Month: June 2025

Thoughts About Recipients’ Experiences When Receiving a Cold Call

The following is from a conversation between a fan of HPS and the author, and is published here with permission.

Hi Carl

Though I’m now retired I absolutely admire your HPS system, so enjoy following your posts etc including the latest “calling businesses/leaving messages”.

May I respond to this one with a thought.  Do your students have to consider what their recipients experience when they cold call?

My pet cold calling irritants as a recipient are when I hear their obvious sales pitch.  It instantly makes me immediately disinterested.

My pet hates are:

  1. “How are you today”
  2. Speaking their intro too quickly just to get it out of the way
  3. “I’m calling to save you money on your . . . Phone/energy/other “
  4. Thinking I should be interested in that!

So I wondered what others don’t like to hear when they get cold called.  Might help them understand what needs to be removed/modified.

Ian Clark

Hello Ian,

What you say makes a lot of sense. 

High Probability Selling was not created from any logical reasoning.  Jacques Werth observed and documented what the top producing salespeople were actually doing, regardless of whether any of it made sense or not.  So he discovered HPS.  He did not invent it. 

Most of your pet peeves are things that really effective salespeople already avoid doing.  So we teach our students to stop doing those things.  Not because it makes sense (even though it does), but because it works better. 

I find that making sense of something is useful, because it helps me remember details, but making sense doesn’t make an idea any truer. 

Aristotle had an idea about falling objects that made perfect sense (and still does).  It was so perfect that no one thought to question it for almost 2000 years.  Then Galileo actually tried it out. 

I think selling is a little bit like that.  Traditional selling makes a lot of sense, until you look at it much more closely. 

I’d love to put your thoughts (and my response) in an article on the blog.  May I have your permission to do that?  And if yes, do you want to be identified in that article, or not? 

Carl Ingalls

Please feel welcome to add comments with your own pet peeves about what salespeople say and do when they call.

Perfectly Logical Reasons Why High Probability Selling Cannot Possibly Work

  1. High Probability Selling (HPS) is too direct.  I can’t communicate that directly with my prospects or clients, because they’ll be offended.  And if I offend them by asking direct questions, I will lose the sale.
  2. The reason people buy from me is because I’m so nice to them.  Everyone knows that people HAVE to like the salesperson.  If I stop being super nice to them, they’ll stop buying from me.
  3. HPS doesn’t require any sucking up or flattery or feigning interest in what the customer likes.  But if I don’t find commonality and create rapport, then how can I get them to like me?
  4. HPS will get me less appointments.  Sales is a numbers game, and less appointments ALWAYS means less sales.
  5. HPS recommends disqualifying prospects who aren’t ready to do business.  I can’t afford to leave money on the table without chasing every single opportunity, no matter how unlikely.
  6. The High Probability Selling book is all about outbound prospecting, and I don’t do outbound prospecting.  All my calls are inbound or referral, so there’s no way it will work for me.
  7. The book is based on selling B2B (business to business).  I only sell B2C (business to consumer), so it won’t work for me.
  8. I am in financial services, and I do seminar selling, and seminar selling isn’t mentioned in the book, so HPS won’t work for me.
  9. HPS says that you don’t have to educate people to get them to buy.  I sell to consumers who never know what they want and can’t make a decision.  Unless I am there to tell them what they want and why they want it, I won’t make any sales.  So HPS won’t work for me.
  10. The only reason people buy from me is because I’m able to impress them with all of my knowledge and credentials, and unless I wow them more than the other guys, they’re not going to buy from me.
  11. High Probability Selling claims to be selling without needing to overcome objections.  But that’s impossible, because everyone knows you have to overcome objections in order to sell anything.  My job as a salesperson doesn’t even start until they say “no”.
  12. Order takers aren’t real salespeople.  People who get lay-down sales aren’t working hard for it, and I don’t want to be perceived as someone who finds sales easy, so HPS won’t work for me.
  13. HPS is all scripted and C level executives hate scripts, so it won’t work for me.
  14. Success at HPS requires that I keep track of my prospecting and sales activity, and I hate keeping records.  I enjoy winging it and going by feel, so HPS isn’t going to work for me.

This is just a few reasons HPS can’t possibly work.  There are certainly a lot more.  If you have any to contribute, or if you want to learn more, please join us for our next HPS Community Forum meeting (details below).

You are also welcome to add comments to this blog post.  We will answer as many as we can.

When:  Thursday 19 June 2025 at 9:30 AM (USA Eastern Time)
Google Calendar Link

[Zoom access details removed]

This meeting will be recorded.  A link to the recording will be emailed to the people who attend this meeting.  If you want a copy of the recording for this particular meeting, and are not sure that you will be able to attend, please Contact Us and with a request for the recording before the meeting begins.

There is no charge to attend.  You are welcome to invite friends and colleagues.

Discovery/Disqualification Questions – Who really uses them?

For those of you who have been HPS practitioners for a long time as well as those who have just begun to discover HPS, Discovery Disqualification questions are a key component of the HPS process, typically done during the sales appointment.

As many know and the book discusses, these 12 or 13 questions are designed to discover, inquire about, and negotiate or disqualify the typical deal breakers in a sale. In traditional selling these issues often come up towards the end of the sales appointment, and require a myriad of memorized objection handling and closing tactics in order to chase this herd of deal-breaker cats and get the sale.

In HPS, we ask these questions as soon as possible in the process. Most people who are introduced to that idea find it a groundbreaking concept. And a real relief.

These questions are a great idea, until we go back to the real world, and scare ourselves out of asking them.

We agree they should be used. Most of us understand where the idea of asking them came from. But when  the real world is engaged, most HPSers bail out before they ask question 3 at best.

All the questions make perfect sense until we start hoping we don’t have to be that direct.

After all, being that direct might offend someone. Being that direct might make people (us) uncomfortable. And why the heck am I asking these questions anyway? Just cuz some guy named Jacques said so? What could he possibly know about my business? My prospects? My clients? I’m sure they worked great for him, but I’m different. 

It turns out that the reason we don’t use them, and the reason some of the more successful practitioners do use them, Is Not What It Seems.

It’s not a thick skin. It’s not being extroverted or introverted. It’s not being detached from the outcome. And it’s certainly not courage. And it’s not training. And it’s not fear by itself.

And “Just Do It” won’t work sustainably enough.

It’s something else. And that something else is a key component to what makes HPS as powerful and distinctive when compared to any other sales process.

And on this forum call we will share that key component, with which all things HPS are based and upon which all successful HPS practitioners found their feet and foundation.

When:  Thursday 12 June 2025. We will offer this meeting twice: at 2:00 PM and again at 7:30 PM (USA Eastern Time)
Google Calendar Link  

[Zoom access details removed]

This meeting will be recorded.  A link to the recording will be emailed to the people who request it before or during this meeting.  Use our Contact Us page to request the recording.

There is no charge to attend.  You are welcome to invite friends and colleagues.

About the HPS Community Forums (2025)

Please see the most recent update on our HPS Community Forum Series Webpage.

What.  We host a series of interactive meetings on Zoom where we talk about High Probability Selling (HPS).

Purpose.  To provide a community of like-minded individuals, who would otherwise feel very isolated in a non-HPS world.  We talk about HPS, but we do not try to teach how to do it in these meetings.

Who.  Anyone who has an interest in High Probability Selling is welcome.  No particular background is required.  No charge.  No registration required.  Just show up.

When.  We generally offer these forum meetings once per week on Thursdays.  Starting time is usually 9:30 AM or 1:30 PM (USA Eastern Time).  We are experimenting with different timing, to see what works best for our audience.

Topics.  We usually decide what to talk about a few days before each forum meeting.  We keep our options open.  We welcome suggestions from our audience.

Recording.  We record these Zoom meetings.  We email each recording link to the people who showed up at that meeting.  We will also email it to the people who request the recording ahead of time.

[Zoom access details removed]

If you want to be notified by email about the details for each forum meeting, send us your name and email address so we can put you on our mailing list.  You can use our Contact Us page for that.

Or, you can see our Google Calendar and search for HPS Community Forum.

Mystery of Sales Strategy – The Probability Game

Sales can be a bit of a mystery to many people.

People who do it, people who see it done, and the people who have never seen it done, but think they have. 

It has existed for a long, long time in the category of business alchemy and marketing. 

In the world of alchemy, what makes sense doesn’t work. What doesn’t make sense suddenly works. And then when we make sense of that, it doesn’t work anymore.

We look under every rock and internet resource and folklore and the rumor mill, constantly seeking that magic formula that will produce the results we seek.

The result we seek is for someone to say yes. 

In conventional sales techniques, gurus are all promising that they have the secret way to get everybody to say yes 100% of the time.

It’s been more than 100 years since assembly line style of scientific psycho selling has been invented.

We are all searching and seeking, drunk on dopamine that this one thing will be the one, the Holy Grail, the one phrase, the magic word, the technique that will get everyone we call and everyone we sit in front of and everyone we meet with to say, “Yes, where have you been my whole life?” 

Then something works.  We hear the yeses.  We draw the conclusion that we’ve been waiting for decades to draw, that we finally found the formula. 

So if an unexpected number of prospects say yes, when I’m using a technique that I picked up from a YouTube video by Jim Bandersnatch, then that’s why all those people, all of a sudden, said yes.  So now whenever I sell, I’m going to make sure I use the Bandersnatch technique, because that’s what made them say yes.

And of all the products and services that I sell, if the emotional charge, the emotional bookmark, the feeling was powerful enough when an unexpected person or persons said yes, then I become completely smitten with that particular product.  Because that product is the one that sells itself, a no-brainer.

And since I love the feeling of people saying yes, and I love the feeling associated of people buying from me, and I love the accolades that I get from people buying from me more than they buy from anyone else, then I’m going to chase that feeling constantly, even after conditions have changed.

Even after prospects (also known as people who are extraordinarily illogical) have changed their minds about the wonder product that I’m convinced will never stop selling, and they all stop buying it, even when I use the Bandersnatch technique.

So when things are working, whatever that means for us, and we happen to be using the Bandersnatch technique, and we keep our rabbit’s foot in our left pocket and a silver dollar in our right pocket, and we wear our shoes on the opposite feet, we don’t stop to inquire.

We’re like the gambler who thinks that they’re on a winning streak.

We worry about being attached to the outcome of a sale.  We’re not attached to the outcome of a sale. We’re attached to the feeling.  We’re attached to the thought that we found the magical combination of random factors that will produce the feeling that we’ve been seeking.

Casinos make billions of dollars off of that feeling, and normally intelligent, practical people, driven most of the time by common sense, will hand their money over to a casino as soon as they have had the feeling of getting lucky.

Now the professional poker player knows that the feeling of winning and the feeling of being lucky is the precursor to the apocalypse.

The professional poker player is a statistician.  Even when playing against people, they work in the field of mathematical probabilities, because they don’t give two craps about the feeling of winning.  They’re motivated by profit. Profit respects probabilities, and profit doesn’t care at all about feelings, and profit doesn’t care about beliefs.  Professional poker players laugh hysterically at beliefs. 

Most salespeople (at least the lower 99% according to our research and observation) run entirely on feelings, beliefs, hope and superstition.  The top 1% of salespeople operate on probabilities.  Real questions, definitive answers, real data, and they never ever operate on beliefs or hopium.

Jacques Werth dreamed of introducing High Probability Selling to a world full of super superstition.  He hoped that a straightforward, transparent sales process based on things like mutual respect and trust (like he observed and codified from three or four decades of observing top salespeople) would change the world.

It would somehow provide an alternative Way Of Being for salespeople (and those who find themselves having to do sales-like things in work, business and life).  This alternative way of being, way of interacting, way of communicating is based on probabilities.

It’s not exciting.  It doesn’t generate adrenaline.

When they made a sale or someone bought something from them, none of the top salespeople he studied did a happy dance.  They knew better than to establish for themselves an emotional bookmark, or even to consider that they would connect a specific technique or phrase and relate that directly to the fact that a client or prospect purchased their product. 

They knew intuitively that if they just showed up statistically at the right time and place, when their prospects and customers were ready to buy, that all that hope and all that attachment to the magic technique and the Holy Grail would actually stop and get in the way of business being done.

So what they really did was they figured out a way to reverse engineer the typical conventional assembly line sales process that everyone was taught, including them, and they removed all the parts of it that get in the way of doing business. 

All of the beliefs about making someone buy, the beliefs about manipulation, the beliefs about if I just use the right words, the beliefs about if I just used the Bandersnatch technique, all the beliefs, superstitions, where to put the rabbit’s foot, putting the silver dollar in the right pocket instead of the left pocket, wearing the right clothes, driving the right car, living in the right house, all the bullshit, all of the trappings of someone who is playing a sales game, instead of finding and doing business with people who want to do business.  

And unless you’re a professional poker player, stay the hell out of a casino if you have any propensity of thinking it’s about luck.  It’s actually High Probability Selling.  The casino is playing the probability game too, and the House never loses until someone comes in who’s playing the probability game against them.  And then they get nervous.

Where the Heck Are These High Probability Prospects Anyway?

A Review of the Neil Myers’ Recording on High Probability Prospects, led by Paul Bunn (recording available here, $50 USD)

This week’s HPS Community Forum will be a live discussion on a previously recorded HPS workshop segment that delivers a mutual understanding of the HPS paradigm shift as it applies to your prospects, markets, and sales experience. 

For those of you who are relatively new to HPS, a High Probability Prospect is defined as follows:  Someone who needs, wants, and is willing and able to buy from you now, if you can meet the prospect’s conditions of satisfaction.

The challenge of course is, in a world in which salespeople are expected to make people into sales, by the force and irresistible rhetoric of the salesperson’s skills, how could these High Probability Prospects (HPPs) even exist?  Why haven’t I seen them before?  You have seen them, and you probably have been one, but never realized it.

One of the first steps in being able to “see” these HPPs is to realize they not only exist, but they have been right under our collective noses for decades.  Like other perspective shift experiences, realizing the presence of these HPPs is like viewing auto-stereograms, also known as Magic Eye 3D, (see Hidden Illusions That’ll Make Your Brain Hurt on BuzzFeed).

Once you’ve seen the hidden image, seeing it again gets easier and easier through practice. This HPS Forum session is intended to provide a similar “aha” level of awareness of the paradigm shift, which will provide a foundation for understanding and implementing HPS with minimal stress and effort.

By the end of this session, you should be able to answer the following FAQs:
Do HPPs really exist?
What creates HPPs?
Who creates HPPs?
What exactly are they?
How have I missed seeing them before?
Can HPPs be created by me?
Are there enough of them out there?

When:  Thursday 5 June 2025 at 9:30 AM (USA Eastern Time)
Google Calendar Link

[Zoom access details removed]

This meeting will be recorded.  A link to the recording will be emailed to the people who attend this meeting.  If you want a copy of the recording for this particular meeting, and are not sure that you will be able to attend, please let us know before the meeting begins.

There is no charge to attend.  You are welcome to invite friends and colleagues.