible. Customers practice economic calculation in their choices. They seek to minimize their purchases and to minimize their costs, or outlays. Customers always attempt to get the things they want the fastest and easiest way possible, right now, at the lower possible price. This is not a problem. This is merely a fact of business life. Customers want the very most for the very least, and they will buy from whomever they feel can best give it to them.
Customers are Both Demanding and Ruthless
Customers are both demanding and ruthless; they reward highly those companies that serve them best and allow those companies that serve them poorly to fail. Sam Walton once said, “We all have the same boss, the customer, and he can fire us any time he wants by deciding to buy somewhere else.” It isn't that customers don't care about your business, its just that customers care more about themselves and their own satisfaction than they do about the success or failure of your enterprise. Wherever you see a business fail, you see a business where the owners were either unable or unwilling to adjust their offerings to satisfy the customers at prices that allowed them to carry on.
Customer Always Behave Rationally
Customers always behave rationally in pursuing the path of least resistance to get want they want. From the point of view of the customer, every action makes perfect sense. All buying behavior is aimed at achieving greater personal satisfaction, toward improving one's position, toward being better off. If a salesperson or a businessperson suggests that the customers are stupid for not patronizing a particular store or buying its products, it is actually the salesperson or the businessperson who is stupid. The customer is very smart and usually knows what is in his or her best interest. The customer's decision is always rational, from the customer's point of view.
Proper Business Planning
Proper business planning always begins with the customer as the central focus of attention and discussion. People within companies have a dangerous tendency to lose touch with the thoughts, feelings, and needs of their customers. They tend to talk only among themselves, and what is worse, they listen only to each other. They lose touch with the reality of their customers. If you are in business, and if what you do affects your customer, you should mentally erect a statue of the customer and place it in the middle of the table when you discuss any plans regarding your products or services. Always ask yourself; if the customer was sitting here listening to us, what would the customer be thinking? What would the customer say?
Action Exercise
Make a list of all your customers, both inside and outside of your business. Write down the names of your boss and co-workers, your outside customers and contacts, everyone with whom you deal, including your staff
Written by Brian Tracy and trained by Mark Garbelotto
Three Powerful Principles for Success
Be Clear About Your Goals
There are many simi larities between business and war. In both cases, the victor is the one who uses superior strategy against his or her competition.
There are three principles of military strategy you can apply to your work every single day. The first idea from the military is called the Principle of Man euver. The principle of man euver says that you should be clear about the goal, but be flexible about the process of ach ieving it. According to the Menninger Institute, this quality of flexibility is the most important single quality that you will require for success in times of rap id change.
Be Open to Continuous Feedback
A key peak performance quality for you is to "accept feedback and self-correct." Peak performers are those who can take information from their environment and even if the information is contrary to all of their planning, they can accept the information, modify their plans, and continue moving forward. They are always open to new ideas and insights.
Learn What You Need to Know
The second military principle you can use is the Principle of Intelligence. This principle of intelligence means simply, "get the facts!"
The most important thing in business decision making is for you to get accurate information. Facts don't lie. It is important that you get the real facts, not the assumed facts or the apparent facts or the obvious facts, or the hoped for facts, but the real, provable facts.
Make Better Decisions
Perhaps the key job of the executive is decision making. The quality of the decisions that you make will be in direct proportion to the amount of time that you take to gather timely and accurate information. The very best thing that you can do, if you have insufficient information, is to delay making a decision at all.
Invest Your Resources Wisely
The third military principle applied to strategic planning is the Principle of Economy of Force. Economy of force means that you expend only the resources necessary to achieve the objective and not more. It also means that you commit sufficient resources to achieve the objective once you have decided upon it.
Since your own personal en ergy is all you really have to invest over the course of your lif etime, the military principle of economy says that you should be very selfish when deciding how you are going to use your self. Keep asking your self, "How important is this?" and more important, "How important is this to me?"
Action Ex ercises
Here are two ideas that you can apply immediately to be more strategic in your work and personal life.
First, remain flexible when you are working towards your goal. In times of rap id change, all of your best ideas can be contradicted by new information. Be willing to try different things. Be open to new inputs and ideas.
Second, get the facts! The more and better information you can acquire before you make a decision, the better your decision will be. The very best managers spend a good amount of time getting the real, provable facts before they take action.
Written by Brian Tracy and trained by Mark Garbelotto
How to Identify Your Goals
Here are seven goal-setting questions for you to ask and answer over and over again. I suggest that you take a pad of paper and write out your responses.
Question Number One:
What are your five most important values in life?
This question is intended to help you clarify what is really important to you, and by extension, what is less important, or unimportant. Once you have identified the five most important values in life for you, organize them in order of priority, from number one, the most important, through number five.
Question Number Two:
What are your three most important goals in life, right now?
This is called the "quick list" method. When you only have thirty seconds to write down your three most important goals, your subconscious mind sorts out your many goals quickly. Your top three will just pop into your conscious mind. With only thirty seconds, you will be as accurate as if you had thirty minutes.
Question Number Three:
What would you do, how would you spend your time, if you learned today that you only had six months to live?
This is another value questions to help you clarify what is really important to you. When your time is limited, even if only in your imagination, you become aware of who and what you really care about.
Question Number Four:
What would you do if you won a million dollars cash, tax free, in the lottery tomorrow?
How would you change your life? What would you buy? What would you start doing, or stop doing? This is really a question to help you decide what you'd do if you had all the time and money you need, and if you had virtually no fear of failure at all.
Question Number Five:
What have you always wanted to do, but been afraid to attempt?
This question helps you see more clearly where your fears could be blocking you from doing what you really want to do.
Question Number Six:
What do you most enjoy doing? What gives you your greatest feeling of self-esteem and personal satisfaction?
This is another values question that may indicate where you should explore to find your "heart's desire." You will always be most happy doing what you most love to do, and what you most love to do is invariably the activity that makes you feel the most alive and fulfilled. The most successful men and women in America are invariably doing what they really enjoy, most of the time.
Question Number Seven:
What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you would not fail?
Imagine that a genie appears and grants you one wish. The genie guarantees that you will be absolutely, completely successful in any one thing that you attempt to do, big or small, short or long-term. If you were absolutely guaranteed success in any one thing, what one exciting goal would you set for yourself?
Action Exercise
Study the pad of paper that you used to answer these questions. This paper represents your future goals. Look at what you wrote every day and shape your life the way you see it on that paper.
Written by Brian Tracy and trained by Mark Garbelotto
Eat That Frog – Seminar Townsville…
EXCLUSIVE INVITATION
To our world famous Eat That Frog! seminar
At this event you will discover how to:
Ø Master your time and gain hours of productivity
Ø Stop procrastination
Ø Set and achieve your goals in 5 key areas of your life
Ø ABCDE method to high performance time management
Ø Connect with people for Win/Win networking
Ø And much, much more.
See you there…
The Law of Clarity for 2011
Clarity accounts for probably 80% of success and happiness. Lack of clarity is probably more responsible for frustration and underachievement than any other single factor. That's why we say that "Success is goals, and all else is commentary." People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine. This is true everywhere and under all circumstances.
The Three Keys to High Achievement
You could even say that the three keys to high achievement are, "Clarity, Clarity, Clarity," with regard to your goals. Your success in life will be largely determined by how clear you are about what it is you really, really want.
Write and Rewrite Your Goals
The more you write and rewrite your goals and the more you think about them, the clearer you will become about them. The clearer you are about what you want, the more likely you are to do more and more of the things that are consistent with achieving them. Meanwhile, you will do fewer and fewer of the things that don't help to get the things you really want.
The Seven Step Process for Achieving Goals
First, decide exactly what you want in each area of your life. Be specific!
Second, write it down, clearly and in detail;
Third, set a specific deadline. If it is a large goal, break it down into sub-deadlines and write them down in order;
Fourth, make a list of everything you can think of that you are going to have to do to achieve your goal. As you think of new items, add them to your list;
Fifth, organize the items on your list into a plan by placing them in the proper sequence and priority;
Sixth, take action immediately on the most important thing you can do on your plan. This is very important!
Seventh, do something every day that moves you toward the attainment of one or more of your important goals. Maintain the momentum!
Join the Top 3%
Fewer than three percent of adults have written goals and plans that they work on every single day. When you sit down and write out your goals, you move yourself into the top 3% of people in our society. And you will soon start to get the same results that they do.
Review Your Goals Daily
Study and review your goals every day to be sure they are still your most important goals. You will find yourself adding goals to your list as time passes. You will also find yourself deleting goals that are no longer as important as you once thought. Whatever your goals are, plan them out thoroughly, on paper, and work on them every single day. This is the key to peak performance and maximum achievement.
Action Exercises
Here is how you can apply this law immediately:
First, make a list of ten goals that you would like to achieve in the coming year. Write them down in the present tense, as though a year has passed and you have already accomplished them.
Second, from your list of ten goals, ask yourself, "What one goal, if I were to accomplish it, would have the greatest positive impact on my life?" Whatever it is, put a circle around this goal and move it to a separate sheet of paper.
Third, practice the seven-step method described above on this goal. Set a deadline, make a plan, and put it into action and work on it every day. Make this goal your major definite purpose for the weeks and months ahead.
Get ready for some amazing changes in your life.
Written by Brian Tracy and trained by Mark Garbelotto at the eat that frog seminars www.eatthatfrog.com.au
Create Your Sales Plan for 2011
Nothing happens until a sale takes place. Your actual ability to sell your product or service to your customer determines your profit or loss, success or failure, in business. The sales process, to be effective, must be planned and organized in detail from start to finish. Every word and action must be scripted, rehearsed and memorized. Nothing can be left to chance.
Sales Recipe
Making a sale is like cooking with a recipe. You must use the correct ingredient and blend them in the proper quantity with the right timing. All successful companies have developed a proven sales process that can be duplicated over and over. By using a proven sales system, you can accurately predict the quantity of your sales, the average size of your sales, and the profitability of your sales activities.
Prospecting
It is important to speak directly or by telephone to people who can and will buy and pay in a reasonable period of time. Start with your ideal customer profile. Who is he or she exactly-in terms of age, occupation, income, education? Who is he or she exactly—in terms of problems, wants, needs, attitudes, and experiences regarding your product or service? If you could advertise for perfect customers, how would you describe him or her?
Marketing and advertising is aimed at telling your ideal prospect that your product will help them. The ideal prospect has an immediate need for what you sell. The ideal prospect knows you, likes you, and respects your products or business. The ideal prospect can buy and pay for your product if he or she likes it.
Establish Rapport
Establishing rapport and trust with the customer is a must. The prospect will not listen to you or buy from you unless he/she likes you and believes that you are honest. Be friendly, straightforward and believable. Be punctual, prepared and properly dressed. Ask questions and listen carefully to the answers. Make no attempt to sell until the prospect is relaxed and comfortable with you. Identify what the customer needs so you can better sell to them. Ask carefully planned, structured questions so that you can fully understand the customer's situation.
There is a direct relationship between asking questions and sales success. Plan your questions word-for-word in advance. Make no effort to sell or talk about your product. Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
Presenting Your Product or Service
Repeat back the specific needs or concerns that your prospect has expressed. Position yourself as a trusted advisor, dedicated to helping him solve his problem or achieve his goal with your product. Position yourself as a teacher-showing her how your product works to help her satisfy her needs. Match the customers expressed needs and concerns to the product or service. Focus on helping rather than selling. Conclude your presentation with an explanation of how the product is delivered or used. Invite questions.
Action Exercises
List three phrases or questions you can use or ask to determine if this is a qualified prospect.
Written by Brian Tracy and trained by Mark Garbelotto
Time Management Techniques for Salespeople
Time Management Techniques for Salespeople
In 1928, the magazine Sales and Marketing Management surveyed American Businesses to determine how efficiently salespeople were using their time. They discovered that the average salesperson in America was only working 20 percent of the time, approximately one and one-half hours per day. This finding caused bells to go off throughout the sales industry. The idea that salespeople were only working ninety minutes per day became the emphasis for improved training, better time management skills, better supervision, and better control of the activities of salespeople.
Double Your Sales
In my sales programs, I teach what I call my minutes theory. It is based on a simple equation. If you are in sales today, 100 percent of your sales and your income are generated by the number of minutes hat you spend face-to-face with prospects and customers. If you want to increase the number of sales or the amount of money you make, you must increase the number of minutes that you spend in actual selling activity, face-to-face with people who can, and will, buy from you. My theory says that if you double the number of minutes that if you spend with customers, you will double your income, even if you do not improve in any other area of sales. If you manage your time as the top salespeople do, so that you are spending more time with customers, your sales will increase immediately.
The Job of the Salesperson
Let us begin with the job description of the salesperson. The job description of the salesperson is to create and keep customers. The measure of effectiveness of a salesperson is how many new customers she creates, or resales she generates, in any given time period. Everything else that salesperson does is secondary to creating and keeping customers. Therefore, the only time a sales person is working is when he is face-to-face, head-to-head, and knee-to-knee with a prospect or customer.
Begin with Clear Income and Sales Goals
Achieving Peak Performance and excellent time management in sales begins with your setting clear income and sales goals for yourself. The act of sitting down and deciding, in writing, how much you want to earn, and how you are going to go about earning it, makes it far more likely that you will achieve those goals than if you didn't set them at all. The goal-setting exercise I am about to share with you has led to the doubling and tripling of the incomes of many salespeople. It is powerful because it is simple and easy. You can learn it and apply it immediately.
Determine What You Will Have to Do
Once you have broken your income and sales goals down into monthly, weekly, daily, and hourly amounts, you then define these goals in terms of the activities necessary to achieve them. The critical element in this calculation is the factor of control. You cannot control your income or your sales on a day-to-day basis. They depend on too many other factors. But you can control your activities. You can determine and control what you do from morning to night, and as a result, you can indirectly control your income. If you engage in the activities necessary to make sales you want to make, you will inevitably achieve your sales goals.
Get Better at What You Do
Once you have determined your sales goals and worked out an activity schedule for each day, you immediately go to work on yourself to upgrade your skills in your key result areas. One of the best uses of your time is to get better at the most important things you do. Your goal is to upgrade your skills so that you achieve more and better results in a shorter period of time.
Action Exercise
Take charge of your sales career today; resolve to double the amount of time you spend face-to-face with prospects and customers.
Written by Brian Tracy and trained by Mark Garbelotto
Plan For Turbulence When Selling
On a flight, when your plane takes off, the pilot tells all the passengers to stay in their seats with their seatbelts buckled. In many cases, the pilot will say, “We expect a certain amount of turbulence for the first part of the flight, so please stay buckled up.” When you start any new business or job in sales, you will experience turbulence as well.
Control Your Responses
Strong people expect to experience problems on their journey toward their goals and destinations. Weak people are surprised and dismayed when things don't work out the way they had expected. They become angry and lash out. They blame other people for their problems. Often they become depressed or irrational. Your success is largely determined by your ability to respond effectively to problems as they come up. Fortunately, you can learn a number of effective strategies practiced by successful people to deal with problems.
Problems Go with the Territory
First of all, expect to have problems, disappointments, and temporary failures. Don't be shocked, surprised, or angry when they occur. Instead, take a deep breath, relax, and say, “Solving problems is my job; problems are what I do.” Each time you solve a problem, you will become even more capable of solving even greater problems. The major reward you get for solving problems is the opportunity to solve even bigger problems.
Think in Terms of Solutions
Superior people are intensely solution oriented. They think about solutions and what can be done rather than the problems and who is to blame. They are future oriented and continually think in terms of the actions that they can take immediately to control the damage, minimize the problem, and move ahead. One of the best strategies you can use is to practice mental preparation with regard to problems. Resolve in advance that no matter what happens, you will remain calm and relaxed.
Ask Questions
When you deal with unexpected turbulence in your business or personal life, you can keep yourself calm, clear, and focused by asking questions rather than reacting or overreacting. First of all, get the facts. What exactly is the problem? How did it occur? Sometimes, the solution to the problem is contained within the problem itself. The very act of asking questions keep you calm and in control. Focus on the solution.
Accept Responsibility and Take Charge
Once you have clearly defined the problem (and confirmed that it actually is a problem) and you have thought about the various actions you can take to solve or minimize it, the next step is the either take responsibility for taking action or assign specific responsibility for taking action to someone else. Think always in terms of actions you can take. Just as a pilot facing unexpected turbulence keeps both hands on the wheel and his or her eyes on the gauges, when you experience problems, you must take command of your situation and ensure that you are flying in the right direction.
Action Exercise
You become a superb pilot of your own destiny by dealing effectively with the inevitable storms that occur in your work and personal life. Next time a situation occurs take a deep breath, and then begin to think of solutions to that situation.
Written by Brian Tracy and trained by Mark Garbelotto
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.
Want to learn More
Call Mark Garbelotto directly on 1300 795 129
Partnering For Profit
The way you can stand out from your competitors is for you to position your self as a business part ner, always looking for ways to improve your customer's business.
Help Your Customer's Business
When you deal with a business person, you can be sure of one thing: that person thinks about his business day and night. It is very close to him. It is dear to his heart. And if you come in and talk to him and ask him questions about his business, looking for ways to help him run his business better, the customer is going to warm up to you and want to be associated with you and your company.
Differentiate Your self from Your Competitors
As a part ner, you should always be looking to help your customer to cut costs and improve results in his or her area of resp onsibility. You should look for ways to help your customer in non-business areas as well. You should position your self as someone who cares more about the success of your customer than anything else, even more than you care about selling your product or service. This approach to partnering in profit with your customer is a key way to differentiate your self and to keep your customer for the indefinite future.
Practice the Reciprocity Principle
There is a principle of reciprocity in business that is very powerful. It is simply this: If you do something nice for someone else, they will feel obligated to do something nice for you. You should be looking for opportunities to go the extra mile, to do more than you are p aid for, to put in more than you take out. By extending your self, you improve your positioning in the customer's mind and increasingly differentiate your self and your company from your competitors who are after the same business. If you do this long enough and strong enough, you will eventually develop the partnership to the point where your competitors don't have a chance against you.
Action Ex ercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, think about how you can help your customer's customer with your product or service. Take time to understand how your customer uses your product to do his business better.
Second, focus on increasing your customer's profits and fin ancial results. Show your customer that doing business with you is both satisfying and profit able in the long run.
By Brian Tracy
