by Brian Tracy
Here are some of the qualities of a good prospect. Your job at the first contact or meeting is to determine if the person you are talking to fits this description:
1. The prospect has a genuine need that your product/service can fill.
2. The prospect is friendly toward you and has a favorable impression of your company and industry.
3. The prospect values the results/benefits of what you sell more than the amount you charge.
4. The prospect is willing and able to make a buying decision in the near future.
5. The prospect is a good potential source of further sales and referrals.
Your job is to ask questions early in the sales process to determine how many of these qualities the prospect possesses.
Wasting Your Time
Some people are a complete waste of time. Even if you can get appointments with them, they will seldom, if ever, buy anything from you. Here are some qualities of poor prospects:
1. The prospect has no need, no money, no authority, or no urgency to buy or use what you sell.
2. The prospect is critical of you, your company, or your product.
3. The prospect immediately haggles and complains about your price.
4. The prospect compares you unfavorably to your competitors.
5. The prospect is indecisive about purchasing from you or anyone.
6. The prospect is not a good source of resales or referrals.
Sometimes the best use of your time is to break off discussions with a poor prospect before you waste too much time going down a blind alley. Always be polite, but don’t spend time where your efforts are not appreciated.
Getting More Appointments
with Better Prospects
In your market, there exist what are called “high-probability prospects.” These are people who have an immediate need for what you are selling. Your job is to find as many of them as possible, as soon as possible, and leave the “low-probability prospects” for others.
The very best way to prospect is, first, be clear about the most important and valuable benefit your product can give your customer. Second, be clear about how and why your product is ideal and appropriate for a specific type of customer. Third, focus and concentrate all your efforts on finding and talking to more of this type of customer.
Remember, the customer’s first question is, Why should I listen to you? Your job is to answer this question in your first communication, whether it is by telephone, voice mail, fax, letter, or e-mail. Summarize the primary benefit of your offering, for a qualified, high-probability prospect, in your first words.
For example, when I was selling sales training, I would call a company and ask to speak to the person who was responsible for sales, whose income was probably determined by how much was sold (the “problem haver”). When that person came on the line, I would say, “Hello. My name is Brian Tracy from the Institute for Executive Development. I was calling to find out if you would be interested in a method to increase your sales by 20 to 30 percent over the next three to six months.”
This opening fulfills all the requirements of a professional call. You identify yourself immediately and give your name and your company’s. You then politely ask the “qualifying question.” If this person is a prospect for what you are selling, he or she will reply by saying something like “Of course. What is it?”
When you are speaking to the right person and you have asked a question that connects with an existing need, the prospect will ask, “What is it?” If he or she says anything else, the chances are good that this person is not a prospect for what you are selling, or your opening words need to be changed.
Another example is in the sale of financial services. One of the most powerful qualifying questions is always, “Would you like to see a way to reduce your taxes on your existing income?”
Everyone with any income is interested in reducing his or her taxes. A qualified prospect will always ask, “What is it?”
You can develop an opening question or statement that triggers immediate interest from a person who can and will buy what you are selling. This requires some imagination and experimentation, but the results can be amazing.
Your job is to spend more time with better prospects. You must therefore be absolutely clear about what it is you sell and exactly who your best prospects are the most likely to be. In today’s market, you must learn to focus your sales efforts, to become a rifle rather than a machine gun. This is the way you keep your sales funnel full.
You should have far more prospects in your funnel than you have time to see, even if you work all day long. Never allow yourself to run out of prospects. Keep your funnel full. Remember the ratios. You have to call on a lot of prospects to get a small number of sales.
Be sure the ones you are calling on are the ones you can sell to the most easily.
ACTION EXERCISES
Develop a powerful opening statement or question that will immediately grab the attention and interest of a good prospect for what you sell. Try it out and test it until it works every single time.
Begin today to keep an accurate record of the number of people you call each day, the number of sales appointments you get from these calls, the number of sales you get from these appointments, and the dollar value of each sale. Use a simple recording method such as four vertical lines with a diagonal line crossed through them for every five people in each category.
Make a plan today to improve your ratios between prospecting calls and presentations and between presentations and eventual sales. If your current ratio is 20 to 1, see if you can’t get a little better in each area. Work to increase your sales rate to 15 to 1, then 10 to 1, and so on. Never stop improving in the critical things you do that determine your level of sales. And keep your sales funnel full.
19
Set Clear Income and Sales Goals
There is one quality that one must
possess to win, and that is definiteness
of purpose, the knowledge of what one
wants and a burning desire to possess it.
— NAPOLEON HILL
Your ability to set goals and then to make clear, written plans for their accomplishment is the master skill of success. In no area is this more important than in the field of professional sales.
The fact is that you can’t hit a target that you can’t see. The highest paid salespeople, in every field, have very clear sales and income goals, broken down by year, month, week, day, and even by the hour. They know exactly what they have to do every working day to achieve the goals they have set for themselves. Every morning, they get up and get to work on reaching their sales goals.
Here is a powerful process you can use to move yourself into the top 20 percent in your industry: Begin by deciding how much you want to earn in the next twelve months. Set a goal to increase your income by at least 25 percent over your best year. This kind of a “stretch” goal will motivate and energize you to perform at a higher level than ever before. And the only question you need to ask is, How?
Let us say that your income goal for next year is to earn $50,000. For the sake of this example, let us assume that you earn an average of 5 percent commission on sales. This means that you will have to sell $1,000,000 worth of your product or service next year in order to earn $50,000.
You can now break these numbers down by the number of months, weeks, and days that you intend to work. This will tell you that you will have to sell $83,333 per month of your product to sell $1,000,000 worth in twelve months. By selling this amount, you will earn approximately $4,200 per month, or $50,000 over the year.
You can now break your income and sales goals down by the week and even by the amount you need to sell each day. This will give you specific targets to aim at for the next twelve months.
Here is an even simpler method you can use. Take your $50,000 income goal and divide it by the number 250, the days you work in an average year. This comes out to $200 per day. Then divide the $200 per day b
y 8, the number of hours you work in an average day. This will give you the amount of $25 per hour.
(Another way you can calculate your desired hourly rate is to divide your income goal by 2,000, the number of hours the average salesperson works in a year. Your answer will be the same.)
Now you know that to earn $50,000 per year, you must earn $25 per hour, every hour, 8 hours per day, 250 days a year.
From this moment forward, you must discipline yourself to work all the time you work. Absolutely refuse to do anything during your workday that does not pay $25 per hour. You must refuse to make your own photocopies, read the newspaper, or chat with your coworkers. You do not drop off your dry cleaning, pick up your laundry, get your car washed, phone your friends, or go shopping. None of these activities pay $25 per hour. No one will pay you $25 per hour to do them.
In selling, only three things you can do during the day pay $25 per hour or more. These three activities are prospect, present, and follow up!
The average salesperson, according to Columbia University, works only about one and one-half hours per day. The first sales call, on average, is usually made at about 11:00 A.M. The last sales call is usually made at about 3:30 P.M. In between, the average salesperson talks with coworkers, drinks coffee, reads the paper, phones his or her friends, goes for lunch, and drives around listening to music. As a result, the average salesperson works only about 20 percent of the time.
If you want to be in the top 20 percent of your field, you can only get there by making more sales. You can lead the field only by spending more time in the specific sales activities of prospecting, presenting, and following up that lead to sales success.
Ask yourself, every minute, “Is what I’m doing right now leading to a sale?” If what you are doing is not leading to a sale, you must immediately stop doing it and get back to work.
And when is a salesperson working? There are only three times. You are working only when you are prospecting, presenting, and following up.
You can use this proven formula to double your income: Simply double the amount of “face time” that you spend with prospects and customers. Plan every day carefully to maximize the number of minutes you spend across from people who can buy what you are selling. If the average salesperson is spending 90 minutes with prospects each day, by increasing your average to 180 minutes, you will make twice as much as the people around you.
A popular management principle says, “What gets measured gets done.” The very act of measuring the number of minutes you spend each day face-to-face with people who can buy will immediately increase your awareness, improve your time management skills, and boost your income.
ACTION EXERCISES
Take a sheet of paper and write a list of ten goals that you would like to achieve over the next year. Review this list and select the one goal that would have the most positive impact on your life if you were to achieve it. Write this goal at the top of a new sheet of paper. This becomes your major definite purpose.
Now, set a deadline on your major goal, and set subdeadlines as well. Make a list of everything you can think of that you can do to achieve this goal. Organize this list into a plan with priorities. Finally, take action on this plan immediately, and do something every single day that moves you toward this goal.
Your commitment to yourself and your future, represented by written goals and plans, will increase your results faster than you can imagine.
20
Manage Your Territory Well
Our goals can only be reached through
a vehicle of a plan, in which we must
fervently believe, and upon which
we must fervently act.
There is no other route to success.
— STEPHEN A. BRENNEN
Just as a retail shopkeeper has a store from which he or she sells, you have a store as well. It is your sales territory. It is the area in which you work to develop sales and customers. And just as a physical store must be well organized for maximum sales results, so must your territory.
One of the major reasons for failure in selling is poor territory management. The average salesperson travels randomly throughout his or her territory, driving from place to place depending on whoever calls or is willing to see him or her at the moment.
This salesperson will often drive all the way up to the north end of the city to make one call and then all the way down to the south end of the city, spending an hour or more in traffic, to make the second call. Then he or she drives all the way back to the north end again for the next call.
You know that your income is largely determined by the amount of time that you spend personally with people who can buy. You must therefore plan every day strategically to increase these precious moments, and let nothing distract or divert you.
Here is a simple method of territory management that you can apply immediately. Divide your sales territory into four parts, like cutting up a pie. From now on, resolve to work in one of these quadrants each day or each half day. When you make appointments, cluster your appointments so that they are close together. This will shorten the amount of time you spend on the road and increase the number of minutes of each day when you are actually prospecting, presenting, and following up.
If someone asks you if you can meet on a particular day and you are not scheduled to be in that area on that day, resist the temptation to change your plans and rush over. Instead, explain politely that you will be in the prospect’s area on a particular morning or afternoon, and ask to arrange an appointment at that time. It is amazing how much more respect prospects have for a salesperson when they know that he or she is busy and well organized.
Many salespeople, by reorganizing their territories, have increased their income by 20 percent, 30 percent, and even 50 percent in a single month. They find themselves spending much less time traveling and much more time face-to-face with customers. Both their income and their self-confidence go up.
Remember, your time is all you have to sell. And nobody will pay you for the time you spend driving around between appointments. It is not the number of hours that you put in each day that counts but the amount of direct selling work you put into those hours.
To increase your income, you must increase the number of minutes that you spend face-to-face with customers by reducing your traveling time. Put the law of averages to work in your behalf. The more people you see, all other things being equal, the more you will sell.
ACTION EXERCISES
Take full responsibility for planning and organizing the territory in which you work. Get a map of the area and study it carefully. Divide the map into four quadrants based on your experience with the area and the natural dividing lines, such as streets.
When you prospect, set a goal to schedule a full day or half day of appointments in a specific sector. Phone people only in that quadrant until your appointment book is full. Then go on to fill your calendar with appointments in each of the other quadrants.
21
Practice the Seven Secrets of Sales Success
Do a little bit more than average and
from that point on your progress
multiplies itself out of all proportion
to the effort put in.
— PAUL J. MEYER
Sales success is based on seven secrets, or principles. They are practiced by all the highest paid salespeople every day. The regular application of these principles is virtually guaranteed to move you to the top of your field.
Success secret number one: Get serious! Make a decision to go all the way to the top of your field. Make a decision today to join the top 10 percent. No one and nothing can hold you back from being the best except yourself. Remember, it takes just as long to be great as to be mediocre. The time is going to pass anyway. Your job is to commit to excellence, to get better and better each day, and to never, never stop until you reach the summit.
Success secret number two: Identify the skill that’s limiting your sales success. Identify
your weakest important skill and then make a plan to become absolutely excellent in that area. Ask yourself, and your boss, “What one skill, if I developed and did it consistently in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on my sales?” Whatever your answer to this question, write it down, set a deadline, make a plan, and then work on it every day. This decision alone can change your life.
Success secret number three: Get around the right people. Get around positive, successful people. Associate with men and women who are going somewhere with their lives. And get away from negative, critical, complaining people. They drag you down, tire you out, distract and discourage you, and lead you inevitably to underachievement and failure. Remember, you cannot fly with the eagles if you continue to scratch with the turkeys.
Success secret number four: Take excellent care of your physical health. You need high levels of energy to sell effectively and to bounce back from continual rejection and discouragement. Be sure to eat the right foods, get the right amount of exercise, and get plenty of rest and recreation. Make a decision that you are going to live to be eighty years old or more, and begin today to do whatever you have to do to achieve that goal.
Success secret number five: Visualize yourself as one of the top people in your field. Imagine yourself performing at your best all day long. Feed your subconscious mind with vivid, exciting, emotionalized pictures of yourself as positive, confident, competent, and completely in control of every part of your life. These clear mental pictures preprogram you and motivate you to sell at your best in any situation.
Success secret number six: Practice positive self-talk continually. Control your inner dialogue. Talk to yourself the way you want to be rather than the way you are today.