I've worked in sales and with sales professionals all my life.
Just to name a few types, real estate, financial services, insurance, investments, automobiles, time shares, network marketing, weight loss, as well as, in business to business, high tech equipment, nuclear power plant part fabrication, chemicals, P & C insurance.
And with people who don 't necessarily think of themselves as salespeople, but who are: chiropractors, dentists, karate school owners. Each and every one of them sabotages their success by devoutly believing their business is different. Each one further frustrates himself or herself by following long established industry norms and ordinary sales practices, yet being unhappy with normal and ordinary results. The complaints of salespeople are universal, and universally solvable.
Complaint #1 Prospecting Sucks.
Every sales pro hates prospecting, for good reason. It is not a productive use of time. They view it as necessary evil, in order to get the opportunity to do what is productive: make presentations, make sales. They are accurate in calling it evil. Inaccurate it in calling it necessary. My testimonial files are chock full of salespeople who no longer have to prospect at all, ever. Instead, they replace manual labor prospecting with expert positioning coupled with what I've termed magnetic marketing, and voila!
Their clients or customers come to them, pre-disposed to do business only with them. I'm going to give you references for this. In my book NO B.S. SALES SUCCESS, Chapters 16 and 17. In addition, my complete Magnetic Marketing System, which you can find at the Glazer-Kennedy Webstore located at www.dankennedy.com. Over 50-million dollars worth of this System has been purchased worldwide. It is the only System that actually shows you how to end cold prospecting.
Let me mention a few people who no longer prospect, ever. Craig Proctor, who is, every year, one of the top ten ReMax agents in the entire world. My friend Tracy Tolleson, a mortgage broker, who makes, net, $200,000.00 to $250,000.00 a year, 70% from Realtor referrals, works 30 hours a week, takes 2 months off. Darin Garman, who sells apartment buildings and dominates his market. I could list 100 more I know of personally in some 60 different fields.
Think of it this way, to get started: prospecting is hunting, pursuing, trying to push yourself on people. Magnetic Marketing is waiting, inviting, encouraging people to come to you.
Oh, and if you're a sales manager or run the company, and you still have your salespeople wasting time prospecting, you're a bonehead.
Complaint #2 Price Resistance.
Salespeople hate haggling over price, losing deals because of price. Well, here's the first truth: if you aren't, and cannot stay the cheapest price provider, then there is absolutely no benefit whatsoever to coming in 2nd, 3rd, or 4th. Might as well be the highest.
Second truth: price resistance is very, very, very rarely, really price resistance. If it exists, it's a symptom. Its cause? Poor positioning, refer to what I just said about Complaint #1. Or, selling in a competitive environment rather than a competitive vacuum.
Again, refer to what I just said about Complaint #1. You see, if you engineer the front end of your selling process to attract, so people feel they are seeking you out, then they are not in a price comparison mindset, not even in a price questioning mindset. References, chapters 10, 11, 12 and 21 of my NO B.S. SALES SUCCESS book, combined with 16 and 17.
I'd also suggest another book of mine, based on Psycho-Cybernetics, titled
ZERO RESISTANCE SELLING.
Here's something very important: most salespeople, by instinct, conditioning, and training, are way too quick to get in front of a prospect and sell. If you will carefully consider the four steps on page 123 of my book, you will see that they actually delay selling. They install a process in between a prospect first expressing interest and you getting in front of that prospect.
In between. That process, those tools, are designed to pre-empt price resistance. This goes against the grain. Most salespeople want to jump on a prospect the minute they find one, like a starving dog that spots a discarded burger by a dumpster in an alley. You MUST fight this tendency. You have to hold yourself in check, exercise patience, and let a smart process work for you. Most salespeople work way too hard overcoming obstacles, like price resistance, when, instead, the obstacles should be pre-emptively dissolved.
As mental picture, imagine a very thick concrete wall between you and your objective. You can run as hard as you can and smash your shoulder against the wall, use a battering ram, hack away at it with a pick axe. And by the time you get through, if you get through, you are dead ass tired, worn out, disgusted, and hate the whole idea of having to do that day in, day out to make your living.
Or you can take some acid, squirt it all over a big circle in the middle of the wall, go take a nap under a tree, enjoy a lemonade, WAIT, that 's the key, wait for the acid to slowly do its work, weakening the wall. Then stroll over hours or a day later, lean on the wall, and bingo, nice big hole to walk through. Salespeople operate too much by brute force, the high price of impatience. And of fear, fear that if you don 't leap on the prospect the instant he 's spotted, he 'll go buy from somebody else. If you 're going to live your whole business life in fear, you aren 't going to be very happy.
Complaint #3 Commoditization
That brings me to #3. When I spoke at the Advertising Specialty Institute Convention, I started by saying "If you 're in a commodity business, get out. A woman walked out and later sent me a letter calling me an idiot for not understanding who I was speaking to; that they were in a commodity business. Well, being perceived as interchangeable commodity is your choice. Your fault.
One of my VIP coaching members, Mitch Carson of Impact Products is in that business, but he is definitely not interchangeable with anybody else selling the same products, thus he has no fear about losses to competitors, and he blithely charges higher prices. I refer you, again, to chapters 13 and 16, NO B.S. SALES SUCCESS.
But I really want to talk with you about re-invention. In my Magnetic Marketing System, you see example after example, the one I use most is the Italian restaurant re-positioned as the "evening of romance." A restaurant but not in the restaurant business, serving food but not selling food. Competition and price, irrelevant.
Mitch provides ad specialties and promotional merchandise, but he sells something else.
This starts with focusing on the "who , rather than the what ," of your business . And there are two "who 's that are important," you and them. The clients, the prospects, the carefully chosen target market. The other who , is "you." And you can 't be commoditized because you are unique. No one matches your DNA. The more you make the relationship with the client and the client 's choice about you, the less about the product or service, the more impossible it is to be commoditized.
In one of my businesses, freelance direct-response copywriting, there 's actually a national directory called Who 's Charging What, where hundreds of my competitors , fees are listed for anyone to see. Mine are higher than every single one of them. Some of them have won more awards than I, some have more years of experience, many more education, many longer name client lists. But I charge more than any one of them. And for every job I take, I turn down three. I am far busier than I want to be. I 'm booked months ahead. I 'm over-worked. Not under-paid, but over-worked. How can this be? I have made it all about me, not about the service provided.
Complaint #4 Closing Sales vs. Stalls and Objections
You'll find very little in my entire 259 page book about "closing". Maybe ten or eleven pages, tops. Why? Because if you have to overcome objections and fight your way to a close, you screwed up badly long before you got there. The close should be seamless, effortless, automatic, assumed.
I've personally sold eight different things in my career, rarely worse than a 70% close rate. People I train close at a rate two, three, four times greater than anyone else in their field. But not because we close better. Because we don't have to. If you're having trouble closing, you don't need another tricky closing gimmick, a new script, or to get tougher and more brutal. You need to back up, back way, way up, to re-engineer your sales process from step one.
Complaint #5 Poor Working Conditions
No, when I say "Poor Working Conditions" I don't mean your office or store, or the car you drive. I mean the hours you work, the constancy of your accessibility to any and all, your rising stress and insanity, never a moment's peace, even the lack of respect shown to you by prospects and clients. Two things are at work here.
One, that salespeople just aren't highly regarded. People think nothing of keeping you waiting, cooling your heels, canceling appointments at the last minute, even insulting you, just about calling you a liar, Chiseling your price. Clients think you should be waiting for their call or Fax or e-mail, drop whatever you're doing and jump up and bark when they whistle, after all, you're just another damned salesman.
Second, salespeople invite all this lousy treatment out of their own fear, insecurity, poor self-image, lousy positioning, brute force prospecting, permitted commoditization.
My friend Lee Milteer says: there are no victims, only volunteers. She is 1000% right. Visit her at leemilteer.com. She will tell you: you create your reality. In selling, if you don't define yourself, they will. But you definitely can choose NOT to be just another damned salesman, and to the contrary, demand and get the courtesy, respect, dignity, trust and transfer of power that clients typically give to their lawyer or patients give to their cardiac surgeons.
In NO B.S. SALES SUCCESS, you must study the section on Takeaway Selling. But you should also study the NO B.S. TIME MANAGEMENT book, because it's about a lot more than time management tricks --- it's about doing business on YOUR terms. It's about giving yourself better, no, ideal working conditions. Then, if you get really serious about this, I want you to read the 40 pages or so of information at www.renegademillionaire.com, paying special attention to what I've written there about the subject of AUTONOMY.
My speaking colleague for 9 years, Zig Ziglar calls selling "the proud profession. " It can be, but not the way most salespeople do it! I've been a salesman my whole life, but have never been viewed or treated as one, after the first year. Now that is an important, significant, even profound statement every salesperson hearing or reading this ought to take to heart. Write it down. Keep looking at it, roll it around in your mind, let your subconscious chew on it, until a light bulb goes off.
Dan S. Kennedy
