Read an Excerpt
Sales Success
By BRIAN TRACY AMACOM
Copyright © 2015 Brian Tracy
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8144-4920-2
CHAPTER 1
Become Brilliant on the Basics
WHEN VINCE LOMBARDI was brought in from the New York Giants to take over the Green Bay Packers in Wisconsin, the team had been performing poorly for several years.
When he was asked what he was going to change or do differently to move his team into championship contention, he said these famous words, "We are not going to try anything fancy; we are just going to become the best team in the National Football League at kicking, running, passing, and catching. We're going to become brilliant on the basics."
He went on to say, "We are going to run each play so smoothly and efficiently that, even if the other team knows what we are doing, they will be unable to stop us."
High-performing salespeople are those who have, first of all, identified the basics of sales success, and, second, have become brilliant on those basics.
The Basics of Sales Success
There are seven key results areas that determine sales effectiveness. Give yourself a grade from one (low) to ten (high) in each of these seven areas (listed below). Remember that a weakness in any one area can be enough to hold you back from realizing your full potential in sales.
In fact, your weakest key skill largely determines the height of your sales and the size of your income. Sometimes, just bringing yourself up in your weakest key skill area can lead to a dramatic increase in your sales results.
Here are the "big seven":
1.Prospecting. Find and spend time with more and better prospects.
2.Building Rapport and Trust. Take the time to understand and empathize with the prospect so that he likes you, trusts you, and is willing to discuss his needs and problems with you.
3.Identifying Needs. Ask well-formulated and structured questions to uncover the real problems, wants, and needs of your prospect as it relates to what you sell.
4.Presenting. Move from the general to the particular and show your qualified prospects that your product or service is the best choice for them at this time, all things considered.
5.Answering Objections. Present logical and conclusive answers for the natural objections that most prospects have regarding the price and capabilities of your product.
6.Closing the Sale and Asking for Action. Bring the sales conversation to a satisfactory conclusion with a closed sale and a signed order or contract.
7.Getting Resales and Referrals. Provide excellent follow-up customer service such that the customer is so happy that he buys again and recommends your products/services to his friends.
Total your score and divide it by seven to get your coefficient of sales effectiveness today. If your average score is less than five, your sales results are probably less than satisfactory. And the area where you scored the lowest is probably holding you back from sales success more than any other factor.
Old and New Models of Selling
Almost all top salespeople use what I call the "new model of selling." This is very different from the old model, which is still taught by many companies and used extensively by many salespeople. Each of the models, the new and the old, has four parts.
The first part of the old model, about 10 percent, begins with the approach—the first contact. The salesperson meets the prospect and says something like, "Hi, how are you?" before engaging in small talk about the latest football game or television program. The salesperson then launches straight into the sales conversation.
The second part of the old model involves quickly qualifying the prospect to determine whether the person is in a position to buy your product or service. Salespeople have been taught supposedly clever qualifying questions to make sure that the prospect could both use and afford the product before wasting any time on a sales presentation. The third part of the old model is presenting your product or service in the best light possible by showing prospects what the product consists of and then trying to get them to buy it. The salesperson was taught to talk as much about the benefits as possible, and then to answer objections with a series of clever questions and answers.
The final part of the old model of selling—fully 40 percent of the sales process—is closing the sale. The general assumption was that all of sales effectiveness comes down to the ability of the salesperson to close the sale using a variety of techniques.
New Customers, New Methods
Today, the old way of selling does not work at all. Customers have changed completely in their knowledge and sophistication, and successful salespeople, those in the top 20 percent, have learned to sell to customers the way that customers want to be sold to.
The new model of selling is like an inverted pyramid, with the bulk of the pyramid at the top and the point at the bottom. The pyramid is divided into four parts. The first part, 40 percent of the sales conversation, is simply to build trust. Trust is the most important single factor in determining the purchasing decision, and in all relationships between people, for almost all reasons.
The second part of the new model, 30 percent, is to identify needs accurately. Take your time to ask a series of prepared and structured questions that allow you to fully understand the customer's situation before you even mention or discuss your product or service.
The next 20 percent of the new model is for you to pre sent your product or service, based on what the customer has said, and show your customer how your product or service can satisfy the needs that have been clearly identified in your conversation with the customer up to this point.
The final 10 percent of the new model of selling is to ask the customer to make a buying decision, to confirm that what you are offering is what the customer needs and wants, and to get the customer to take action today. The more time you take to build trust, the easier it is for you to make an effective presentation and to close or confirm the sale at the end.
Relationship Selling
This new model is based on what we call "relationship selling." The key to success in selling today is developing high-quality professional business relationships with customers. This model requires building high levels of trust and credibility, identifying needs carefully and accurately, showing the customer that your product or service will satisfy those needs, and then encouraging your customer to take action and wrap up the transaction.
Throughout this book, we will be talking about relationship selling. We will return continually to these two concepts: 1) the importance of building credible relationships and 2) the importance of becoming brilliant on the basics. The starting point of your becoming the best in your field, and moving into the top 20 percent or even the top 10 percent in your business, is to identify the key skills necessary for sales excellence, and then determine what you have to do to become excellent in each of those areas.
ACTION EXERCISES
1. Give yourself a grade of one to ten in each of the seven key result areas, and determine where you are the strongest and where you are the weakest.
2. Select one key skill area where you are weak and begin working every day on becoming better in that area.
CHAPTER 2
Stay Enthusiastic
THE 80/20 RULE applies to successful selling. Most of your success—fully 80 percent and maybe even more—will be determined by your attitude, your personality, and your level of motivation.
It has been said that the critical variable in a sales conversation is a "transfer of enthusiasm." The sale takes place when you transfer your enthusiasm and belief in the goodness and value of your product or service into the mind of the customer. Like an electrical connection, when the spark of enthusiasm passes from you to your customer, the sale is made.
Enthusiasm is the key to establishing good relationships with buyers and closing sales. You need to be enthusiastic about yourself, your product, and your company to be able to transfer enthusiasm to another person. This enthusiasm is something you develop, like physical fitness. No one is born with it naturally.
Keep Your Energy High
There are several techniques you can employ each day to develop and maintain high levels of enthusiasm and selling energy.
Have Positive Expectations
This is one of the greatest motivators of all. Your expectations determine your attitude. And your attitude determines how you treat other people, and how they respond to you.
You develop an attitude of positive expectations by always expecting to do well. Expect that each person you talk to is a potential prospect. Expect that people will like you and be open to your presentation. Believe in yourself and your ability to be a top performer in your field.
Use Positive Self-Talk
Talk to yourself in a positive way all the time. Fully 95 percent of your emotions are determined by how you talk to yourself on an ongoing basis. Successful people make a habit of deliberately filling their minds with positive statements that are consistent with the way they want to be perceived, and the goals they want to achieve.
Successful salespeople love their work. They believe in their product or service. They are committed to their companies and to their customers. As a result, they continually reinforce these commitments in their minds and resist negative experiences by repeating, "I love my work! I love my work! I love my work!"
Practice Positive Visualization
Feed your mind continually with clear mental pictures of the person you want to be, doing what you want to do. "What you see is what you get."
In sport, and in sales, the regular practice of the "mental rehearsal" is a powerful tool you can use to keep yourself positive and motivated, and performing at your best, all day long. In a mental rehearsal, you close your eyes and create a clear picture of yourself as the best person you can be, selling with the highest level of effectiveness that you can imagine. Each time you replay this picture in your mind, it is accepted as a command by your subconscious. When you go into the actual sales situation, your subconscious mind will give you the energy, enthusiasm, and positive attitude consistent with your mental picture. This technique can help you more than anything else to be successful.
Consume Positive Mental Food
You know that if you eat healthy, nutritious food, you will have more energy and will perform better throughout the day. In the same way, when you feed your mind with positive mental food—what we call mental protein—you will think with greater clarity and feel better about yourself all day long.
Here are three things that you can do to improve your mind, feel better about yourself, and move rapidly toward joining the top 20 percent in the sales field:
1.Read for thirty to sixty minutes each day. Reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body. Get the best sales books that you can and, for an hour each morning, read up on the best sales methodologies, strategies, and techniques ever developed. Read newsletters, articles, and magazines on selling.
2.Listen to educational CDs and audio books. In your car, use your smartphone to listen and learn as you drive to appointments. Turn your car into a "classroom on wheels." As Zig Ziglar said, "Enroll in automobile university and attend full-time for the rest of your career."
3.Attend every seminar that you can. Resolve today to attend four seminars each year, or about one every three months. Sit in the front row and take good notes. Talk to the instructor or speaker and ask questions. Take the time to meet the other people who are attending and ask them what they have learned that is most important.
When you return home from a seminar, review your notes completely—ideally, once a week for the first month. Think continually in terms of the specific actions that you can take to implement the ideas that you have just learned. Make the seminar a rich and rewarding experience for your career.
Get Around Positive People
The people you associate with have an inordinate effect on your thinking and on your emotions. For this reason, resolve to get around winners. Associate with positive people who are going somewhere in their careers. As Zig Ziglar said, "You cannot fly with the eagles if you continue to scratch with the turkeys."
One of my students told me how he went from the bottom to the top of his sales force. When he began as a junior salesman, he would hang out with the other junior salespeople, who spent most of their time in the office shuffling their business cards and talking about what they were going to do.
He noticed that the top salespeople were seldom in the office, and when they were, they were busy making calls and organizing presentations. So he did something that changed his life. He went up to one of the top salespeople and asked for advice on managing his time.
The top salesman, surprised at this request, because it was so rare, showed him how he managed his time each day. The new salesman did exactly what the top salesman was doing, and within a week he noticed that his sales activity and results were improving.
He then began asking the other top salespeople for advice on what programs to listen to, what to read, what to say in a sales conversation, and so on. In every case, the top salespeople were helpful. It was no surprise that within six months, he was also one of the top salespeople. He was now associating with the top people in his company. They got together on a regular basis to talk about different ways to improve their sales. Within a year he was one of the top salesmen in his company, and he never looked back.
Become an Expert in Your Field
Study your products and services carefully and read your brochures from cover to cover. Become so knowledgeable about what you sell that you could give a presentation from memory if you lost all your sales materials.
Study your business and industry. Study your competitors. Understand the products and services they sell, and how what you sell is different from and superior to their offerings. The better you know your products, services, competitors, and the market in general, the more confidence you will have and the more respected you will be by your customers.
Get Serious About Your Work
Remember that, as a professional salesperson, you are a member of a profession. When you rise to the top of your field, you can earn as much or more than a doctor, dentist, architect, or engineer—people with many years of university qualifications.
Professionals at the top of their fields invest a lot of time keeping current with what is going on in their industries. They take their work seriously. They resolve to excel—to be better than their competitors. They want to be known as the top people in their fields. Above all, professionals are committed to doing an excellent job in their work, and to continually improving, getting better and better every day and every week. So should you.
ACTION EXERCISES
1. Resolve today to engage in personal development as a lifelong practice. Begin acquiring books on sales and resolve to read one chapter each day, from now on, for the rest of your sales career.
2. Say these words: I like myself and I love my work! Repeat this sentence over and over again throughout the day, first thing in the morning, and whenever you have a disappointment or a setback.
CHAPTER 3
Personal Management skills: The Inner Game
TO GET INTO THE top 20 percent in your field, and then the top 10 percent, 5 percent, and even one percent—where the big money is—you have to have everything going for you. The world of sales today, in any field, with any product or service, is more competitive than it has ever been before, except for tomorrow and the next day, and the day after that. Your goal must be to win this competition.
My favorite word in describing success is clarity. In my estimation, clarity accounts for 95 percent of your success and achievement in anything that you attempt to do, in both your personal and your business life.
The number one reason why some people are more successful than others is because they are absolutely clear about who they are, what they want, and exactly what they have to do to get it. Clarity requires a tremendous amount of thinking and rethinking. As Thomas Edison said, "The hardest work in the world is thinking, which is why most people never do it."
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Excerpted from Sales Success by BRIAN TRACY. Copyright © 2015 Brian Tracy. Excerpted by permission of AMACOM.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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