There are twelve principles at the core of our training programs:
- You must believe in what you sell.
At its very essence, selling is about the transfer of beliefs. Your client will never believe in the value of your product or service any more strongly than you do. - Keep your focus on your prospect at all times.
It sounds simple, but most salespeople focus primarily on themselves, their product or service, or their organization. Your focus should always be on your prospects or customers, never on you. - The better you are at prospecting, the better you’ll be at selling.
If you don’t have a full pipeline of new opportunities, your ability to sell will be compromised. When you only have a handful of new opportunities with which to meet your business objectives, every deal becomes critical. When you desperately need to make a sale, you tend to everything wrong. - Seek to be respected, instead of being liked.
Although people tend to do business with the people they like, salespeople who seek to be liked rarely succeed in the long term. Not only do they tend to sell on price and hang on to opportunities long after they are dead, they don’t have the guts to guide the sales process in the appropriate way. - Collaboration, not competition, is the appropriate mindset for selling.
Too many companies and their salespeople view selling as a contest in which one party is trying to win at the expense of another. This mindset makes it harder for your prospect to let down their guard and tell you what you need to know to qualify them effectively. During the sales process, your goal is a collaborative relationship, not a competitive one. - People buy emotionally; they only justify their decisions rationally.
When it comes to making buying decisions, it’s not what buyers think, it’s what they feel that determines whether they’ll buy from you. - People buy when they have “pain.”
Pain is the gap between where people are and where they want to be. Regardless of whether you sell a product or a service, tangible or intangible, to consumers or to businesses, in the end what you really sell are solutions to an individual or an organization’s pain. - Use systems for prospecting and selling.
Systems for prospecting and selling are an overall strategy and set of techniques designed to ensure that you handle every buyer-seller interaction in as close to the optimum way as humanly possible. Without systems, your sales efforts will be inconsistent and so will your results. - You can’t “convince” anybody of anything.
Traditionally, salespeople have been led to believe that they must convince someone to buy. The fact is, you can’t convince anybody of anything. All you can do is facilitate your buyer’s decision process and supply the proof they need to convince themselves. Your success (along with your credibility) is determined by the questions you ask, not the answers you give. - Selling is a process of disqualification.
The most important resource you have as a business person is your time. Smart business people do not waste their time with prospects that are not qualified. - Give your prospect the freedom to say “no.”
Most salespeople are taught the exact opposite – to push for a “yes.” All this does is frustrate your prospect and force them to lie to you. Giving your prospect the freedom to say “no” reduces the pressure on both of you, and helps you get to the heart of the problem so that you can determine if there is a good fit between their problems and the solutions you provide. - Give yourself permission to fail.
Failure is often just a stepping stone on the road to success. You should never punish failure; you should only punish a lack of effort.
