by Brian Tracy
You proceed to wrap up the sale as if the prospect had just said, “I’ll take it!” You then add, “And I’ll take care of all the details.”
This is a form of the “Assumption Close” or the “Selling Past the Sale Close,” where you assume the sale, in advance, and carry on exactly as if the decision to buy had already been made. The strength of this closing technique is that it enables you to take and control the initiative. It keeps you in the driver’s seat.
The third closing technique you can use is called the “Authorization Close.” At the end of the sales conversation, you double-check to make sure that the prospect has no further questions. You then take out your order form, place a check mark by the signature line, push the order form across the desk, and say, “Well then, if you’ll just authorize this, we’ll get started right away!”
Sometimes the customer doesn’t know how badly he or she wants what you’re offering until you offer to get started “right away.”
There are dozens of proven ways for you to close the sale, each of them appropriate for different situations. If you have built a solid relationship with the prospect, positioned yourself as a consultant and a teacher, and matched your product or service carefully to the real needs of your prospect, the close is relatively easy and painless.
But you must be prepared to ask for the sale. Fully 50 percent of all sales conversations end without the salesperson asking for the order or even for a subsequent meeting. Most sales are closed only after the fifth time the salesperson asks the prospect to make a buying decision. Your ability and willingness to ask for the prospect’s business can be the deciding factor in your career.
The future belongs to the askers. Financial and personal success goes to those men and women who confidently and courageously ask for what they want, and if they don’t get it, they ask again and again.
Of course, you should ask politely. Ask courteously. Ask expectantly. Ask in a friendly and persistent way. You should ask for appointments. Ask what customers are doing now and how satisfied they are with it. Ask about their future plans and needs. Ask who else they are considering. Ask for more information. Ask for references and referrals. But above all, ask for the business. Ask for the order. Never be afraid to ask for what you want. This is the key to success both in selling and in life.
ACTION EXERCISES
Plan your closing in advance. Think through your sales process and presentation and be ready to ask a closing question as soon as you think your prospect is ready to make a buying decision.
Practice and memorize the closing techniques explained above. Read, study, listen to audio programs, and build your repertoire of closing techniques. The more confident you become about your ability to close, the more confident you will become in prospecting and presenting as well.
Remember that your job success depends on your ability to close the sale. Everything that you do up to that moment is preparation. Asking for the order is the key to the sales process, and your goal must be to become absolutely excellent in this area. Don’t hesitate!
16
Make Every Minute Count
Set priorities for your goals. A major
part of successful living lies in the ability
to put first things first. Indeed, the
reason most major goals are not
achieved is that we spend our time
doing second things first.
— ROBERT J. MCKAIN
Your most valuable asset, in terms of cash flow, is your earning ability. It is your ability to go out each day and apply your skills in your profession to earn an excellent income. The most successful salespeople, in every field, work on maximizing their earning ability every single day.
It has taken you an entire lifetime of education and experience to develop your earning ability to where it is today. You should never take it for granted.
By leveraging your earning ability, you can enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world by focusing your time and talents on selling more and more of your products or services in your marketplace.
Your most precious resource is your time—the minutes and hours of each day. It is all you really have to sell. In fact, your entire lifestyle today—your home, your car, your bank account, and so on—is the result of how you have traded your time up to now. If, for any reason, you are not completely happy with the results of the way you have traded your time in the past, you can begin right now to trade it better for the future.
One of the very best uses of your time is to increase your earning ability. One of the greatest timesavers of all is to get better at the most important things you do. Nothing else will give you a more rapid and predictable increase in your income and your standard of living. The more you invest your time and money back into yourself, into making yourself more capable and confident at the activities that pay you the most, the more you will earn and the happier you will be.
Resolve today to become an expert at time management. This one skill will make more things possible for you than perhaps any other, for without it, no other skills can be utilized to their fullest extent.
The core principle of time management is the ability to do first things first; to set priorities among competing demands on your time; and above all, to think, plan, decide, and then to take the appropriate action.
The most important word in setting priorities is “consequences.” An activity is valuable in direct proportion to the potential consequences of doing it or not. The task that represents the most serious potential consequences is almost always the one with the highest priority.
There are four questions that you can ask and answer continually to keep yourself focused on your highest priorities. First, ask yourself, “What are my highest value activities in terms of the potential consequences of doing them or not doing them?”
For you, a sales professional, they are (1) prospecting, (2) establishing rapport, (3) identifying needs, (4) making presentations, (5) answering objections, (6) closing the sale, and (7) getting referrals from customers. Your competence in each of these areas, and in all of them together, determines your sales and your income. What is the most important activity you need to be engaging in right now?
Second, ask yourself, “Why am I on the payroll?”
Every minute of every day, you should imagine that your boss were traveling along with you, observing your actions, and preparing your annual performance appraisal. Keep asking yourself, “Is what I’m doing right now leading to a sale?” This result is the sole reason you are on the payroll. If what you are doing is not leading to a sale, stop doing it and start doing something that is.
The third question you can ask and answer repeatedly is, “What can I, and only I, do that, if done well, will make a significant contribution to my company and myself?”
This is a task, such as prospecting or closing sales, that only you can do. If you don’t do it, it will not be done by someone else. The successful completion of this task, whatever it is, should be a major priority for you.
The fourth question for setting priorities, the best single question of all, is this: “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?”
There is only one answer to this question at any time. Your primary job is to identify the answer and then to work on this one task exclusively until it is complete.
Ask each of these questions of yourself continually. Hold your own feet to the fire. Discipline yourself to stay focused on those activities that can contribute the most to your success.
All highly effective people think clearly in two dimensions of time: long-term and short-term. First, they are very clear about their future goals and ambitions. Second, they are very focused in the moment in that they are always doing the one thing that can most contribute to achieving their most important goals. Your ability to hold these two thoughts simultaneously is the key to high productivity.
ACTION EXERCISES
Begin today to plan every day, week, and month
in advance. Use a time planner of some kind, either written or electronic. Any of these systems will help you get organized if you will discipline yourself to use them every day.
Perhaps the best time management tool of all is a list. Make a list of the next day’s activities each evening. Go through the list and set priorities on the items. Determine which are more important and which are less important. Decide which activities can contribute the most to your life and which contribute the least.
Each morning, begin with your most important task and discipline yourself to stay at it until it is 100 percent complete. This one habit will do more to improve your results and your life than anything else.
17
Apply the 80/20 Rule to Everything
Nothing can add more power to
your life than concentrating all of your
energies on a limited set of targets.
— NIDO QUBEIN
In 1895 in Italy, an economist named Vilfredo Pareto discovered a principle that has had an enormous impact on economics and business ever since. He found that you could divide members of society into the “vital few,” the 20 percent of the population who controlled 80 percent of the wealth, and the “trivial many,” those who possessed only 20 percent of the wealth.
This is now called the Pareto Principle, and it has proven to be universally valid in virtually every study of economic activity. We call it the 80/20 Rule, and you can apply it to every area of selling.
The 80/20 Rule says that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results. If you have a list of ten things to do, two of those activities will be as valuable, if not more valuable, than the other eight. One of your chief responsibilities is to continually analyze your tasks to be sure that you are working on the top 20 percent.
In selling, 20 percent of your prospects will account for 80 percent of your customers, 20 percent of your customers will account for 80 percent of your sales, 20 percent of your products and services will account for 80 percent of your sales volume, and so on.
In business, 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your profits. In addition, 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your expenses, and the activities that represent 80 percent of your expenses may not be closely related to your most profitable activities. In the worst of cases, businesses find themselves spending most of their time and money in areas that are not profitable at all.
Some years ago, a major insurance company analyzed the sales and incomes of its many thousands of salespeople throughout the country. The analysts found that the 80/20 Rule held up: 20 percent of the salespeople were making 80 percent of the sales and 80 percent of the commissions.
Then they compared the incomes of the people in the top 20 percent to the incomes of those in the bottom 80 percent. They found that the average income of those in the top 20 percent was sixteen times the average income of those in the lower 80 percent!
They then looked at the top 20 percent of the salespeople in the upper 20 percent—that is, the top 4 percent of the sales force—and found that their income amounted to 80 percent of the income of the top 20 percent. Some of the people in the top 4 percent were earning as much as fifty times the income of the people in the bottom 80 percent!
When I learned the results of this study, I resolved that I was going to do whatever it took to get into the top 20 percent and move up from there. I then discovered two principles that changed my life. First, I found that it took just as much time to be in the top 20 percent as to be in the bottom 80 percent. It took just as many days, weeks, and months of work to succeed greatly as to get average results.
The second thing I discovered was that there was very little difference in talent or ability between the high performers and the low performers, except for the way they used their time. It turned out that the high performers had developed the habit of working primarily on the top 20 percent of their activities, and the lower performers had not.
What this means, quite simply, is that for you to succeed greatly, you must always be focusing your time and energy on the few activities, the 20 percent of tasks, that can make a real difference in your life. Your ability to keep this focus will eventually move you to the top of your field.
On the other hand, the inability to focus on the top 20 percent of sales activities is the primary reason for failure, frustration, and underachievement in the sales profession. Even if you are working hard, it will do you no good if you are accomplishing more and more tasks of little value in comparison with what else you could be doing with the same time and energy.
ACTION EXERCISES
Make a list every day, before you begin work. Organize your list on the basis of the 80/20 Rule. Select the one or two tasks that are potentially more valuable than any of the others. Start on the first task and stay with it until it is complete.
Use the ABC Method to sort out your prospects and customers before you begin work. Make a list of all your prospects. Place an “A” next to those who have the highest potential, the top 20 percent. Place a “B” next to those of middle potential and a “C” next to those of low potential.
Conduct the same exercise with your customers to determine how often you call back on them. Visit your “A” customers personally on a regular basis. Visit your “B” customers less often, and phone them between visits. Visit your “C” customers occasionally, using the telephone and mail to keep in touch.
18
Keep Your Sales Funnel Full
The power which resides in man
is new in nature, and none but he
knows what that is that he can do,
nor does he know until he has tried.
— RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Professional selling has three stages, which have been the same throughout history. They are prospect, present, and follow up. These three phases constitute the three parts of the “sales funnel.”
If ever you are not satisfied with your results, you can analyze your performance in terms of these three basic activities. If your sales and your income are down, it is because you are not prospecting enough, presenting enough, or following up and closing enough. The way to increase your sales is usually for you to increase the quality or quantity of your activities in one or more of these areas.
Imagine this basic sales model as a funnel. At the top of the funnel, you put in prospects. You have to call on a certain number of people, or suspects, to get a certain number of prospects. This number varies depending on the market, your product or service, your individual skills in prospecting, advertising, and many other factors.
The second part of the sales funnel is presenting. There is a direct ratio between the number of people you call on initially and the number of people who will agree to meet with you. Let us say, for example, that you have to call on twenty prospects to get five presentations. This would give you a ratio of 20 to 5 for your prospecting activities. Selling is very much a numbers game.
Now, let us say that you have to make five presentations to get two prospects who are interested enough in your offering that you can follow up on them. This would give you a ratio of 5 to 2 for your presentation activities.
In the third part of the sales funnel you have following up and closing. Let us say that you have to follow up with two prospects to get one sale.
What this means is that you have to put twenty prospects in the top of the funnel to get one sale out of the bottom of the funnel, a ratio of 20 to 1. The rule, therefore, is this: “Keep your funnel full.”
Apply the 80/20 Rule to your sales activities. Spend 80 percent of your time prospecting and presenting, and spend only 20 percent of your time following up. And don’t mix them up. Avoid the temptation to spend all your time calling back on prospects who won’t give you a yes or a no. Instead, spend most of your time filling your sales funnel with new prospects.
Here is a great rule for sales success: Spend more time with better prospects!
Prospecting Power
The definition of a good prospect is “Someone who can and will buy and pay within a reasonable period of time.”
Do not waste your precious selling time with nice people who do not have the authority, money, or ability to buy from you. Think continually about your personal income, and always be sure that the person you are talking to can contribute to that income soon enough to justify the time you are investing in him or her.
Prospecting begins with your analyzing your product or service and your market so that you can be clear about what you are really selling and the type of person who is most likely to buy it.
Begin with the question, What do I sell? Answer this question in terms of what it does for your customer, not what it is. Define the exact benefits or advantages that your customer will enjoy by purchasing what you sell. How will he or she be better off?
What specific ways does your product or service improve the customer’s life or work?
Second, why should the customer buy the product or service from you or your company? What is your competitive advantage? What is it about what you sell that makes it better, superior in some way, to that of your competition? How are you different? What is your unique selling proposition?
Surprisingly enough, most salespeople don’t know the answers to these questions. As a result, their sales efforts are scattered rather than focused, and their sales results are far below what they should be. The sad fact is that even a qualified prospect cannot buy from you until and unless he or she knows why what you sell is better than someone else’s product or service. Clarity is essential.
Segment Your Market
Once you are absolutely clear about what you sell, defined from the customer’s point of view, and you know why and how what you sell is better than anything else available for a particular type of customer, your next job is to identify exactly those customers who can most benefit, the most rapidly, from what you sell.