Advanced Selling Strategies: The Proven System of Sales Ideas, Methods, and Techniques Used by Top Salespeople

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELLING

Some salespeople always do well, no matter what is happening around them. They make excellent money, live in nice homes, drive new cars, and dine in fine restaurants. They always seem to have money in their pockets and in their bank accounts. Most of all, they are happy, optimistic, positive, friendly, relaxed, and seem to be in complete control of themselves and their lives. They are the top salespeople in every organization and their companies are dependent upon them for continued sales results.

Thousands of hours and millions of dollars have been spent studying the most successful salespeople in our society. They have been interviewed exhaustively, as have their customers, co-workers, and managers. Today as a result of this research, we know more about what it takes for you to be one of the best in your business than we have ever known before. And the most important thing we have learned in all these studies is that selling is more psychological than anything else.

One of the most important principles ever discovered in the field of human performance is called the "winning edge concept." This concept states that "small differences in ability can translate into enormous differences in results." What this means is that if you become just a little bit better in certain critical areas of selling, this slight improvement can translate into a substantial increase in your sales results. You may be on the verge of a major breakthrough in your sales career at this very moment by lust learning and practicing one small thing that is new and different from what you have done before. If a racehorse comes in first, even by a nose, it wins ten times the prize money of the horse that comes in second. Does this mean that the horse that wins by a nose is ten times faster than the horse that comes in second? Of course not! Is the horse that wins by a nose twice as fast, or 50 percent faster, or even 10 percent faster? The horse that wins is only a nose faster, but that translates into ten times the prize money.

By the same token, the salesperson who gets the sale for himself and his company gets 100 percent of the business and 100 percent of the commission. Does this mean that his product is 100 percent better than that of the competition, or 100 percent cheaper? Of course not! His product may not even be as good and it may cost more than that of the competitor, but the top salesman gets the sale nonetheless. The person who gets the sale is, in most cases, not a lot better than the person who loses the sale. He or she merely has the winning edge, but that's all it takes to get 100 percent of the business.

This concept is vital to your success. You may have heard of the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule, which, as it applies to sales, says that 80 percent of sales are made by 20 percent of the salespeople. Depending upon the sophistication of the industry and the overall level of training, the ratio can be 90/10 or 70/30, but in large national sales forces, the 80/20 rule holds true. Twenty percent of the salespeople make 80 percent of the sales and earn 80 percent of the commissions, while 80 percent of the salespeople make only 20 percent of the sales and share only 20 percent of the commissions.

What this means in dollar terms is remarkable! If ten salespeople are making a total of $1 million in sales in a given period, this means that two of the salespeople are making $800,000 of sales or approximately $400,000 each, and eight of the salespeople are making $200,000 of sales, or $25,000 each on average. This is a ratio of 16 to 1. The top salespeople are outselling the bottom salespeople by sixteen times!

This difference in sales results cannot be explained simply by sales technique and methodology. There is something else going on, and that something else is the mind-set or psychological state of the salesperson.

In every large company, it is common for some salespeople to be earning $25,000 a year while other salespeople are earning $250,000 a year, a difference of ten times. They are all selling the same product, to the same people, at the same price, under the same competitive conditions, into the same market, and out of the same office.

Is the person earning ten times as much as the other working ten times as hard, putting in ten times the number of hours? Does he or she see ten times the number of prospects?

Is it possible for the high-earning salesperson to be ten times better, in any area, than the person earning one tenth as much? Of course not.

In fact, sometimes the person earning ten times as much as the other salesperson in the office is younger, has less education, sees fewer people, works fewer hours, and has less experience than the long-term professional who is barely making a living.

This book will show you how to move into that top 10 percent of salespeople, to become one of the highest paid people in America, and to achieve all of your goals and dreams in this wonderful profession. And this requires, more than anything else, that you develop the winning psychological edge, which we will talk about through the rest of this chapter.

ATTITUDE VERSUS APTITUDE

The 80/20 rule is as applicable to individual salespeople as it is to large sales forces. Fully 80 percent of your success as a salesperson will be determined by your attitude and only 20 percent by your aptitude.

A positive mental attitude, or a constructive and optimistic way of looking at yourself and your work, goes hand in hand with sales success in every field and in every market. Developing this attitude of unshakable self-confidence and enthusiasm, no matter what is going on around you, is your passport to greatness in selling.

The 20 percent of sales effectiveness that comes from product knowledge and professional selling skills is extremely important as well. It is only when you are thoroughly knowledgeable about what you are selling and thoroughly skilled in your ability to present it effectively that you develop the confidence and self-assurance upon which a positive mental attitude depends. We will talk more about this in later chapters, but for now, let's continue our discussion of attitude.

The quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life. If you improve the quality of your thinking, in any area, you will improve the quality of your life in that area. By using your mind, your ability to think, you take charge of your life and determine your own destiny. You move from being powerless to being powerful. You determine everything that happens to you by the way you think about it, in advance. You may not be what you think you are, but what you think, you are!

The most rapid and positive changes in your personality and your sales results come about when you change your thinking about yourself and your possibilities. When you reprogram your subconscious mind so you feel a sense of personal power and control, every part of your life begins improving immediately. As William James of Harvard wrote in 1905, "The greatest revolution of my generation is the discovery that individuals, by changing their inner attitudes of mind, can change the outer aspects of their lives."

The very best salespeople have an attitude of calm, confident, positive self-expectation. They feel good about themselves and they have a quiet faith that everything they are doing is contributing toward their inevitable success. They are relaxed about their lives and their careers. They know, in their hearts, that they are good at what they do, and their customers know it as well. Often, their customers decide to buy from them even before they've made a sales presentation or described their product or service. They are the champions of selling everywhere. And because of the Law of Cause and Effect, you can become one of them by developing the same attitudes and attributes that they have.

SELF-CONCEPT: THE MASTER PROGRAM OF PERFORMANCE

One of the greatest breakthroughs in human performance and effectiveness in the twentieth century is the discovery of the self-concept. Your self-concept is the bundle of beliefs that you have about yourself and your world. It is the master program of your subconscious computer. These beliefs began forming with your very first experiences as an infant. Over the years, you have absorbed a complex series interwoven ideas, doubts, fears, opinions, attitudes, values, expectations, hopes, phobias, myths, and other impressions. You have taken them into your mind and accepted them as true. These are the operating instructions of your subconscious computer and they control everything that you say, do, think, and feel. In the absence of any deliberate change on your part, you will continue doing, thinking, saying, and feeling very much the same things indefinitely.

Just as you have an overall self-concept, or composite idea of who you are and what you can do, you also have a mini-self-concept for each individual part of your life. These mini-self-concepts determine how you think, feel, and perform with regard to people, sports, health, relationships, work, learning, creativity, and everything else you do.

You have a mini-self-concept for how much money you earn, as well. Whether or not you are happy with your income, it is the amount you have programmed yourself to earn, based on your past earnings and your current belief system. It is your self-concept level of income. It is the cumulative total of all your experiences with earning money since you got your first job. It is a part of your subconscious programming, and you tend to earn that amount even if you change jobs or move to another city. It is locked in.

In fact, this self-concept level of income is so deeply ingrained that if you earn much more or less than your current level of income, you will feel distinctly uncomfortable. Even thinking about earning substantially more or less than you're accustomed to will make you uneasy.

For example, if you earn 10 percent or more above this level, you will do everything possible to get rid of the money. You will have an irresistible urge to go out and spend it, even splurge on buying something you don't need. If you earn more than you're comfortable with for any period of time, you will feel impelled to invest in things you know nothing about, lend it to people who won't pay it back, or even give it away.

If you earn less than your self-concept level of income, you will start engaging in scrambling behaviors to get your income back up into the range where you feel comfortable. You will start working longer and harder, and maybe upgrading your skills. You may consider second income opportunities, starting your own business, or think about getting a new job where you can earn more.

Any change, or even an attempt to change anything you are doing, makes you uncomfortable. By attempting to change, you move out of your comfort zone. You feel increasingly uneasy. You experience stress and tension. If the change is too extreme, your physical and mental health can be affected. You will experience sleeplessness, indigestion, or fatigue. You may react with impatience, irritability or anger. You will often feel as if you are on an emotional roller coaster.

So if you want to sell more and earn more, you must increase your self-concept level of income. You must increase the amount you believe yourself capable of earning. You must raise your aspirations, set higher goals, and make detailed plans to achieve them. You must begin to see yourself and think about yourself as capable of being one of the highest earning salespeople in your field. You must take charge of developing a new self-concept for sales and income that is more consistent with what you really want to accomplish.

Your self-concept determines your levels of performance and effectiveness in everything you do. In sales, you have mini-self-concepts that govern every activity of selling. You have mini-self-concepts for prospecting, for cold calling, for making appointments, for presenting, for closing, for getting referrals, and for making follow-up sales. You have a mini-self-concept for your level of product knowledge, your personal management skills, your level of motivation, and for the way you relate to different types of customers. In every case, you will always perform in a manner consistent with the way you see yourself.

Wherever you have a high self-concept, you perform well. If you enjoy working on the telephone, you look forward to telephone prospecting and selling, and you do it well. If you have a high self-concept for making presentations or for closing sales, you feel comfortable and competent whenever you are doing them.

Wherever you feel tense or uneasy in selling, it means that you have a low self-concept in that area. You do not feel comfortable when you are engaged in that activity. You probably avoid that activity as much as possible.

If you are not particularly skilled at a particular activity, you will feel uncomfortable at the very thought of it. If you are not good on the telephone, you will avoid the telephone as much as possible. If you are not good at prospecting, you will avoid prospecting as much as possible. If you are not good at confirming the sale and closing the order, you will choke up at the end of the sales presentation and avoid asking for a commitment from the prospect. In each case, your income and your sales will suffer until you decide to change.

Some years ago, a young man in one of my seminars told me how moving out of his comfort zone was affecting him. He had come from a small farming community and he was selling large, expensive satellite dishes to wealthy farmers who had just had an excellent harvest. The winter was coming and they wanted television during the cold months ahead. The satellite dishes were new at the time and popular, and he was selling two a week, earning $1,000 commission on each one.

He told me that he had never made so much money in his whole life. His problem was that, after his second sale of the week, he experienced a form of withdrawal, accompanied by a desire to flee. He said that he was so overwhelmed by the amount of money he was making that he would go home after the week's second sale, close all the blinds in his bedroom, and lie on his bed in the darkness for several hours. This was his comfort zone.

Whenever you feel any kind of stress in selling, your natural tendency will also be to return to your comfort zone, at a lower level of performance, rather than to continue at what you're doing until you feel comfortable at that new level. Sometimes this discomfort, which can lead to self-sabotage, is mislabeled the "fear of success." But what it really is is the experience of attempting to achieve at a level beyond what you really believe is possible for you.

It is no surprise, then, that the top salespeople have high self-concepts in every phase of the selling process. They make most of the money that is paid in the sales profession. They are the most respected and esteemed people within their organizations and by the customers they call on. Their high, positive self-concepts for selling translate into excellent sales results and great lives for themselves and their families.

YOUR MENTAL MAKEUP: SELF-IDEAL, SELF-IMAGE, SELF-ESTEEM

Your self-concept is made up of three parts, each of which affects the others. When you understand the roles of these three aspects of your mental makeup, you can then put your hands on the keyboard of your own mental computer and change your programming. When you learn how to create a new and better self-concept of yourself as a salesperson, you can then control your sales results for the rest of your career.

The first part of your self-concept is your self-ideal. Your self-ideal largely determines the direction of your life. It guides the growth and evolution of your character and personality. Your self-ideal is a combination of all the qualities and attributes of other people that you most admire. It is a description of the person you would most like to be if you could embody the qualities that you most aspire to.

Throughout your life, you have seen and read about people who demonstrated the qualities of courage, confidence, compassion, love, fortitude, perseverance, patience, forgiveness, and integrity. Over time, these qualities have formed in you an ideal, or vision, of the very best person you or anyone could possibly become. You may not always live up to the very best that you know, but you are constantly striving, even at a subconscious level, to be more like the kind of person you most admire. In fact, in almost everything you do, you are comparing your activities with these ideal qualities, and you strive continually to behave consistent with them.

Successful salespeople have very clear ideals for themselves and their careers. Unsuccessful salespeople have only fuzzy ideals, if they have any ideals at all. Successful salespeople are clear about wanting to excel in every part of their work and their personal lives. Unsuccessful salespeople don't give the subject very much thought. One of the primary characteristics of successful men and women in every walk of life is that they think continually about whether or not their current behaviors are consistent with their idealized behaviors.

Part of your ideals are your goals. As you set higher and more challenging goals for yourself, your self-ideal improves. When you set clear goals for the kind of person you want to be and the kind of life you want to live, your self-ideal becomes a greater guiding and motivating force in your life.

Perhaps the most important part of developing your self-ideal is for you to realize that whatever anyone else has done or become, you can do or become as well. Improvements in your self-ideal begin in your imagination, and in your imagination there are no limits except the ones that you accept.

What is your ideal vision of the very best person you could possibly become? How would you behave each day if you were already that person? Asking yourself these questions and then living your life consistent with the answers is the first step to creating yourself in your ideal image.

The second part of your self-concept is your self-image. Your self-image is the way you see yourself and think about yourself in the present. It is often called your "inner mirror." You constantly refer to this mirror to see how you should perform or behave in a particular situation. You always behave on the outside in a manner consistent with the picture you have of yourself on the inside.

For example, when you see yourself as calm, confident, and competent in any aspect of selling, whenever 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 disturb your mental picture.

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

Some years ago, when I was selling discount club memberships, I would end my presentation by giving the prospect a booklet outlining the membership 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 go from office to office giving my presentation and leaving a little booklet for the prospect 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 they were not interested.

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 that 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 my results to improve.

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 presentation, the prospect would know everything that he needed to know to make a decision. There was no benefit or advantage to leaving material behind or giving the prospect several days to think about it.

At my very first call, when I had finished my presentation, the prospect said, "Let me think it over." This time I was ready. I smiled and told him politely that I did not make callbacks because I was too busy making sales to other customers. I then 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, "Okay. I'll take it. How would you like to be paid?"

I walked out of that office 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, I had been promoted to the position of sales manager with forty-two people under me. I went from making one or two sales a week to making ten to fifteen. I went from worrying about money constantly to earning 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 my decision to change my self-image and make it more consistent with the results I wanted rather than the results that I was getting.

The third part of your self-concept is your self-esteem. This is the emotional component of your self-concept. It is the "reactor core" or energy source of your inner power. It is the most important single element determining your attitude and your personality. It is the key to your success in life.

Your self-esteem is best defined as how much you like yourself. The more you like yourself, accept yourself, and respect yourself as a valuable and worthwhile person, the higher your self-esteem. The more that you genuinely feel you are an excellent human being, the more positive and happy you are.

Your self-esteem determines your levels of energy, enthusiasm, and self-motivation. Your self-esteem is the control valve on your performance and your effectiveness. Your self-esteem is like the fuel in a rocket that blasts it free of the earth's gravity and into orbit. People with high self-esteem have tremendous personal power and do well at just about everything they attempt.

Your self-ideal is the person you most want to be, sometime in the future. Your self-ideal determines the direction of your life, of your growth and evolution as a person. Your self-image, on the other hand, determines the way you perform in the present. Your self-image is the way you see yourself now, today, at this moment. Your self-esteem is largely determined by the relationship between your self-image and your self-ideal, or the way you are performing in your day-to-day activities compared with the way you would be performing if you were the very best person you could possibly be.

The more that your day-to-day activities are consistent with the person you want to become, the higher will be your self-esteem. If your ideal is to be well organized, calm, positive, and working progressively toward the achievement of your goals, and in reality you are behaving in a well-organized, calm, positive manner, working step by step toward your objectives, you will have a high level of self-esteem. You will like and respect yourself. You will feel happy, healthy, and optimistic. You will be a high-performance personality.

Self-esteem is the foundation of a positive self-concept. High self-esteem is the critical element in sales success. The more you like and respect yourself, the better you perform at everything you do. Developing and maintaining high levels of self-esteem is the most important thing you can do, every day, in building yourself to the point where you are capable of achieving all your goals.

THE MAJOR OBSTACLES TO SALES SUCCESS

High self-esteem goes hand in hand with great sales success. By the same token, the major cause of sales failure is low self-esteem. Low self-esteem translates into feelings of inferiority, unworthiness, and undeservingness. It is manifested in feelings of incompetence and inadequacy. Low self-esteem is a feeling of not being good enough. Low self-esteem is comparing yourself negatively with others, ascribing greater qualities to them than they have, and ascribing to yourself lesser capabilities than you possess. Low self-esteem is seeing the glass as half empty rather than half full. Low self-esteem leads to stress, negativity, pessimism, fearfulness, self-doubt, and the tendency to sell yourself short in almost every situation.

In sales, the negative effects of low self-esteem are experienced in the fear of rejection. The fear of rejection is the biggest single obstacle to success in selling. It is the fear of rejection that, more than anything else, holds you back from achieving your full potential. It is the fear of rejection that causes you to settle for far less than you deserve. It is the fear of rejection that causes you to hold back from seeing more and better prospects, and from translating those calls into more and better sales. It is the fear of rejection that acts as the brake on your potential for greatness in the field of sales. And it is the fear of rejection that you must eliminate if you are going to go all the way to the top in your field.

The one good thing about the fear of rejection is that it is an acquired fear. No one is born with it. It is learned through a process of conditioning from early infancy onward. It is a negative habit pattern that almost everyone develops during the process of growing up. And because it is a learned condition, it can be unlearned as well, and sometimes quite quickly.

When you were born, you had no fears at all except for two: the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. Every fear that you have today had to be taught to you by your parents, siblings, and others through repetition and reinforcement as you grew up. Your fears are all learned.

The fear of rejection or disapproval is based on "conditional love." Conditional love occurs, for example, when one or both parents make their love and support conditional upon your behaving in a certain way. At an early age, you learned that if you didn't do what Mommy or Daddy expected of you, they would withdraw their love and approval. They would be angry and negative. They would use destructive criticism and even physical punishment on you to get you to do what they wanted you to do.

As you grew up, your self-image, the way you see yourself and think about yourself, became more and more dependent upon the way you thought others saw you and thought about you. You might even have become hypersensitive to the way people treated you and talked to you. You may have started adjusting your behaviors to get other people to like you, respect you, and approve of you. You started down the slippery slope of compromising your own uniqueness in an attempt to gain the respect and esteem of others.

To a greater or lesser degree, we all have fears and concerns about how other people think about us. Adults with low self-esteem are extremely sensitive to the opinions of others, often to the point where they cannot make a decision without getting the approval of someone else.

A husband will not make a buying decision without getting the approval of his wife, or a wife will not make a buying decision without getting the approval of her husband. Grown children will not make buying decisions without getting the approval of their parents. People will not buy things without asking their friends, lawyers, accountants, or advisors. In business, people will not make decisions without referring the entire matter to one or more other people to gain their approval.

In sales, the fear of rejection manifests itself in a fear of calling on strangers. It is at the root of the reluctance you feel to seek out new prospects for your product or service. Fear of rejection causes stress, anxiety, and even depression. It paralyzes prospecting behavior and undermines a salesperson's effectiveness at every stage of the process. Fear of rejection is the primary reason that so many people drop out of sales, blaming the company and the management, and then take jobs earning far less than they could be. This fear of rejection can manifest itself in different ways, and not all salespeople are subject to the exact same fears.

For example, low self-esteem, and feelings of inferiority leading to the fear of rejection, make some salespeople tense and uneasy about calling on prospects who they feel are better than they are socially or economically. These salespeople will not call on senior executives or professional people because they don't feel good enough.

An older salesman was telling me recently about several people he had gone to school with who were now senior executives in major corporations. He was proud of his friendships with these people, which he had maintained over the years. I then asked him how many of them were customers of his. The answer was none. His particular type of call reluctance was holding him back from approaching them even though he knew they were buying large quantities of the services he sold from other companies.

Many salespeople are afraid to sell to their friends and associates for fear that they will disapprove of them or be critical of their career choices. Sometimes, salespeople are ashamed of being in sales in the first place, and as a result they are afraid to approach almost anyone they know to offer their products or services.

The most common fear of rejection is that associated with approaching strangers, people that you don't know and who you have never spoken to in the past. This generalized fear of disapproval is the greatest destroyer of promising sales careers. It is the fear that a person will say something unkind or "I'm not interested."

The fear of rejection is always the fear of not being liked by the other person. It is the fear of rudeness, criticism, or negativity. It is the fear of hearing the word. "No!" (And, by the way, if you have a fear of the word "No!" you have picked the wrong field in which to earn a living.)

The starting point of overcoming the fear of rejection is to realize this: rejection is not personal. Rejection has nothing to do with you as a person. The prospect does not know you well enough to reject you as an individual. The rejection is only associated with the situation and personality of the prospect, and has nothing to do with your personality, integrity, and competence. To repeat: rejection is simply not personal. It is a standard reaction to almost any sales proposal in a commercial society.

Some of your very best customers will be people who responded negatively to your first approach. This is to be expected.