Category: Mindset of High Probability Selling

New Course for 2024: High Probability Selling for Inbound Selling

The Backstory: HPS and Inbound Selling

Since the 1990s, High Probability Selling (HPS) has focused predominantly on outbound telephone prospecting, followed by a sales appointment or closing process. Despite the fact that Jacques Werth, one of the co-authors of the HPS book, successfully implemented HPS in several businesses with primarily inbound traffic, the book and training did not cover how to handle inbound sales.

When I asked Jacques about applying HPS to inbound sales calls, he suggested, “just listen to them long enough to give them an outbound prospecting offer.” However, I found that this approach was ineffective and often counterproductive, frustrating both the prospect and me, as well as the referral source.

Through my own experiences, I quickly realized that the traditional HPS methods were not suited for inbound calls. Abandoning HPS was not an option for me, as it would create more chaos. Instead, I adapted HPS to fit inbound selling scenarios.

From 2010, over 13 years working in health insurance agencies and call centers that handled 95% inbound calls, I developed a new approach. I created what we now call “HPS in a non-HPS world” for inbound selling. As I successfully applied these adaptations as an agent, I also trained, coached, and supervised others in implementing HPS for inbound callers.

Why Adapt HPS for Inbound Selling?

Outbound calls are straightforward; you know the topic, the offer, and the likely responses. However, inbound calls are unpredictable. You don’t know who is calling, why they are calling, or even if it’s a sales call. This unpredictability can unsettle even the most seasoned sales professionals.

Through trial and error, I learned how to listen effectively to inbound callers, determining if a sale was possible and if the caller was a High Probability Prospect (HPP). If they were not, I developed ways to gracefully lead them to an exit point while preserving the opportunity for future warm calls. This gentle and respectful disqualification is crucial for maximizing inbound call opportunities.

Workshop Content

This course will teach you how to handle inbound calls using the HPS framework. You will learn:

  • Common Pitfalls and Mistakes: Identify and avoid common mistakes made during inbound calls.
  • Effective Listening Skills: Listen to discern the caller’s primary and secondary concerns, ensuring open and transparent communication.
  • Customer Needs Identification: Identify both expressed and unspoken customer problems and determine their conditions of satisfaction.
  • Resolving Customer Concerns: Find mutually beneficial solutions and establish a respectful, ongoing business relationship.
  • Overcoming Salesperson Biases: Recognize and mitigate preconceived ideas and beliefs that hinder understanding and connection.
  • Creating a Safe Space: Make prospects feel safe to share necessary information for both their benefit and yours.
  • Maintaining HPS Mindset: Balance qualification and disqualification while maintaining neutrality.
  • Implementing HPS Processes: Design and implement written processes to handle inbound inquiries efficiently.

Personal Insights and Strategies

During the workshop, I will share personal anecdotes and strategies that helped me adapt HPS to inbound selling. You’ll learn:

  • How to handle inbound calls confidently and effectively, maintaining the HPS mindset.
  • How to design and implement HPS processes specific to your business needs.
  • How to ensure inbound calls become enjoyable and profitable experiences.

Conclusion

This interactive workshop will equip you with the skills and insights to manage inbound calls successfully, even the unexpected ones. You will discover that handling inbound calls can be a highly enjoyable and profitable part of your sales process.

Instruction: Live and interactive on Zoom, taught by Paul Bunn (with over 13 years selling this way and teaching others) in three sessions. Recordings of live sessions also provided. One-on-one coaching available.

Schedule:  The next course begins Fri 24 May 2024 at 9:30 AM (USA Eastern Time).  The second and third sessions of that course are Fri 31 May and Fri 7 June, same time. 

Price:  $547 USD per person
Purchase:  click here

For updates on this course, see https://www.highprobsell.com/training/inbound.html

Thinking in the Language of High Probability Selling – Short Course

Features:

Topics include:
– The power of unspoken words.
– How to stay in the High Probability Selling (HPS) zone.
– How to recognize when mixing incompatible paradigms.
– The truth about Poison Words.  
– How to keep the thinking from getting in the way.

  • Taught by Paul Bunn and Carl Ingalls.
  • Live group webinars on Zoom, two sessions, two hours each, spaced one week apart. 
  • Webinar recordings will be sent to everyone who purchases this course.
  • Exercises will be assigned to do between sessions.
  • Coaching (one-on-one) after the course:  two sessions, 60 minutes each.

Schedule:  Starts Thursday 4 January 2024 at 11:30am USA Eastern Time.  Session #2 is one week later, same time.  Also see the HPS Calendar for updates. 

Price:  $497 USD

Sign Up & Purchase:  click here

If you purchase this course, please include your email address, so we can send you the Zoom instructions. 

Questions? Please Contact Us, or call +1 610-627-9030, or email Ingalls@HighProbSell.com

HPS From People Who Have Never Heard of It

That’s how Jacques Werth learned it. He discovered High Probability Selling (HPS) by watching and copying what hundreds of very successful salespeople were doing.

by Carl Ingalls and Paul Bunn

That’s how Jacques Werth learned it. He discovered High Probability Selling (HPS) by watching and copying what hundreds of very successful salespeople were doing. Nobody had a name for it, until Werth created the name and wrote the book.

These top salespeople used a variety of methods, which Werth compiled into a single process. None of them followed that complete process, but most of them followed a common theme, a way of being when they were selling.

The process varied between these salespeople, but their way of being was the same, and that is what we focus on now.

This HPS way of being does not follow the commonly accepted doctrine of selling. Once you look outside of that doctrine (getting people to buy), you may start to see examples of HPS in the broader world around you.

For example, “Do you want to buy some Girl Scout cookies?” is pure and natural HPS. They don’t ask us if we need it. They don’t spin it to make it tastier. We respect them, because they are standing up and asking us a direct question, and they respect us to decide if we want cookies without being persuaded. Mutual respect.

Exercise. Find and note examples of the HPS way of being, and especially from people who have never heard of High Probability Selling.

We will write more about this. Meanwhile, your comments and questions are very much appreciated.

A Word That Says It All

There is a single word we say to a prospect that demonstrates one of the most important ways of how we are being. It’s a very simple word that says so much.

Can you guess it?

When we respond to something the prospect says, it’s usually the first word we say.

It signals acceptance. It’s an early indicator that we are not going to try to change someone’s mind.

If you are an experienced practitioner of HPS, and can’t think of this word, it may be because you use it automatically, without being conscious of it.

If you can’t figure out what the word is, don’t worry. It’s ok.

And that is the answer. That’s the word. It’s ok.

Simple Selling – Why Is It So Hard?

The simplest way to sell something is to find people who want it. That’s the basic idea behind High Probability Selling (HPS). But why is it so hard to do?

We complicate things. We go far beyond just finding people. We try to change their minds. We try to get them to do something we want them to do.

These are deep habits, and they are very difficult to let go of. However, changing those habits is necessary to be successful when applying HPS.

There must be some kind of emotional reward that reinforces our need to influence or persuade other people. Here is an article that talks about such rewards: “How to Break Up with Your Bad Habits” by Jud Brewer.

We will discuss this in our next HPS Community Forum (scheduled for Thu 12 Oct 2023 at 10am USA Eastern Time on Zoom). If you want to attend, please Contact Us and please provide an email address where we can send you the Zoom sign-on details. Anyone with an interest in High Probability Selling is welcome. No charge.

Bold Feedback About the Trust and Respect Inquiry (TRI)

The following is an email conversation between Carl Ingalls and a student of High Probability Selling (HPS).  We are discussing the Trust and Respect Inquiry (TRI), as it was taught by Jacques Werth (the founder and discoverer of High Probability Selling).

This conversation will have the most meaning to people who learned HPS (with the TRI) from Jacques.

From: Tyler
Sent: Thursday 7 September 2023 8:37 PM 2037
To: Carl Ingalls; Paul Bunn
Subject: Re: New Short Course Ideas

Carl (and Paul),

At the risk of sounding like a jerk, I want to give you some bold feedback about the TRI from a student’s perspective.  At the very least, I’ll finally be getting some of this TRI stuff off my chest after 10-plus years.  I hope you’ll see this as sincere feedback.  I have no axe to grind with anyone.  Y’all have been very nice and very generous timewise with me.

BTW, I found all your other responses very helpful.

I think that teaching the TRI as a part of HPS is a huge mistake.  I actually think it should be completely done away with in the HPS system.  We all know that HPS works without doing a TRI, and I personally believe that the TRI is almost impossible to pull off productively in an outbound sales context in today’s day and age.

At the very, very least, it has been taught by Jacques in a very confusing way.  And when you consider how adamant he was about it being so key to the whole HPS way, it just has always seemed to be an unnecessary burden for making HPS more mainstream than it has been.

It’s very hard for me to believe that, when Jacques followed those 312 top producers and took notes, he found that most of them were using something like the TRI.  With all due respect, I am guessing that Jacques probably had a slight bias and attraction towards anything having to do with the field of psychology, and he wanted to try and fit this kind of stuff into the HPS method.

By his own account, Jacques has said that only about 7% of prospects fail the TRI (and that he only ran across 2 TRI failures himself when he was selling), and I cannot see why knowing about childhood traumas of our prospects helps us to know prospects in a way so that we can be of better service.  We are not psychologists, we are salespeople.

The cost/benefit analysis of implementing a TRI does not seem favorable in any way shape or form.  In terms of time spent and risk of irritating needlessly a prospect in that first hour, especially in today’s day and age of a super busy, “low bandwidth for invasiveness” prospect (in the age of having to limit Offers to 25 word or so), I think using a TRI is detrimental to sales success, especially if only 7% fail the TRI.

If I happen to take on a client that ends up being untrustworthy, because I did not use the TRI, I’ll just fire them later.  No big deal.  But the idea of eating up valuable time with every prospect in that all-important first hour to screen 7% of my prospects while trying to be a psychologist just seems so foolish and unproductive to me.

The other thing is this:  HPS-ers can just let the simple power of demanding mutual trust and respect carry the day for getting mutual trust and respect!  Our word economy in our Offers, our quick accepting of “no’s”, our conditional commitment questions from the get-go and throughout, our straightforward un-bending Discovery and Disqualifications, our demanding clarification on unclear prospect comments throughout the process, our not selling from our knees, our refusing to deal with anger (“you seem upset”), our clear proclamation of detriments, our not asking for the order, etc, etc, etc very successfully creates trust and respect in the prospect’s mind.  And, if we don’t like any of their answers and/or cannot get commitments and agreements when needed, we just abort.  No big deal.  And if a jerk slips through, we fire ’em as soon as we decide it’s not worth having them as a client.  Again, no big deal.

But trying to diagnose people in 45 minutes as to whether or not they are worthy of our trust and time seems to be not only unproductive, but also unfair, if you consider that the prospect might really need an HPSer like us.  We also talk a lot in HPS circles about not judging, but that’s exactly what we are doing via the TRI – we are trying to judge, in a very suspect way, whether someone has the psychological make-up to be our client.  What???!!!!

We are not professional psychologists, first and foremost, but even PHD psychologists get it wrong a lot.  The “science” of psychology is far from perfect.  And so, there are just too many variables, moving interdependent parts, biases, and unclear communications with their shaky interpretations to be doing something like this in a non-clinical environment.

Determining the level of resentment (and therefore untrustworthiness) that someone has from a 45 minute invasive discussion about their childhood traumas when you are there in a time-pressed way to see if they want your product or service seems like a crazy idea to me.  And, believe me, I have tried to keep as open a mind as possible about this, mostly because of my respect for Jacques.  I think the TRI was on very shaky ground 30 years ago, and that it is a total non-starter today.

After all is said and done, I really can’t see any reason whatsoever to do a TRI in a sales context, given all the above, even a TRI-Lite.

I also think that this whole TRI thing (even just mentioning it as a possible tool) really gets in the way of faster, sustainable learning of HPS.  It’s a huge, unnecessary hurdle to both explain well and learn.

Well, there you go.  I said it.  LOL.  I hope no one is offended.

Best,

Tyler

From: Carl Ingalls
Sent: Friday 8 September 2023 3:28 PM 1528
To: Tyler; Paul Bunn
Subject: About the TRI

If all I knew about the TRI is what Jacques had taught, then I’d feel exactly the same way as you do, and I probably would not have any way of getting a different perspective.  Some of his best students came to the same conclusion that you did, and I can see why.

Fortunately, I was also exposed to what Jacques actually did with the TRI, both in what I saw him doing and in what he described himself doing.  I also followed other people’s experiences with it, and eventually my own.

All of that gave me a very different perspective.

I fear that Jacques’ overselling the TRI has done a great disservice to many of his students.  If you could find a way to forget everything he taught you about the TRI (and especially its name and purpose), and start fresh all over again, you might see its value.  However, I do know that this may be a very difficult thing to do.

Paul and I teach this whole area very differently, so much so that people who had learned it from Jacques would not recognize it at all.  For one thing, we do not isolate it as a separate step in the sales process.

Carl Ingalls
Ingalls Consulting, LLC
(doing business as) High Probability Consulting
Providing training and materials in High Probability Selling
Tel:  +1 610.627.9030  USA Eastern Time
Text:  +1 484.464.2557
Email:  Ingalls@HighProbSell.com
Website:  www.highprobsell.com
Blog:  HighProbabilitySelling.blog

From: Tyler
Sent: Friday 8 September 2023 6:38 PM 1838
To: Carl Ingalls
Subject: Re: About the TRI

This was a super helpful response.

Thank you,

Tyler

What If They Complain About the Price?

Suppose you sold an expensive dining room set for $3000, and suppose the customer calls you later and says that their cousin’s neighbor’s sister got exactly the same set for $700 less.

What do you do?

General Rule: Listen more and talk less. Ask questions that get the other person to talk. Don’t argue. Don’t explain or justify yourself any more than is necessary. Don’t try to change the customer’s mind about anything. Let the customer talk more than you do. 

The best thing for you to start with is to say, “Ok.  What do you want to do?”  Say it in a neutral tone, with a downward intonation at the end, and don’t rush it. Pause a bit after saying ok and before you ask what they want to do. Then listen.

Here is a list of some of the things that a customer might say to your question about what they want to do, and how you can reply.

  • Cust:  “I want you to give me $700 back.”
    You:   “That won’t work for me.  You can return the dining room set and receive a full refund of the purchase price, not including the delivery charges.  Or you can keep the set. What do you want to do?”
  • Cust:  “Why did you charge me $3000?”
    You:  “That’s what I sell it for.”
  • Cust:  “Why did someone else get it for so much less?”
    You:  “I don’t know.  You could ask them.”
  • Cust:  “I think it’s really unfair that I had to pay that much when someone else got it for less.”
    You:   “Ok.  What do you want to do?”
  • Cust:  “I want my money back.”
    You:   “Ok.  You can get a full refund of the purchase price of the dining room set, but not of the delivery charges.  Do you want to go ahead with that?”

The above is one example of how a practitioner of High Probability Selling might handle a situation like this, when following the Mindset of HPS.

Questions, comments, and ideas from readers are very welcome.

Judging

We try not to judge, but it’s a difficult habit to break.  Sometimes we do it without intending to.  Sometimes we are completely unaware of it.

I’m talking about the Good vs Bad kind of judging that we do when we apply it to people and what they do.  We form a value opinion, and then we drop our opinion into the world where it does its damage.

In High Probability Selling (HPS), we do our best to avoid this kind of judging.  Nothing positive, nothing negative.  Neither good nor bad.  We consider it too manipulative.  People are less likely to trust us.

It takes a great deal of work to become more aware of how our opinions – and how we state them – make other people feel judged and pressured.  Good intentions are not enough.

If you want to read some guidelines about how we avoid judging, see a previous article on this blog, “You Have to Get Personal“.

Questions and comments are very welcome.

Sales Copywriting Tactics and High Probability Selling

Are sales copywriting tactics compatible with the non-manipulative methods of high probability selling?

The question is:

“Is using a marketing sales letter that uses the sales copywriting tactics of direct response marketing compatible with the non-manipulative methods of high probability selling process?”

This question was asked by a reader in a comment on this blog, and I decided to write a post about it.

The short answer is: NO.

The most common sales copywriting tactics are completely incompatible with High Probability Selling (HPS). And for most copywriters, even the fundamental purpose of copywriting is incompatible with HPS.

One copywriter explains the difference in purpose between copywriting and other writing in his article, “81 staggering lines in literature“:

“Unlike writing, copywriting exists to get the reader to do something, buy something, sign-up for something or share something.” He goes on to say, “copywriting exists to elicit an action in the reader.”

In High Probability Selling, we DO NOT attempt to get anyone to buy. Not even a nudge one way or the other. We do try to be as clear as possible about what it is that we are offering, and we do try to get the prospect to make an immediate decision about whether they want that or not. But nothing intended to influence that decision.

So, what about sales copywriting? What would that look like if you wanted to make it completely compatible with the methods and principles of High Probability Selling?

Here is what I think sales copywriting would look like if it were to be compatible with HPS.

  • Informative, without attempting to influence or impress the reader. Our primary purpose is to provide the information that someone might want in order to make a well-informed decision.
  • Honest, full disclosure of what is relevant.
  • Balanced, revealing both pros and cons.
  • Neutral, objective (factual), transparent. No exaggerating.
  • Concise, direct, to the point.
  • Short and simple, easy to read. What it’s about should be immediately apparent to the reader, as quickly as possible. If details are necessary, put them further down the page.
  • Focused more on what a customer receives (The Get), and less on what the seller does.
  • Features (what the customer gets immediately) are more important than benefits (potential later outcomes).
  • No pressure. No pushing, not even a nudge.
  • Provide options.
  • Ask for a decision. One of my favorite ways to do this is, “What do you want to do?”

My opinions on this are based on years of conversations with Jacques Werth (founder of High Probability Selling) and others, plus my own thinking and experience.

What are your thoughts and experiences about this?

High Probability Selling Was Discovered, Not Made

Jacques Werth discovered what he later called High Probability Selling (HPS) by observing and documenting what hundreds of highly successful salespeople were doing.  He invented the name, and he invented a way of talking about it and teaching it, and he wrote the book, but he did not invent the method of selling.  It was already out there.  That’s where he found it.

I asked him why he used the phrase “Re-invents the Selling Process” on the cover of his book.  He told me that, at the time, lots of successful authors were saying things like that on their books and it seemed like a good idea.

In those days, Jacques tended to use conventional methods in marketing.  In later years, he moved toward marketing methods that were more compatible with his preferred selling method.

One of the things that distinguishes HPS from other selling methods is that it’s all about discovery—all the way through the entire process.  Discovering a sale, not making one happen.

I see High Probability Selling itself as something to be discovered, not controlled.  That is the way I prefer to work with it.  Learning, talking, and teaching.

Comments and questions are very welcome and appreciated.