Month: November 2007

Change Your Commitments and Change Your Life

by Jacques Werth

Last week I got a call from "Mark" who has been a financial services professional for 12 years.  He said he works far too hard for the $80,000 he earns.  My response was, "What are you committed to?  

He replied, "I want to make a lot more money and work less."  

"I make as many appointments as I can and I try to persuade every one of my prospects to buy from me.  But then, I really try to help them."

"That is a selling strategy that you are committed to and that strategy is not working," I said.  "It is obvious that you need to change your sales strategy."

In sales, and in life, commitment is everything.  Yet, most people cannot accurately articulate what their commitments are.  They make a sincere stab at it by telling you what their ideals and goals are.  However, evidence shows that what you are committed to is seldom the same as your ideals and your goals.  So, what are you really committed to?   The answer to that is simple. You are committed to the life you have now.  

Your commitments are evidenced by the results of all of the actions that you take to attain what you are committed to.  All of the choices that you make, every minute of every day, are in support of your commitments.  If you are happy and satisfied with the life you are living now, then your commitments are aligned with your ideals and your goals.

If you are not happy and satisfied with the life you are living now, then your  commitments are not aligned with your ideals and your goals.  Knowing and accepting that is the first step towards having the life that you want.  The next step is to figure out how to change your commitments to achieve what you want.  It starts with reexamining all of your activities to determine which of them are forwarding your ideals and goals and which are not.

You may be committed to:

  • Find more prospects by working longer and harder;
  • Make tons of cold calls, while bearing the pain of rejection and failure;
  • Struggle heroically to overcome difficult obstacles in order to succeed;
  • Get all prospects to like you by establishing "rapport" and commonality;
  • Show prospects how to solve important problems;
  • Persuade and convince prospects with logic and factual documentation;
  • Use sophisticated closing techniques to help prospects decide;
  • Manipulate, control or dominate people in order to get what you want. 

Yet, your income might indicate that those commitments are not producing the results that you want.  

Your commitments dictate the choices that you make about what you do every day, and how you do it.  Change your commitments and you will change your behaviors.  That will change your life.

If you want to learn the process and mindset of top producing salespeople, you want to learn more about High Probability Selling.

Until Next Time…Sell Well

Jacques Werth, President
High Probability Selling

Copyright 2007.

 

Tags: How+to+sell, The+secret+to+selling, Selling+and+Persuasion

Popular Doesn’t Necessarily Equal Best – or Even Good

by Paul Bunn

If everyone is thinking alike, somebody isn’t thinking.     – George S. Patton

Turnover in the sales profession is extremely high compared to most other professions.  The failure rate for financial services agents and representatives is greater than 90 percent.

Look at the world of sales experts, sales trainers and sales consulting firms. You will find nearly all of them are offering the same way, or a better way, of selling based on the same three main goals:

  • Find prospects that apparently need your products, services, or solutions.
  • Get those prospects to agree to meet with you, in person or over the phone
  • At that meeting, or subsequent meeting(s), persuade them to buy from you

 

There are other aspects of that way of selling, such as: building a relationship and rapport, getting referrals, overcoming objections, improving your presentation, identifying decision-makers, etc.  But these are just supporting elements of the three main goals.  Seems simple enough. 

Consultative selling, solution selling, SPIN selling, value based selling, trusted advisor, buying facilitation, B2B, M2M, etc., whatever the current popular variation, nearly everyone in sales is pursuing those three main goals.  Most salespeople and their managers accept it as the only way to sell. It is also accepted as the only way to measure and market the effectiveness of their training.

So, why is the failure rate so high?  Why are there so many new, and supposedly better, variations of a system that is generally accepted as the only way?  Why does it need so many modifications?

We have discovered that there are only two groups of people that do not embrace the sales methods used by most salespeople: 

  • Top producers, the ones that make up the top one or two percent of salespeople
  • Prospects and customers – including salespeople when they are not selling

This discovery is a result of 40 years of research, consisting of in-person direct observation of hundreds of top producers in multiple industries while they were prospecting and selling.   We found that over 80 percent of these top producers did not follow the universally accepted selling models.  Also, they did not accept or work towards the popular and accepted goals of selling.  They used a sales  process that formed the basis of what is now known as High Probability Selling (HPS).   

Most salespeople will continue to stay with what is popular. However, if you believe that popular doesn’t necessarily equal best, then High Probability Selling might be for you.

Listen and Learn

We teach High Probability Selling and Prospecting.  You can listen to a recording of one of our Participative Learning Sessions by clicking here.

You can contact us by clicking here… even if you disagree.

Or call us at 800-394-7762 (disconnected in 2015 – see updated contact page). 

If you want to learn the process and mindset of top producing salespeople, you want to learn more about High Probability Selling.

Until Next Time…Sell Well

High Probability Selling

Copyright 2007.

 

Tags: How+to+sell, The+secret+to+selling, Selling+and+Persuasion

How Successful People Make Decisions

by Carl Ingalls and Paul Bunn

A colleague here in our office recently shared the following strategy for succeeding in business:

“If you want to be successful in business, do business with successful people.”

How we communicate with them is a significant element of that strategy. We’ve developed a table comparing sales communication methods that are more consistent and less consistent with the way successful people make decisions. You can see the table here at our website.

 

If you want to learn the process and mindset of top producing salespeople, you want to learn more about High Probability Selling.

Until Next Time…Sell Well

High Probability Selling

Copyright 2007.

 

Tags: How+to+sell, The+secret+to+selling, Selling+and+Persuasion

%d bloggers like this: