by Brian Tracy
Become a “do-it-to-yourself project.” Select the books you are going to read and block out time each day to read a specific number of pages. Determine the audio programs that can help you the most and begin listening to them. Resolve to attend one sales seminar every three months and discipline yourself to stick to your plan.
Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning. School is never out for the professional. The race is on, and you are in it. Be sure that you do everything you have to do, in terms of preparation, to win. Never stop learning and growing in your field.
7
Accept Complete Responsibility for Results
Hold yourself responsible for a
higher standard than anybody else
expects of you. Never excuse yourself.
— HENRY WARD BEECHER
Sometimes I will begin a sales seminar by asking, “How many people here are self-employed?” Usually, about 15 to 20 percent of the hands go up. I then stop and ask a confident-looking person in the audience, “How many people here would you say are self-employed?”
He or she almost always replies, in a loud voice, “We all are!”
I then say, “You’re right! The biggest mistake you can ever make is to think that you work for anyone else but yourself. We are all self-employed.”
The highest paid sales professionals in every field accept 100 percent responsibility for their lives and for everything that happens to them. They see themselves as the presidents of their own professional sales corporations. They view themselves as self-employed.
They say, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” They refuse to make excuses or to blame anyone else for anything in their lives that they are not happy about. If they don’t like something, they know that it is up to them to get busy and change it. They accept complete responsibility and they refuse to complain or criticize.
The wonderful discovery is that the more responsibility you accept, the more you like and respect yourself. And the more you like and respect yourself, the more optimistic and positive you become. The more positive you are, the more creative and constructive you feel. As you accept more responsibility, you become more personally powerful and irresistible. You feel terrific about yourself. And the better you feel, the more you sell. Eventually, you reach the point where you feel unstoppable, like a force of nature.
The foundation of a healthy personality is the complete acceptance of personal responsibility for your life and for everything that happens to you. From now on, see yourself as the president of an entrepreneurial company with one employee—yourself. See yourself as responsible for selling your product— your personal services—into a competitive marketplace. Look upon your employer as your best client. See yourself as the boss of your own life.
As the president of your own professional sales corporation, you are paid for results, not activities. If you want more money, make more sales. In the long run, you determine your own income by what you do and by what you neglect to do.
Do you want to increase your income? Then go to the nearest mirror and negotiate with your “boss.” The person in the mirror makes the decisions that determine the course of your life.
Here is an exercise for you: Make out a check to yourself on the first of the month for the amount you want to earn that month. Then, for the rest of the month, figure out how you are going to make payroll. You’re the boss. It’s your company. It’s your life.
This is how the highest paid salespeople think about themselves and their work. When you practice thinking, all day long, the way that the top people think, you will eventually do the same things and get the same results that the top people get. You will begin to take complete control over every part of your career and your personal life. You will move onto the fast track and start to become a sales superstar.
ACTION EXERCISES
Imagine that you are starting a new business called “You, Inc.” Prepare a complete strategic plan for your business, starting with sales projections on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.
Develop a step-by-step series of goals and activities that you are going to engage in every day to reach your sales goals. Organize your life around the achievement of these goals, and refuse to accept or allow excuses for nonperformance.
Develop your own plans for marketing, sales, production, quality control, training and development, and finances. Accept complete responsibility for yourself and for everything that happens to you.
8
Become Brilliant on the Basics
The quality of a person’s life is
determined more by their commitment
to excellence than by any other
factor, no matter what the
external circumstances.
— VINCE LOMBARDI
On many occasions, when we have offered our sales training programs to companies, we have been told, “We don’t need that kind of training around here. All our people have years of experience.”
We have a simple response to this objection. We say, “That’s fine. Let’s just give a simple test on selling basics to the members of your sales team. Everyone who passes the test doesn’t need to take additional training.”
What we have found is that virtually no one ever passes. Very few people are familiar enough even with the basics of selling to pass a simple multiple-choice exam. This means that salespeople who are already doing well could probably be selling far more if they were trained better on the basics. Salespeople who have never been trained at all can change their lives.
The AIDA Model of Selling
The AIDA Model describes the basic sales process. It has been used consistently throughout history. The four letters in AIDA stand for “Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action,” the logical process of making a buying decision. Whenever you are having problems in your sales, it is because you are falling down in one of these four areas.
Get the Prospect to Listen to You
The first word, “Attention,” requires that before you begin selling to anyone, you must break his or her preoccupation. You must get the customer to listen to you and pay attention to you. The fact is that everyone is busy today. Therefore, every sales call is an interruption of something else that the customer is doing.
To get a customer’s attention, you must ask a question or present an idea aimed at a specific benefit that the customer wants or a specific need of the customer that your product or service can fulfill. You must answer the first question of every prospect in your opening communication, which is, Why should I listen to you?
For example, in selling to a business customer, you could ask, “Would you like to see an idea that could save you time or money in your current operations?”
This question goes right to the heart of the concerns of almost every businessperson and tells the prospect why it might be of benefit to listen to you. If the prospect has a need to save time or money, this question will get his or her attention.
Whatever you sell, you can design a question or statement that will attract the attention of a prospect. Your question should focus on a specific desire of the prospect to achieve, avoid, or preserve something. For example, one of the most successful ads in the world, for Preparation H, is the word “Hemorrhoids?” It is simple and immediately catches the attention of qualified prospects.
Get the Prospect Interested
The second letter in the AIDA Model stands for “Interest.” You arouse interest by showing features of your product or service or by explaining how your product or service can improve the life or work of the prospect.
A product demonstration arouses interest. A presentation of your services, showing how they can improve the prospect’s work or business, maintains interest.
People are curious. They are interested in knowing about new products and services. But interest is not enough. The presentation or demonstration must connect with a need or desire or no purchase will take place.
Arouse Buying Desire
The third lette
r in the AIDA Model stands for “Desire.” This is the part of the sales presentation where you explain the benefits that the prospect will enjoy from using your product or service. Features arouse interest, but desire causes the prospect to buy. If your prospect says something like “I want to think it over,” what he or she is really saying is “You have not aroused my buying desire high enough for me to want to proceed at this time.”
Your ability to think through and determine the real benefits that will motivate a prospective customer to buy is the most important part of selling. Your job is then to find prospects who intensely desire these benefits.
Some benefits that are most likely to stimulate buying desire are
1. Saving or making money
2. Saving or gaining time or increasing convenience
3. Being healthy, secure, popular, respected, or current
4. Improving one’s personal or business situation in some way
Your primary job is to determine the key buying desire that your product or service can arouse in the mind and emotions of a particular prospect and then to convince him or her overwhelmingly that he or she will have that desire fulfilled with what you are selling.
Closing the Sale
The last letter in the AIDA Model stands for “Action.” This is the part of the process where you ask the customer to make a definite buying decision, to take action on your offer. This is where you close the sale.
Later in this book, I will give you some proven techniques to get the customer to take action on your offer. For now, it is essential that you are clear about the AIDA Model and that you follow the steps in the correct order.
It is amazing how many salespeople mix up these four parts of the sale, getting them out of order, jumping back and forth from one to the other, or omitting them altogether. But they are like numbers in a sequence to open a lock. If they are out of order, they won’t work at all, even if they are the correct numbers.
For you to be a top salesperson, you must become an expert in all four areas. You must learn and practice each phase of the sale until you reach the point where you can do all of them easily and automatically.
ACTION EXERCISES
Write each of the words in the AIDA Model at the top of separate sheets of paper. Then, write ten statements that you can use to connect better with your prospect in each area.
Give yourself a grade on a scale of one to ten in each area to assess how well you are doing today. Ask your colleagues and your sales manager to grade you as well. Go to work on the skill area that can help you the most.
Develop an opening question or positioning statement that grabs the prospect’s attention and makes him or her want to listen to you. If necessary, rephrase your introductory question or statement so that a qualified prospect would respond with immediate interest.
Identify the key benefits that a customer will enjoy from owning or using what you sell. Which are the most important? Create a single sentence that summarizes the important benefits and repeat it often.
9
Build Long-Term Relationships
Fully 85 percent of the happiness
and success you enjoy in life will be
determined by the quality of your
relationships with others.
— BRIAN TRACY
All of your selling success today, and for the rest of your career, will be based on the quality of the relationships that you form with your customers. Because of the complexity of your product or service, customers are usually unable to make an accurate judgment on the details of what you are selling. Instead, they have to depend upon how they feel about you and your claims. For most customers today, the relationship comes first. It is more important than the product or service itself.
More than twenty years of research and millions of dollars have been spent by Neil Rackham and Huthwaite Associates interviewing more than 55,000 customers before and after a sale or nonsale. One of the conclusions of their data is that the bigger the sale and the longer the life of the product or service are, the more important the relationship is in making the sale.
The building and maintaining of high-quality sales relationships proceeds in four stages. We call this the Relationship Selling Model. The first stage, roughly 40 percent of the sale, is the development of trust. This is best achieved by asking good questions and listening closely to the answers. In fact, a recent survey of the members of the Purchasing Managers Association of America (PMAA) concluded that the salespeople these professional buyers rated “the best” were the people who asked the most questions before attempting to sell.
The second stage of building high-quality sales relationships, 30 percent of the process, is focusing on identifying the true needs and wants of the prospect. Instead of talking about what you are selling, you ask questions about the prospect and his or her situation. You probe the answers you get and, as Stephen Covey says, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
Once you have built a high level of trust by asking questions and seeking to understand how your product or service can help the prospect in some way, you move to phase three, 20 percent of the Relationship Selling Model, which is presenting solutions. In this stage, you show the prospect how he or she could be better off with what you are selling than he or she is today. You carefully match the prospect’s expressed needs with the specific features and benefits of your product or service.
In phase four, the final 10 percent of the Relationship Selling Model, you ask for confirmation from the prospect that what you are offering and what he or she needs are the same. You ask the prospect to make a decision and take action on your offering. You close the sale.
The Relationship Selling Model is based on trust. You develop trust by asking the customer about his or her needs and then by listening intently to the answers. The more you ask good questions and listen carefully to the customer, the more the customer will trust you and open up to you. When the customer trusts you enough, he or she will tell you everything you need to know to either make a sale or to determine that this customer is not a good prospect for what you are selling.
The very best salespeople are “relationship experts.” They focus all of their attention on the relationship before they begin talking about their products or services. And as a result, they sell far more than the average salesperson. They get far more resales and referrals. They eventually move to the top of their fields.
ACTION EXERCISES
Focus first and foremost on the prospect and the relationship—before anything else. Concentrate on building a high level of trust. Only when you have built a bridge of understanding of the prospect’s real needs should you start talking about what you are selling. When the relationship is strong, the sale will take care of itself.
Develop a series of questions aimed at fully understanding the customer and his or her situation. Ask your questions in a logical sequence, from the general to the particular. You can even make a list of these questions and give it to the prospect at the beginning of your meeting. (See chapter 5.) Then go through the list together to assure a high level of understanding between you before you begin your product or service presentation.
10
Be a Financial Improvement Specialist
A single idea—the sudden flash of an
idea—maybe worth a million dollars.
— ROBERT COLLIER
In consultative selling, you position yourself as a consultant, an expert, an advisor, a helper, and a teacher in the sales situation. Above all, you position yourself as a problem solver. You ask good questions and listen attentively to the answers.
When you are selling to businesses especially, you should position yourself as a “financial improvement specialist.” This requires that you focus all your attention on showing the customer how his or her business can be financially better off as the result of using your product or service.
Customers of top salespeople describe these salespeople as consultants, “u
npaid members of my own staff.” They say, “He/she really understands my situation.” This must be your aim as well.
Begin the sales process by asking questions about your prospect’s business, seeking to understand how sales and revenues are generated, how costs and expenses are incurred, and how profits are made. Put yourself in the position of the business owner or executive and try to see yourself as being personally involved in achieving the financial results for which he or she is responsible.
Once you understand how your prospect’s business or department operates, then find a way to define what you sell in financial terms. Your primary aim is to demonstrate to the prospect that the financial benefit of dealing with you is greater than the cost of what you are selling.
Many companies use “internal rate of return” to evaluate a new business expenditure. This is the return on investment that they aim to attain in purchasing new equipment of any kind. For example, a company may set 15 percent as its “IRR.” This means that for you to sell the company something, you must demonstrate that it will save or make the company 15 percent or more each year and eventually pay for itself.
The higher the rate of return that a business can achieve in using your product or service, the more attractive it is to buy and use because it basically pays for itself and yields a profit.
The most important decision criterion business-people use in evaluating a prospective purchase or expenditure is called “time to payback.” This is the amount of time that will pass before the company gets 100 percent of its money back. This is determined by dividing the IRR into the number 72. (For example, if your product or service will save or earn the company 20 percent of its cost each year, the time to payback is 3.6 years.) The company then compares this rate of return against alternate uses of the same money.