Question:

“Our company successfully implements the first 4 steps of the High Output Sales System. Due to the nature of our business the process has evolved where step 5 consists of agreement by the prospect to receive a “statement of understanding”. This is essentially a document from our company stating what we understand their needs to be and nested in it is a proposal to move forward. The document is written following the first 6 steps of the process. We attempt to follow up with the prospects to complete the process but have been unsuccessful in booking the appointment. What do you suggest?”
T. St Germain

Answer:

By the nature of your question, it sounds to me that you are mailing, faxing, emailing or sending by courier your statement of understanding to your prospects. In other words, it sounds like you are not personally delivering these proposals. That is a dire mistake. 75% of your success or failure is directly related the trust and rapport that you establish, and therefore, you want as many opportunities as possible to solidify a relationship with your potential clients.

Every sales call or presentation needs to have an objective and sometimes closing the sale isn’t closing the sale; sometimes the close you seek is just an agreement for the next meeting date!

The approach I suggest you take during your initial sales call is to establish the relationship and to gather a deep understanding of the prospect’s current situation. Having done that you will have a good understanding of true need and how you can possibly help them. Simply state a confirmation of need as you understand it, until both you and the client are on the same page with same understanding of the current situation. Next, advise the prospective client that what you would like to do is prepare a statement of understanding, and deliver it personally so you may present it to them. What you want to right now sell the next appointment. Choose a date for a future point in time by which you can have your presentation finished and schedule the appointment right then and there. You could say something like this:

“You know Mr. Jones, it seems there could be a good fit between what you and XYZ Corp are looking for and what we specialize in. Here’s what I’d like to do, I’d like to prepare a full letter of understanding which outlines what we see as the current situation, and where we see ourselves being able to add value to you. I can have that document ready next Tuesday, if I can deliver it to you for review next week, can you think of any reason, why we shouldn’t go ahead and set that up?”

All you want to do is get a committment to the next appointment. When you come back, re-qualify the prospect to ensure that everything is the same as it was when last you met, then review the letter of understanding. Since it contains your action plan for moving forward, you will then be ready to close the sale to move forward.

 

 The Secret of Success [11:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

Sales Skills are one thing, but if your attitude is off nothing else matters.

Sales can be one of the most gratifying and rewarding carreers available. Among the many benefits, we have the opportunity to forge wonderful relationships, set our own schedules, and to earn truely exceptional incomes. These freedoms do, however, come with a price tag. We need to stay disciplined with the freedom we’ve been afforded and we must have the presence of mind to stay strong in the face of inevitable adversity and rejection.

There’s an old expression: “If your thinkin’ is stinkin’ you’re probably sinkin” and it’s true. The results we achieve are a direct manifestation of the way we think. Positve thoughts produce positive results and negative thoughts produce negative results. While our training courses are very much about teaching hands on “how to” skills sets, we begin every single program with a seguay into developing and maintaining a positive attitude, because if you let the cares of this world wear you down, the skills we teach won’t make a difference.

Some of the suggestions we make to fortify a good strong positive attitude include:

• Begin each day by reading just 10 minutes of something positve every morning before you get going with the rest of your day.
• End each day by reading 10 minutes of something positive, before you turn out the lights. Our minds are like sponges and they take in what ever we feed them. If you watch the 11:00 news before going to bed that’s what you’ll reflect on in your sleep. So feed your mind something positive to reflect on before you get your shut eye.
• Listen to positive CDs or MP3s during your commute instead of your favorite DJs on the radio; they may be funny but aren’t doing much to enrich your state of mind.
• Write down a good powerful affirmation that paints a picture of your ideal circumstance and review it daily.

All of these suggestions are powerfully effective. We live in a mixed up crazy world. We’re constantly bombarded by the news and the media with negative frightful impending events and fear. Whether you realise it or not, this stuff seeps into our consciousness. In addition we face rejections from our customers and have the pressures of modern daily life. The only way to combat all this is to fortify ourselves with positivity.

People like to do business with positive successful people. The number one secret of success that we profess: No matter what your circumstance may be, tell yourself this every single day “Today is the greatest day that I’ve ever been alive.” Even if it’s the worst day of your life, professing this to yourself will give you the fortitude to carry on. It will project out of you. If any one ever asks “How are you doing”, your answer is always the same “Great, I’m doing really well” and there are only two or three people who you really trust that you share the truth with if it’s any different. Everybody including you, me, and the person asking you has got enough of their own garbage going and they don’t want to deal with yours too. If we know that’s true, and we know that positive thoughts produce positive results, and we also know that others like to do business with positve successful people, then it’s up to us to consciously decide to be positive. It is a choice. If you’ll choose to be positive, positive results will follow.

In the Free Sales Aids section of our site I’ve included a copy of my personal Daily Affirmation. I’ve also included in this post is an MP3 excerpt of a training session I recently conducted where the topic of The Secret of Success Came up. You can listen to it on the computer or download it to an MP3 player. Enjoy.

Here’s to your success!

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Sales Passport

This is your ticket to increased sales. The sales passport is a small printable version of both the Sales Process and and The Buyer’s Style Worksheet. You can print it in either black & white or color, then trim it along the cutout lines, fold it and keep it in your wallet or purse. Use this handy little guide as a reference prior to each sales call!

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Increasing Your L-Factor

Your life is a popularity contest! People do business with people they like and the decisions other people make about you in an instant, affect your life more than the decisions you make. The good news is that through awareness we can positively affect how we are viewed. Research shows likeability is not static, it fluctuates. By taking this little self assessment you can work on the things you may not be doing enough of and decrease the things you may be doing too much of. Spend 5 minutes to take this assessment now and mark your calendar to take it again in 4 weeks and watch your L-Factor and your success level rise!

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Conversation Guide

When Selling Becomes a Procedure, It Ceases To Be A Problem. This 2 page script tool comes from our 1, 2 and 3 day complete programs and will allow you to reinforce the steps you must take on each sales call to ensure that you address the 5 Universal Buying Decisions appropriately and in the right order. Perfect practice makes perfect, and once you’ve got this down, it will become your 2nd nature. The conversation guide has far more relevance once you’ve taken either The 3 Truths or Building Value workshops where we teach you to use it to steer a naturally flowing, well managed, customer focused converstion.

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Buying Styles Worksheet

Know Yourself, Know Your Customer. Taken from our building credibility module and our PSI and SSI assessments, this worksheet will help you determine the preferred buying style of your customer in 15 seconds or less so you may be more effective, credible, likeable and successful with them.

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Daily Affirmation

Positive Thoughts Produce Positive Results. Reinforcing positive thoughts daily, helps give you the fortitude and resilience to rise above inevitable rejection. We have read this affirmation every day for years and are astounded by the results created. It is included it here as a guideline for your use. If it resonates with you, you are free use it  or change as you desire.

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Sales Process

Keep Your Conversations On Course. This is a handy one page companion to the Conversation Guide. Print it out and refer to it often to stay in control, naturally.

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Your Sales Plan

People Don’t Plan To Fail - They Fail To Plan. Just taking 1 to 2 minutes prior to leaving for a sales call can make all the difference between success and failure. Luck is the intersection point of opportunity and preparedness. Are you prepared for your next call?  Take 2 minutes and get lucky!

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Increased sales and increased margins do not need to be mutually exclusive. In fact, when you get it right, they go hand in hand.

Over the years, I have done alot of selling in highly competitive and highly commoditized industries where my collegues and competitors alike have bitterly complained about the incredible price pressure they receive from their customers. Yet in those same markets and under those same conditions I found myself able to rise above all that to not only get the order but to also get my price without giving away the store.

In all my years of selling, I have found that you cannot sell price. Maybe you can for a while, but if undercutting is all you do, then eventually you will cut yourself right out of business. What people actually buy is value, but it’s up to you to create the value equation.

Those of you familiar with my 3 Truths of Selling philosophy know that I maintain that every human being on the planet will make 5 critical decsions in a precise (not random) order before you can sell them anything. The first decision is about you, the second decision is about your company, the third decision is about your product and Decision # 4 is about the price, but never ever about how much. What your customer wants to know is about the value they will receive.

An email correspondent wrote this to me just today, and it’s fairly typical: ” I have new technology in my office …. I have become very frustrated as a result of the excellent outcomes but few people seeing past the $4,500 price tag.”

So, if it’s all about value, how do we create it to move past absolute price? In my opinion, there are 3 ways to create value:

1. Create value in self. By showing yourself as a professional, distinctly different, unique and truly interested in understanding the other party.
2. Create value in your company or business. By demonstrating and articulating why your company is different and exceptional.
3. Create value in the product or service. By answering the question, what will it do for me, how does it fix my problem, satisfy a need want or desire, or make my life easier.

We won’t be able to address all three of these in this column but here we’ll start with number 1 and then address number 2 and 3 in future posts.

In our eight step High Output Sales System, Locks 1, 2 and 3 are all about the customer making a positive decision about you. (The first way to create value). Every interaction needs to begin by establishing deep levels of trust and rapport and it must be followed by creating a deep understanding of what the customer needs. Yet what happens more often than not, is that a customer (or patient) comes in and says “What have you got and how much is it” The business person then starts spewing features and benefits and then quotes a price. The problem with this is that you just tried to address decsions 3 and 4 about the product and the price and blew right past decisions 1 and 2 which are about you and the company. You have no idea what the customer needs (and even if you do the customer doesn’t know it.)

The power in selling ain’t in telling. The power comes from asking questions so that the customer can hear him or herself giving the answers, and in the process of so doing, two magical thing happen: 1) The customer articulates and gets really clear about what important to them, 2) They now understand that you understand what’s important to them. Even if you already know the answers and even if you already think you know how to help a customer, It is absolutely critical that in the initial stages of a presentation, sales call or consultation that you ask a series of good broad stroked questions that get the customer to express what they need want or desire. You must do this BEFORE you present anything or propose a solution. When you ask questions first and they understand the fact that you understand them, you have just established deep trust and you have gone a long way toward establishing value. And when you can do that, the customer is actually helping you match your product or service’s unique features to their true need. When that happens, price is almost irrelevant.

So just to close this issue off, let’s look at the situation referenced above. If I were the correspondent who wrote today, not knowing anything else, here what I would say to a prospective customer: “we’ve got this great piece of technology, that does many incredible things, but in order to figure out whether it’s right for you, I just need to ask you a couple of questions first, would that be alright?” When the customer invariable responds in the affirmative, I would just start to ask questions about what they like, what they don’t like, what they want, what they don’t want, and when that was all done, I would simply confirm what I heard and then show them how the technolgy addressed the very things they told me were important to them. Now we’ve got value!

Go ahead and try it, I know it works. We offer a full 2 day program which is all about creating value equations. Come visit us in beautiful Vancouver and learn how to get the Ice Out of Price!