People always come up to me and ask me questions
about very specific selling situations.
They say, "Well, when a prospect says this,
"what should I do?"
Or "If they push back at the close, what should I be doing?"
And the reality is most of the reasons that we are facing
challenges in our selling situations is because
we're missing out on the basic principles of selling.
It's almost like if you were to build a house
and you were to build that house
but there's no foundation whatsoever
and so the house is wobbly,
it's crooked, it's all to one side,
even if the house itself is beautiful
because it doesn't have that foundation,
it never stands correctly.
So in this video, I'm going to show you
the five basic principles of selling.
Check it out.
(upbeat music)
Number One- Follow the data and not your gut.
I would even take this further and say,
I don't even trust anyone else's gut instinct
when it comes to selling.
The problem with sales is that there's so much
information out there that is just based on some
guru's gut instinct or maybe they had some selling success,
so now they're sharing what they think is what led them
to where they are today.
But the problem with that is what got one person
to be successful in one particular situation
doesn't necessarily work in other situations.
So a good example of that is the relationship sales person.
I've met a number of really successful
relationship salespeople who just have built
strong relationships over the course of their career
and as a result, they're actually pretty successful.
And so then they go and tell people, they say,
"It's all about building relationships.
"You've got to get out there and build relationships,"
but you know what in today's world of selling,
the data shows that relationship salespeople on average
are far less successful than top performers.
So what we ultimately want to do
is follow what the data tells us.
We live in an unparalleled time in sales,
where we actually have so much more data
on what actually works, as opposed to what doesn't work.
When you follow an approach,
make sure that what it's based on is data
and really what truly works in today's marketplace.
Number Two- Show insight up front.
Now a lot of people say
"Well, so do you mean that I need to educate
"all my prospects?"
No, we're not here to educate your prospects.
Your prospects aren't your clients,
you can educate clients,
but what you want to do with prospects is demonstrate
enough insight upfront at the beginning
of the selling situation, that it causes that trigger
to go off in their head where they're like,
oh, okay, this person is at least worth my time
to talk to because just put yourself in the shoes
of your prospect.
If your prospect gets an email from a salesperson,
and that email says, "You know what?
"I'd love to learn more about your business,
"so that way we can talk about how we can help you."
If you're receiving that email,
are you going to be really inspired to
hop on a phone call?
By the way you've received 90 other emails like that
in the past couple of days?
Of course not because that sales person demonstrated
no insight upfront.
And it's just as true if we're starting our conversation
with that fancy pitch about our product or our offering,
there's no insight.
You could teach a monkey to do that.
What we need to do is demonstrate real insight
and we all have it as salespeople
because you've talked to so many different clients
in the industries that you serve
and as a result, you have this powerful bird's eye view
where you can actually show real insight
and value upfront that demonstrates
that you know what you're talking about,
and may intrigue or actually lower the prospect
into that conversation and that's how you get
that conversation going with real and useful insight
in the eyes of your prospect.
Number Three- Drop the persuasion.
If you go on Amazon right now, and you type in the word
persuasion, there are going to be millions of listings
of books on persuasion, "The Art of Persuasion,"
how to persuade anyone to do anything
all of these ideas that we've all been taught to think
are really synonymous with sales.
But the reality is, and the data shows
that great selling isn't about persuasion.
Persuasion is this old-school idea that you can somehow
manipulate your prospect into agreeing
with what you're saying
as a result of some fancy use of your language
and the reality is that your prospects,
if you're selling something that is actually useful
to people who have money, your prospects are going
to be smart, they're going to be savvy,
they're going to have heard all of their persuasive
arguments out there, and that's not what they need.
They need an expert who can take them through a conversation
to help them determine and to help you determine
whether there's actually a fit.
So the idea of persuasion is this super old school,
cheesy, 1980's approach to selling
and unfortunately, a lot of salespeople are doing it,
whether they know it or not.
Maybe they're still asking a couple of probing questions
up front, but then they go right into the persuasion pitch
and we need to drop all of that because it's not going
to work in today's world of selling.
All that's going to happen is that your prospects
are going to feel a lot of pressure
and as a result, the walls are going to go up
and they will push back and they will run for the hills.
Number Four- No more features and benefits.
This is an extension of the idea of persuasion.
You were probably taught to present your offering.
There's a very good chance that you were taught to
demonstrate features and benefits.
So, the feature of a computer is that it has a keyboard.
The benefit is that you can put information
into that computer.
The feature of this light bulb is that it is
a 350 watt light bulb.
The benefit is that it is going to light
an entire auditorium.
This is the very simplistic idea that we need to basically
demonstrate the feature of what we're offering
and then share the benefit that it has for our prospect.
But again this is like that really old school,
1980's approach to selling where we're kind of
almost assuming that prospects are a little bit dumb
and so they need to be translated to here are the benefits
but the reality is your prospects don't care
about your features and they don't need your benefits.
What they need are solutions to their problems,
to their challenges.
So when we drop that persuasion and we drop those features
and benefits, and instead focus on determining
whether the prospect is a fit and understanding
what challenges that they're facing
that maybe you can actually solve
and then your presentation is simply about demonstrating
that you can actually solve those problems.
That's how we avoid the whole old-school feature
and benefit approach in the first place.
Number Five- Next steps are everything.
Now, this is really one of the most critical basics
of selling that I can possibly think of,
yet so many salespeople simply miss this.
And maybe it's because they knew at one time
and then they just started to get sloppier, or maybe,
you know, we never just learned it in the first place.
Have you ever been in a selling situation where everything
was going well and the prospect says, "You know what?
"This is great, why don't you call me back next week
"and we can talk about next steps."
And you say, "Yeah," and you go to your boss and you say,
"Oh, I've got a good one."
You put it in your pipeline
and you say, this is a 95% chance of closing
and then you go to a call next week and they don't answer
and you send them an email and they don't respond
and you call them again and you leave a voicemail
and you don't get a call back.
Before you know it, you start to get that creeping sensation
that maybe I've lost this one, what happened?
And that's one of the most frustrating situations
that we can all enter into in selling.
But the fatal mistake was not that we were doing something
wrong in the follow-up, it's that we got ourselves
into this situation of following up in the first place.
We want to always establish clear next steps
whenever we are dealing with a prospect.
So that means in that meeting where the prospect says
"You know what, why don't you follow up with me next week?"
Instead of saying, "Sure," you say
"You know what, George, I really appreciate that,
"but actually just to avoid the back and forth,
"would it make sense to get something on the calendar
"where we're both ready to talk about what those next steps
"might look like?"
And the prospect's like "Sure."
And now you have a calendar invite that goes out,
they accept it and now you are in the calendar
and there is a scheduled next step.
So there's no more of this following up.
If you are following up in your selling situations,
you're screwed, you've all ready
put yourself at a disadvantage.
You know, I was telling a client just the other day,
teaching people how to be more effective at followup
is like teaching someone how to arm-wrestle when their arm
is already two inches off the table.
It's like, if you're already here, you're in trouble,
trying to get from here to here is a problem.
You're not going to get there.
So instead just don't get your elbow into this situation,
make sure that you stay up and even
and one of the ways to do that is always have a clear
and scheduled next step.
So there are the five basic principles of selling
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