Seven Steps to Motivating Your Sales Team…
In your next sales meeting ask each sales person the following questions:
1. What’s your greatest sales story ever? (2 minutes max)
2. What specifically made this your biggest sales achievement?
3. What effect did your efforts have on YOUR CUSTOMER?
4. What are 3 THINGS that you have STOPPED doing from your greatest sales story?
5. What are 3 things you are going to START DOING to have your next greatest sales story?
6. Set a new date for your next greatest sales story discussion.
7. Write it down and TAKE ACTION the moment you walk out of the sales meeting.
Watch more sales tips at Selling Like a Pro k
The Key to Sales Success 2011
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 God 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.
Written by Brian Tracy and trained by Mark Garbelotto
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
Sales and Marketing Profitability
Do you know the return on your sales and marketing expenditures? It is not unusual for companies to spend 25 to 35 percent of their revenues on sales and marketing, yet often they don't know the actual return on these initiatives. Before adopting a new marketing initiative, determine how you will measure, not only its impact on sales, but on profits as well. What is an acceptable rate of return? How will you measure the return? Establish a monitoring system whereby you can gauge the efficacy of the program throughout its implementation.
Product Profitability
Every product yields a specific profit of a specific amount. When you offer more than one product, each will have its own profit margin. One of the most important things you can do is to determine the return on the investment you have put into each of your products.
Marathon and Associates
Marathon and Associates, a niche consulting firm, receives enormous fees from Fortune 1000 companies to determine the exact cost of each of their products. This enables their clients to make product-offering decisions based on the profitability of each product, rather than simply relying on gross revenue figures. In today's highly competitive business climate, such an approach is critical in ensuring their overall profitability and even their survival. This is no less true of your own business or organization. Eliminating just one losing product can make the difference between robust growth and mediocre performance or even the demise of your business.
Product Mix
Examine your own product mix. In addition to the normal “cost of goods,” you must include all expense incurred in delivering the finished product to the consumer, including research and development, promotion, associated sales and marketing costs, installation, customer service, product service, returns, proportionate share of general and administrative costs (overhead), and so on. Again, be sure to include the cost of your own time; apply your hourly rate to the amount of time you invest in the development, design, creation/manufacture, sale, and servicing of each product.
Break Down Costs Accurately
Many individuals and businesses lump all their expenses together and then guess at how much is attributable to each product. Your job is to break down so accurately that you know within a few dollars exactly how much you net from the sale of each product. When you have completed your costing analysis, simply deduct the actual cost of developing, selling, and delivering each product from the price to determine its profitability. Which products yield the highest return? The lowest? Do any actually lose money?
Market Profitability
If you sell into more than one market, the same principle applies. Some markets will be more profitable than others. When dealing in foreign markets, for example, you may incur much higher advertising and marketing costs. Conversely, your manufacturing costs might be significantly lower. If you export your products into foreign countries, import duties or tariffs may apply. At times, unexpected costs in dealing in new markets may make the difference between a profitable venture and a financial disaster.
Action Exercise
Identify your most and your least profitable/productive tasks and activities.
Written by Brian Tracy and Trained by Mark Garbelotto
Up skill you sales team using Commonwealth Incentive funding
Recently I helped a company get $96,000 in Commonwealth Incentive funding to up skill their sales team.
If you are considering sales training your company may be eligible to receive $4000 per sales person.
If you would like to know how much Commonwealth Incentive funding your company may be eligible please call me directly on 1300 795 129 or email me at mark@briantracy.net.au as your company may be missing out on thousands of dollars in funding to up skill your sales team.
Kind regards
Mark Garbelotto
Listening Wins Sales
There are books, articles and multi-day courses on listening. There are audio/video-learning programs that include hours of instruction and a variety of exercises. They are all valuable and helpful, but what they teach can be distilled down into a key skill. Your mastery of these skills, through discipline and practice, is all you need to become an excellent listener, with all that that entails.
Listen Attentively When Others Speak
The best listening skill is to listen attentively. Lean forward; face the prospect directly rather than at an angle. Focus your attention on the prospects face, on his or her mouth and eyes.
Hang On Every Word
Listen without interruption. Listen as though you were hanging on every word the prospect was saying. Listen as if the prospects were about to give you the winning lottery number and you would only hear it once. Listen as if this were a million dollar prospect who was just on the verge of giving you a major order. Listen as if there were no one else in the world to whom you would rather listen at this moment than this prospect, and to what this prospect is saying.
The Most Important Skill of All
The ability to pay close, uninterrupted attention to a person when he is speaking is the primary listening skill. It is the hardest facility to develop and is simultaneously the most important of all. It requires continuous practice and discipline. And it's not easy. It is hard to keep your thoughts from wandering, but the payoff is tremendous.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, imagine that your customer is the most fascinating person in the world. Hang on every word as if he was about to place a million dollar order.
Lastly, lean forward when your customer speaks. Nod, smile, agree and be both active and involved. Listening builds sales relationships.
By: Brian Tracy
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
Practice Golden Rule Selling
To improve your sales performance, adopt the Golden Rule mentality. The Golden Rule says to, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It also says, "Love your neighbor as yourself." The Golden Rule mentality in sales, says simply, "Sell unto others as you would have them sell unto you."
Different Strokes For Different Folks
What does this mean? Aren't there all kinds of different personalities that require different approaches and techniques? Well, yes and no. Practicing the golden rule in selling simply means that you sell to other people the way you would like to be sold to. You sell with the same honesty, integrity, understanding, empathy and thoughtfulness that you would like someone else to use in selling to you.
Seek First to Understand
If you would like a salesperson to take the time to thoroughly understand you and your situation before making a recommendation, you practice the same thing with your customers. If you would like a salesperson to give you honest information and to help you make an intelligent buying decision, you practice the same with your customer. If you would like a salesperson to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the strengths or weaknesses of his or her product or service, and that of his or her competitors, then you do the same with your product or service and your competitors.
Care About Your Customers
Perhaps the most important part of golden rule selling is the emotional component embraced in the word, "caring." Top sales professionals care about their customers. They care about themselves, their companies, their products and services, and they really care about helping their customers to make good buying decisions. If you think about the very best salespeople you know, you will recognize that they are caring individuals.
They Don't Care How Much You Know
If you think about your very best customers, you will recall that these are invariably people you care about, and who care about you. When you think about the people you buy from, you will recall that they seem to care about you more than the average. In every part of your business life, you will find that the significant people all have the denominator of caring as part of their character and their personalities.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, resolve today to sell to your customers with the same honesty, empathy and understanding that you would like them to use in selling to you.
Second, take time to genuinely care about your customers, their individual needs and their unique situations. Make people feel important and they will make you feel important.
