Be a Sales Superstar
This is a wonderful time to be alive and working in the profession of selling. Regardless of the ups and downs of the economy or temporary changes in your industry, there have never been more opportunities for you to achieve more of your goals—and enjoy a higher standard of living—than exist today by selling more of your products and services in the marketplace.
Commit to Excellence
Ambitious people have one remarkable characteristic in sales. They dream big dreams. They have high aspirations. They see themselves as capable of being the best in their fields. They know that the top 20 percent of salespeople make 80 percent of the sales, and they are determined to be among that top group.
Act As If It Were Impossible to Fail
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt are, and always have been, the greatest enemies of success and happiness. For this reason, top salespeople work continually to confront the fears that hold most salespeople back. The two major fears that stand as the greatest obstacle on your road to success are the fear of failure, or loss, and the fear of criticism, or rejection. These are the major enemies to be overcome.
Selling has often been called a transfer of enthusiasm. The more enthusiastic and convinced you are about what you are selling, the more contagious this enthusiasm will be and the more your customers will sense it and act on it. Human beings are primarily emotional in everything they so and say. This is why caring is a critical element in successful selling. Position Yourself as a Real Professional
Top salespeople see themselves as consultants rather than salespeople. They see themselves as advisors, helpers, counselors, and friends to their clients and customers. They see themselves as problem solvers more than anything else. Dedicate Yourself to Continuous Learning
To earn more, you must learn more. You are "maxed out" today at your current level of knowledge and skill. You cannot get more or better results by simply working harder using your present abilities. If you want to earn more in the future, you must learn and apply new methods and techniques. Remember the old saying: "The more you do of what you’re doing, the more you’ll get of what you’re getting." Action Exercise
Develop an action plan for personal and professional development. Prepare a "training schedule" for yourself exactly as if you were training for a marathon or a big competition.
The Heart of the Sale
What is selling? In its simplest terms, selling is the process of persuading a person that your product or service is of greater value to him than the price you are asking for it. Our market society is based on the principles of freedom of choice and mutual benefit. Each party enters into a transaction when he feels that he will be better off as a result of the transaction than he would be without it.
Convince the Customer
For the customer to buy your particular product or service, he or she must be convinced, not only that is it the best choice of product or service available, but also that there is no better way for him to spend the equivalent sum of money that it costs. Your job as a salesperson is to convince the customer that these conditions exist and then to elicit a commitment from him to take action on your offer.
The Critical Factor: Risk
The critical factor in selling today is risk. Because of the continuous change, rapid obsolescence, and an uncertain economy, the risk of buying the wrong product or service has become greater than ever before. There are four main factors that contribute to the perception of risk in the mind and hear of the customer.
The first factor that contributes to risk is the size of the sale. The larger the scale, the more money involved, the greater the risk. If a person is buying a package of Lifesavers, the risk of satisfaction or dissatisfaction is insignificant. But if a person is buying a computer system for their company, the risk factor is magnified by hundreds of thousands of times. Whenever you are selling a product that has a high price on it, you must be aware that risk enters into the buyer’s calculations immediately. People Affected by the Decision
The second factor contributing to the perception of risk is the number of people who will be affected by the buying decision. Almost every complex buying decision involves several people. There are people who must use the product or service. There are people who must pay for the product or service. There are people who are dependent of the results expected from the product or service. If a person is extremely sensitive to the opinions of others, this factor alone can cause him or her to put off a buying decision. Length of Life of the Product
The third factor contributing to the perception of risk is the length of life of the product. A product or service that, once installed, is meant to last for several years, generates the feeling of risk. The customer panics and thinks, "What if it doesn’t work and I’m stuck with it." Unfamiliarity
The fourth major risk factor is the customer’s unfamiliarity with you, your company, and your product or service. A first-time buyer, one who has not bought the product or service before, or who has not bought it from you, is often nervous and requires a lot of hand-holding. Anything new or different makes the average customer tense and uneasy. This is why a new product or service, or a new business relationship with your company, has to be presented as a natural extension of what the customer is already doing. Action Exercise
Identify the risks that a customer might find with your product or service. Once you had clearly defined those risks it will be easier to find solutions to them to ease nervous customers.
Create Your Sales Plan
By: Brian Tracy
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.
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 ServiceRepeat 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.
Perverse Motivation.
By Brian Tracy
Everyone likes to buy, but no one wants to be sold. People don’t like to feel that they are the recipients or the victims of a sales presentation. Most customers are independent in their thinking, and they don’t like to think that they are being manipulated, pressured, or coerced into doing anything. They like to feel as though they are making up their own minds based on good information that has been presented to them.
Sales Helper
The best salesperson is perceived as a helper who assists prospects in getting what they want and need. Remember, it is the perception of the customers that, more than anything else determines how the customer behaves toward a salesperson. You must do everything possible to appear to be helping rather than selling.
Salespeople are Teachers
Top salespeople are teachers who show their customers how products and services work to satisfy their needs. The more you are perceived as a teacher, the more likely it is that you will also be perceived as a consultant or an advisor. You will be seen as a trusted counselor who can be depended upon to help customers get what they want by means of the product or service that you are selling.
If ever your customers feel, even for a moment, that you are trying to sell them into buying something, they will instantly resist and withdraw. The most important part of selling is the quality of the trust bond that exists between you and your customers. You can’t afford to do anything that threatens that trust bond. It is important that the customer feels that they are being informed about something that will benefit them, rather than feel pressured to buy a product that is being pushed upon them.
Design PresentationDesign your presentation in such a way that you are always showing, explaining, and asking questions to assure agreement and understanding. See yourself as a teacher with a willing and able student, eager to learn.
Action ExerciseThink of yourself as a teacher and your sales presentation as a "lesson plan." Always begin your presentation with agreement on the value or benefit that the customer seeks that your product or service can deliver.
The Law of the Customer…
By Brian Tracy
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.
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 PlanningProper 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 ExerciseMake a list of all your customers, both inside and outside of your business. Write down the names of your boss and coworkers, your outside customers and contacts, everyone with whom you deal, including your staff
Be a Doctor of Selling!
By: Brian Tracy
Three Keys to Building Relationships
Top sales professionals see themselves as "Doctors of Selling." They see themselves as professionals, well educated, acting in their "patient’s" best interest, and bound by a high code of ethics.
The medical process is the same everywhere. Whenever you go to any doctor, of any kind, for any condition, he will follow the three part sequence of examination, diagnosis and prescription.
Begin With a Thorough Examination
Just as a medical professional would never think of treating you without following these three steps in order, you as a doctor of selling, would never allow a customer to force you to sell without your going through your three stages as well. This is as applicable to selling magazines door-to-door as it is to selling oil tankers to Exxon.
In the examination phase, you ask excellent questions, carefully prepared, in sequence, which are geared to give you a thorough knowledge of the patient’s condition, or the customer’s situation.
The second phase is that of diagnosis. In the diagnosis phase with a customer, you would repeat back the results of your examination and double check to be sure that the symptoms that you had detected were the real symptoms being experienced by the patient. You would ask additional questions to confirm and corroborate. You and the patient would mutually agree that this diagnosis seems to be an accurate description of the condition or problem. Make the Right Prescription
Once this mutual agreement has been reached, that a treatable condition exists and that you have identified it accurately, you can move on to phase three. This is the prescription phase, where you show the patient (customer) that your product or service is the best available treatment, taking all the factors of the patient’s situation into consideration for the ailment that you have diagnosed. You show that, on balance, what you are suggesting is the best of all possible solutions.
Professionals who sell in the way that doctors treat patients find that their sales activities proceed far more smoothly and result in better sales in less time.
Action ExercisesHere are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, take the time to do a thorough examination by asking excellent questions and by listening carefully to the answers.
Second, repeat back and check your diagnosis with the customer so that you both agree on the need or problem – before you recommend a solution.
Building Long-Term Relationships…
If you could take everything we know about communications, put it all in a large pot, boil it and distill it down into its critical essence, it is about the importance of relationships in successful selling. Building and maintaining long-term selling relationships is the key behavior and skill of the top ten percent of the money earners in sales, in every field, selling every product and service.
The Reason for Success
Most of your success in life will depend on your ability to get along well with other people, and on the quality of your relationships. Psychologist Sidney Jourard, found that 85 percent of a person’s happiness in life comes from happy interactions with other people. The reverse holds true as well: 85 percent of a person’s unhappiness or problems in life comes from difficulties in getting along with others.
Sell to Lots of People
Anyone can sell to a few people, some of the time. But only the very best human relations experts can sell to a wide variety of people, and sell to them repeatedly. The only way that you can make the kind of big money that you are capable of is by selling more easily, and more often, to the prospects you talk to, and by having those prospects open doors to others through testimonials and referrals. All top salespeople build and maintain high quality business relationships with their customers and sell to them repeatedly year after year.
We are all sensitive to the quality of our relationships with other people. We are primarily emotional and we make most of our decisions on the basis of how we feel inside. We may carefully consider all of the logical and practical reasons why or why not with regard to buying a product or service, but in the final analysis we tend to go with our gut feeling. We listen to our inner voices. We obey the dictates of our hearts. We buy on the basis of how we feel about the relationship that we have with the other person. Where there is no relationship, there is no sale. Focus on the Key Variable
Everything that you ever learned of value in the profession of selling, regarding your product or service, or personality, is only helpful to the degree to which it contributes to the building of high quality relationships with customers. Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, become a relationship expert in sales. Focus first on the relationship, above all, and the sale will take care of itself.
Second, take care of your relationships once you have built them. Never take them for granted. Tend to them as you would to a flower garden.
