Brian Tracy on Sales - Nordic Business Forum 2012

thank [Music] [Applause] you thank you thank you for being here thank you for coming so far and making such a sacrifice and I promise you that this will be a good time together I will uh I'll make this worth your while uh we are living in a very interesting economic time today perhaps the most difficult and challenging e economic time of our history and uh this has always been a challenge for us as salespeople is to sell against entrench competition so I'm going to give you some ideas today that I have shared with many people

that have enabled them to double and triple their income how many people here would like to double their income if I can show you how will you give it a try say yes yeah okay well I will give you several ideas that other people have used to double their income uh as we go along in your life you must always predict growth you must always predict that things are going to grow and you must always work as though things are going to grow because it is your attitude more than anything else that will determine your

level of success even when the economy is going down some people and some companies are doing well others are not because sometimes they believe well the economy is bad so we have to cut back and we have to reduce our activities and other simply respond by becoming more busy and more aggressive and that's very important for you and I well uh many years ago when I started off I did not graduate from high school and I could only get laboring jobs and my first laboring job was washing dishes in the back of a small hotel

and over time I worked in construction and I worked in factories and Sawmills I know a lot about Sawmills I worked in uh far on farms and ranches and I worked on a ship in the North Atlantic uh when I was 23 years old I was working on a farm and sleeping on the hay in the farmers's barn at the end of the Harvest I was uneducated I was unskilled and I was once more unemployed and when I would could no longer find a laboring job like you I got into [Laughter] sales sales is the

ultimate Default job in our society nobody goes forward into sales is we fall back into sales when nothing else is working it's like driving a car and backing up and hitting something W you get out to see what it is and it's it's a sales job and so so we say well I will give that a try and see what happens and sometimes your friends say when are you going to get a real job because some people don't believe that sales is a real job however uh um the 8020 rule applies 20% of people who

get into sales realize that this is a great opportunity that if you sell really well you can earn more than a doctor or a lawyer or even a politician um you you can make a wonderful living in selling and you can fulfill all of your dreams in the Western World 5% of millionaires are salespeople who have sold all their lives for another company but they sold a lot and they earned a lot and they invested the money carefully so it's possible for you to achieve all your dreams in this field if you become good in

selling so I got into sales and the only job I could get was knocking on doors cold calling from door to door and I had no training and no experience the only thing I could think of was to work hard at least it wasn't like working on a farm or working on a ship it was clean work so I was told that selling is not really selling a selling job it's really a rejection job and the more rejections you get the more sales you'll make this was the totality of my sales training so I used

to get up earlier and earlier each day so I could knock on more doors so I could reject be rejected more often and I began starting at 6 7 or 8:00 in the morning when people came to work and I would knock on doors all day and in the evenings I would go out and knock on doors of homes and apartments I would sometimes work 12 to 14 hours a day I worked 30 days before I made my first sale this is not a good way to live I can tell you that I was sleeping

on the floor of a friend's apartment I had one change of clothes I would have to wash out my shirt in the sink at night I had one tie which came off and clicked back on and one pair of shoes which were too big for me so when I walked it was like walking with swim fins flop flop flop flop and I had to lean forward so my shoes didn't fall off if I ran my shoes would fall off uh so this was my start and after about six months of knocking on doors and earning

just enough to stay alive I noticed that there was one man in my company who was earning 10 times as much as anyone else and he wasn't even working very hard he would start work at 9 or 9:30 he would go out or a client would come into the office or he would go out and visit a client he would have lunch with another respective customer he would make sales in the afternoon and he would quit at 4:30 or 5: and he went to beautiful restaurants and he had nice vacations he had a beautiful apartment

and he had a pocket full of money and he was had no financial problems and he was selling the same product that I was selling out of the same office at the same price to the same people under the same conditions so I did something about six months later I did something that changed my life I still recall this changed my life in your lifetime by the way you have experiences and it's usually an idea or a concept something happens and your life goes in a different direction and this was the transforming moment for me

I took a deep breath and I went and I asked him what are you doing differently from me why are you making so many sales and he said well show me your sales presentation and I'll critique it for you I said my what he saidou sales Pres presentation I said you show me yours and I'll show you mine because I didn't have a sales presentation I was doing what I call the blah blah cell I would find a prospect and go blah blah blah blah blah until they would start looking at their watch and looking

away and say say thank you very much for coming in let me think about it uh call me back next year maybe uh or leave me some information and I would go from place to place and get the same response he said no no no he said there's a process a logical process of selling and the process has seven steps and the first step is to Prospect and to speak to the right people uh the second is to build rapport and trust with those people the third is to ask them questions and identify their needs

accurately the fourth step is to make a presentation and show them your product the fifth step is to answer their objections the sixth step is to close the sale and the Seven step is to get resales and referrals now he probably didn't tell me all that but what he did give me was a very simple presentation and instead of going out and talking I went out and asked questions and my sales went up and I remember people treated me differently when I asked them questions as opposed to talking and so I began to ask more

and better questions then I began to read on sales and I read everything I could find and then I would listen to audio programs and then would actually started going to sales seminars and I did two things which really had a profound effect on my career number one is when I heard a new thing I would immediately try it out I noticed that many other people heard the same things but they took no action is they wouldn't take any action at all whereas when I heard something new I would run out and I would try

it out quickly number two thing that I learned is that nothing works even the best ideas don't work at least they don't work the first time and sometimes they don't work the first five times or the first 10 times so I made a resolution that if I heard a good idea I would try it five or 10 times before I pass judgment 10% of people think about what they want and how to get it most of the time they think about what they want and how to get it so I'm going to give you a

simple word that you can use for the rest of your career which will double your income and the word is how say how how okay from now on whenever you have a goal the only question you ask is how whenever you have a problem to solve the only question you ask is how if you have an obstacle to overcome the only question you ask is how now the wonderful thing about the word how is that it triggers ideas and the ideas are all for actions that you can take immediately and when you take those ideas

you start to get feedback which enables you to correct your course and take even better steps to achieve your goals so the average person when they have a problem complains and blames other people about the problem top people when they have a problem or goal they simply say how can I achieve this goal and they try this and they try that and they try something else but they never it never occurs to them that they will not eventually be successful so they think about they want and how to get it most of the time but

what we found is people in the top 10% in every field think in terms of their hourly rate how much I earn each hour now this change in thinking changes your entire life I know because I've taught this principle to thousands of people who literally transform their lives and their incomes almost overnight if you think in terms of how much you earn in a week or a month well then you have have a natural tendency to waste time during the day Monday is a slow day you're recovering from the weekend Tuesday you start to work

Wednesday the week is almost over Thursday you start to slow down and now it's Friday who gets anything done on Friday we'll do it on Monday and so people's ability to produce drops drops and drops and since 80% of the population thinks like this if you're not careful you'll find you are surrounded by people who waste time the biggest time wasters in the world are other people who want to waste your time and the way reason the way that they waste your time is by talking talk talk talk talk talk talk talk no work just

talk talk talk talk or play on the computer or phone home check the movies go shopping drink coffee start late leave early long lunch hours how am I doing so far does it make you uncomfortable say yes because it gets it starts to become a habit remember human beings are always trying to do what is pleasurable and what is comfortable and over time they do more and more pleasurable things which are talking to your friends and having coffee and going for lunch and soon the average person is not working at all so when you start

thinking in terms of your hourly rate it transforms your life and what we have found and we talked about this this morning is that in terms of your hourly rate there are only only three things that you do that account for 90% of your income in every field it's always the same there's only three things when you think of your hourly rate you have to think of what we call the law of three what are the three things that you do that pay you the highest hourly rate that pay you the highest potential income well

Columbia University did a study some years ago and they found that the average salesperson Works only 90 minutes a day the average salesperson spends all of their time warming up and resting and warming up the average salesperson makes about two calls a day one in the morning one in the afternoon and in between they're getting ready and they're making excuses and they're drinking coffee and they're reading the paper and they're checking their email reading spam and and so on but they only work 90 minutes a day and they did that first study in 1928 they've

upgraded the study year after after year the latest one was about 2008 average salesperson still works 90 minutes a day and so all sales incomes are diluted down to 90 minutes a day so we find that there's only three things that you do that pay you your desired hourly rate and they are prospecting presenting and closing the sale finding new people to talk to Talking To those new people and getting them to take action I was working for a large company at the beginning of this recession and they said we're bringing you in to our

annual convention to talk to our 350 salespeople National company and I asked them a lot of questions which I do and one of the questions was what are your feelings about business for the coming year they say our business will be down by about 30% this year because of the recession I said well why don't you set a goal to increase your business by 30% they said no no that's not possible don't you read the newspaper we are in advertising business is down and business is going to be slow and we adjusting to that I

said well you know your salespeople only work 90 minutes a day why don't you just get them to work three hours a day and you can increase your sales rather than decrease your sales and he said no no that's not true our salespeople are professionals they have an average of 11 years of experience these people have been in the business for a long time he said they couldn't possibly be working 90 minutes a day they work all day long I said no they only work 90 minutes a day so this is not a good way

to start a business relationship so he said he said I've never heard that number I said well unfortunately it's true I said I have a suggestion for you uh at this seminar why don't we hand out stopwatches to all the salespeople and I'll explain this principle and then we'll track their workday so at the seminar I I introduced them to a stopwatch it costs maybe 5 or1 EUR and I got them to agree that for the next month every salesperson when they went in to see a prospect they would click on the stopwatch and when

they went out they'd click it off and they just keep clicking it and it would keep adding up at the end of a day they could see how many minutes they' spent with customers and at the end of a week they could see how many minutes and they said great so the seminar was very successful and I also said one other thing to this group I said you know that 80 or 90% of your prospective customers have never heard of you they do not know that you exist they do not know that your product or

service can help them they have no idea so you can never approach your entire product Prospect market so a month after the seminar about five weeks I got a letter from him and it said Dear Brian he said I writing to thank you for your seminar he said I have to apologize he said the salespeople reported their numbers from the stopwatches at the end of 30 days and we found that the average salesperson was spending 90 minutes and 42 seconds a day with customers he said they have all agreed to increase that to 180 minutes

he said our sales are going up at a faster rate than ever before this recession is not affecting us at all a year later he wrote back and he said their sales were up 30% over their best year in history because the salespeople started calling on people they had never called on natural tendencies to keep calling back on your old customers they started calling on new prospects and spending more time doing it well what I do is I call this FaceTime I call it the critical measure of your success is how much time do you

spend face Toof face with customers and that's the key to the stopwatch idea is if you can increase or double the amount of time you spend face Toof face with customers my promise to you is you will double your income you see you cannot control where the sale is going to come from you cannot control the sales result but you can control one thing you can control your sales activities if you control your sales activities you put yourself under what is called the law of probabilities the law of probabilities says that by doubling the amount

of time you spend face Toof face with customers you double the probability that you will increase your income and so you can have you have total control over your income just go and call on more people just spend more time face to face if somebody calls you in the office they should never be able to find you in the office do you know why because there's no customers in the office the customers are outside the office I I have a good friend his name is Frank petta and Frank petta started off as a junior salesman

with Xerox many years ago and and he was a very good salesman and he wanted to be uh a manager and so he applied to be a manager and they said no we have no positions available for Sales Management he said I will take any position at all because I want to teach my ideas to salespeople and so finally they said an opportunity has opened up in the Cleveland office Cleveland Ohio it's the worst performing office of Xerox in the world of 2,000 off offes it is the lowest performing office in a major city so

if you will move and he lived in California nice place to live if you move to Cleveland which is called in English it's called the mistake on the lake uh it's it's an old industrial Town on Lake Superior they call it the mistake on the lake if you will move there we will make you a manager so he said I'll do it so he packed up his family drove across country and there was a notice that the new manager was going to be in the office and he wanted to hold a sales meeting at 8:00

Monday morning so 8:00 Monday morning he's there waiting and one or two salespeople of 32 alog together came into the office and then one or two more and they're smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and by 8:30 the sales team was there and they've destroyed every sales man manager they've ever had and this was just what we call raw meat because they were going to destroy him as well so he said uh ladies and gentlemen he said thank you for being here I am your new sales manager and uh I want to ask you a question

what is it that you don't see in this office and so they looked around maybe he taken a painting off the wall or something they said we give up he said you don't see any customers and you are salespeople and your job is to be with customers' you have leads now go out and see customers the sales meeting is over everyone out out out and he hurted them out like cattle hurted them out the door I know CU a friend of mine who was in this office at that time told me that this story is

perfectly true and he wrote about it in his book so they they were they were all out and they went out to the hallway and they said what do we do now some they're not used to spending much time with c customers so they said well let's go across the street and have some more coffee and some of them said well I think since I'm already out I'll go and call on customers so the next day they came back and he had announced there would be a sales meeting every morning at 8:00 the next morning

they came back this time they were a little bit more punctual and they came in and all the desks and chairs were gone he'd had a moving company come the night before and move them all away and so they were standing up and he said now you notice there's no desks or chairs yeah so we're going to have our sales meetings standing up over here there's three offices which have locks on them with desks and chairs so if any of you bring a customer in to talk to you can sit in one of these offices

but since you won't be spending any time in the office anymore you won't need a place to sit and this sales meeting is now over so out go and call on customer well this was his strategy in the next 30 days of the 32 salespeople 12 quit they told him that he should go and multiply by himself I don't know if we have that expression in Finnish some of you didn't get that but some of you did all right uh and the others the others though started to make more sales and since they're highly commissioned

they started to make more and more sales and they started to get really motivated by making sales and then he began to have a sales training lesson every morning and talk to people and work with people and go out with people and come back in with people and the sales went up within a year within within one year it was in the top 500 offices in Xerox within two years it was the number one office in Xerox the salespeople in that office were earning more per person than any other office in Xerox worldwide people who

worked with him who I have met still talk about those being the great days and the only strategy was forcing salespeople to go out and spend more time face tof face with customers and you can do that yourself you can be your own sales manager and use the one infallible totally controllable strategy in the world spend more FaceTime human beings are very much they have what is called a cybernetic guidance mechanism like a guided missile the guided missile is fired at the Target and even if the target moves the missile takes feedback and adjusts its

course and hits the target you have a cybernetic mechanism where you are learning you are a learning machine the more activities you engage in the faster you learn and pretty soon you become so smart that you can hit the target almost every time I've worked with people great stories who are making one sale out of 10 that means that they were getting rejected nine out of 10 times but they kept on kept on when they learned proper sales techniques they started to make two two sales out of 10 three sales out of 10 four sales

five one gentleman in my course came one year came back the following year he was making nine sales out of every 10 calls his income went up several hundred% he went from living in a small house to living in a large house he'd been in sales for about 12 years before he learned how to sell professionally and his sales exploded because you can't get worse at selling by doing it you can increase the percentages but the way you do it is you collect more NOS so your job now is to see how many no you

can collect each day just be polite be friendly be Charming as you already are I'm sure and just collect nose all the time the more nose you get the more successful you'll be I taught this to a company recently and they were using telemarketers and they would start at about 8:30 in the morning telemarketing but the tele marketers would get burned out most telemarketing shifts are only three or four hours because telemarketers get burned out psychologically from all the rejection they get so they put in a little contest they had a gift certificate for lunch

and whoever got 10 NOS first in the morning after they started would get a free lunch paid for by the company but nobody could start until 8:30 so they'd wait at 8:30 they go ding everybody would start ding no and they would start dying and get as many nose as they can and finally one person would get 10 NOS usually took 20 or 30 minutes and he'd ring a bell ding contest over he would win this prize and then somebody else would come back and say well I would have won but somebody wanted to buy

and it took up all my time and after that they would laugh all day long and they would start to work whole 8 hour shifts all their incomes tripled quadrupled because the no motivated them when they heard the word no they would laugh and it's one of the most important studies that I've seen I want to pass this on to you because it's a guarantee to double your income or more what they found is they studied people who over the course of their careers had moved up to the top and become the presidents of major

businesses the biggest businesses in the world and they asked why are these people so successful when they started off with many thousands of people about 1 and a half% of the population graduates from University and starts in the workforce each year so at the beginning of the each year they line up like a marathon and everybody's starting work for the first time and then the race is on and then over the years some people get way ahead in the financial race the majority stay in the m and a lot of people fall behind so they

went back and they studied the life career of these people to find out how these people got to the top by the way one of the most important things we do in life is study successful people and find out how they got there so we can follow their tracks well here's what they found in 25 years of research at the University of Florida and they boiled it down to a single concept called deliberate practice which means not accidental or occasional but deliberate focused practice of a skill they found that these people had this one quality

just one is what they would do is at each stage of their career they would ask what one skill will help me the most to move ahead now at this stage of my career if they were working for a large company they would go to their boss or they would ask their co-workers or they would just think themselves they would look at the top people and say what are the top people really good at and then they would pick one skill like a sniper they pick one skill not a lot of skills just one the

one that would help them the most and they would write it down as a goal and they would make a plan and then they would work on developing that skill and they would work every day on that skill until they had mastered the skill how would they know when they had mastered the skill people would start to say you're very good at that you are very good negotiating you are very good at uh getting new getting appointments you are very good at closing sales people would start to compliment them on how good they were and

at that point they said say okay now I own this skill now which one's skill will help me the most so I'm going to give you just a quick exercise this exercise is lifechanging if you take it ask yourself this question if you could wave a magic wand it's my magic wand and overnight you could become absolutely excellent at any one skill in your business or your life what one skill would help you the most to double your income if you could become absolutely excellent overnight what one skill would help you the most to double

your income please write it down what's the one skill write it down so position yourself in your mind as a helper you're there to help them not to sell anything that takes the pressure off of you and it takes the pressure off of them you're almost like a doctor of selling now if you go to a doctor in Finland or anywhere in the world doctors always follow a threep part process if a doctor does not do this it means that the doctor is not a good doctor the first part of the process is what when

you go to a doctor what's the first thing they do they do an examination you would you can imagine going to a doctor and you say hello doctor I've got stomach pains and the doctor says okay let's do some surgery or okay here's a prescription take these pills you said you you can't do that you have to examine me first you have to find out what my need or my problem is before you make a recommendation what is the second thing that a doctor does second step in the process it's a diagnosis and the diagnosis

is where you take what the pat patient has told you and the results of the test and you say this is our problem I remember I had a medical problem a few months ago and I went to two or three Specialists and I went finally to another specialist and finally to another specialist and they sent me for a test and the test told exactly what the problem was took about two months but the first process is diagnosis and once they had the diagnosis very simple to deal with it sort of anyway the first part is

the examination the second part is the diagnosis and then if the diagnosis is satisfactory and the patient agrees then what is the third part I see I coming here was an emergency the third part is the prescription the course of treatment in a sales conversation the last thing that comes up is the prescription the course of treatment the recommendation to purchase the product or service selling out a sequence kills the sale if a doctor said get up here on the table and let's operate you'd say I'm getting out of here you let me think it

over you think I'll get back to I will get back to at another time you would flee if the doctor tried to give you a prescription or a course of treatment without doing an accurate examination and diagnosis so from now on see yourselves as doctors of selling stage number two in selling in and and it's part of stage number one is to establish Rapport and Trust credibility and you establish Rapport and Trust TR by focusing on the relationship rather than on the sale the very best salespeople are the ones who form the very best relationships

with their customers they make it clear to their customers that they like them and they care about them and they ask them questions at the Harvard Business School they came to this conclusion a few years ago that in the 21st century all selling would be relationship selling all success in business will be based on relationships your very best customers I can tell you are the people that you like and the ones who like you 85% of your recommendations and referrals will come from people who like you and people who feel good about you so focus

on the relationship and the sale will take care of itself if you aim at the sale or you think too much about the sale what will happen is you will have neither the relationship nor the sale so how do you build a highquality relationship with other people well here's the rule the rule is that listening builds trust customers want a relationship before anything else and listening builds trust so how do you get a chance to listen the key to making sales is to ask questions and the very best salespeople are simply those who ask really

good questions now the second part of listening is to pause before replying is when the C when the the person stops talking pause allow silence in the room you see we say that selling takes place with the words but buying takes place in the silence if the customer does not have enough time to process then what happens is they don't have enough time to buy so when they finish speaking pause and let them think and maybe they want to continue or maybe they're finished talking but when you pause you tell the person that what you

said is very important and I'm thinking about it before I respond if a person says 1 2 3 and you say 456 a b c DF if you respond immediately after a person has finished speaking what are you actually saying is I don't care about anything you said I was just waiting for a chance for me to speak but when you pause you tell the person that you really care about what they're saying step number three in listening is to feed it back in your own words or I'm sorry is to question for clarification never

assume that you know what the customer really means the most powerful words in sales in every language are the words how do you mean or how do you mean exactly I'm doing this or I'm doing that or I want this or I want that well how do you how do you mean exactly it costs too much or I can't afford it how do you mean whenever you ask the question how do you mean the customer will expand and give you more information and then you can say well how do you mean exactly every time you

ask the question the customer will tell you more information they'll Express themselves they'll give you more information that you need to make a sale and each time you ask a question you get a chance to listen and listening builds trust the fourth key is to feed it back in your own words is don't just jump in with an answer say well let me be sure I understand what you're saying this is what you're doing now and this is what you're trying to to do in the future and this is your concern or your question is

that right and they'll say yes and this is proof that you were really listening and people are immensely flattered when you can feed it back in your own words so those are the Four Keys listen intently pause before replying question for clarification and then feed it back in your own words before you speak so I'll give you a technique by the way this will double your income this technique is so powerful it's been found that the top 10% of salespeople in 32 industries use this technique and you teach this technique to people and they won't

use it but in every audience I say does anybody use this technique and there'll always be somebody I'll say how does it work and they'll say I mean it's like their their seat was electric electrified they customers love it I mean they just there and it's a very simple technique it's called the agenda close the agenda close is where you close the person on an agenda so for example what you would do is you would say Mr Prospect I know how busy you are so I've prepared an agenda for our meeting that now positions you

as a professional it positions you as a consultant an agenda you see only professionals use agendas nonprofessionals go in and just talk so what you do is I've prepared an agenda for our meeting and you take a piece of your stationer this is Nordic business for and you write agenda for meeting with the person's name correctly spelled very important and the time and date and then you have five or seven questions odd numbers are better than even numbers seven is one of the most powerful Cosmic num so I always think in terms of sevens so

you have seven questions and so I've prepared an agenda for our meeting and you space the questions over the page so a person can take notes you write it in large print so a person does not have to get a magnifying glass to read it and then there's 1 2 3 4 5 six seven well customers are astonished they take it like this and it's got their name and their uh time and their business on it and they sit and then you have a copy yourself you said if we can just go through these questions

then you will know and I will know if this is a good idea for you or it's not at the end of the series of questions you say well it looks like what we're offering and what you need seem to fit together pretty well uh can I can I show you some of the details and then you shift gears and you shift into the presentation now just like identifying needs accurately is the turning point or the hinge on the gate or the door the presentation is where the sale is made you make the presentation by

presenting your product or service in a special way and this is worth a million dollars to you over the course of your career this one piece of advice is people don't care what your product is they don't care about you they don't care about your company they don't care about the background of your company and they don't even care what the product is people don't care the only thing they care about is what this product or service does for me you know if you have a little child the child says me Me Mine Mine me

me all customers care they're just children with better EXP excuses all they think about is me me me what do I get what's in it for me and what they want is they want a change in their life they want an improvement in their life a result a benefit or highest of all is a transformation they want to be transformed there is an ABC theory of motivation that applies to selling and a in English stands for antecedants or what happens in the past b stands for behavior and C stands for consequences what happens as a

result of buying here's the rule 15% of buying behavior is determined by the past 85% of buying behavior is determined by the anticipated future what is going to happen as a result of me buying so as we say if you are selling a tour to to the Canary Islands spend 90% of your time talking about the destination and only 10% talking about the plane that you fly to the Canary Islands in most salespeople spend 90% of their time talking about the plane and only 10% of the time talking about the destination imagine if you went

to a travel agent and you said I want to take a vacation to the Canary Islands and they said well let me show you how this plane works and they take out a diagram of the airplane you're going to fly on and and how you walk up the rampway and where you sit and the food they serve and the movie you think I don't want to hear about this I just want to know about the islands and the palm trees and the ocean and the warm water and and so on so talk 90% about the

change that will take place in the customer's life now going back 6,000 years to ancient uh uh ancient Sumeria when they first began the first open markets customers have only bought one thing in 6,000 years can you guess what it is well the answer is Improvement customers only buy Improvement the reason they buy is that they feel that the quality and quantity of the Improvement will be greater than the cost and the trouble of using it or learning how to use it when you answer objections write down and say what are the objections that I

normally get what we find is that no matter what you sell there never more than six objections and we call this the law of six and sometimes there will be several price objections several utilization or quality objections or several uh a aesthetic or color objections but your objections will categorize into roughly six groups and then what you do is you just develop a powerful answer for each objection I've known salespeople who've gone from knocking on doors to earning more than a million dollars a year because they became brilliant at answering objections the top salesman in

the world for many years was a man named Ben Feldman Guinness book of records and he answered objections so beautifully that he would give courses and people would sit on the floor like children around a campfire and he would say that when the prospect says this here's the answer people went out and made millions of dollars in sales because because they learned how to answer objections the way Ben feltman did so think of every objection you get and say what's the very best answer for this objection and so when the customer brings it up you

say that is a good question and you answer it with your pre-prepared answer and the objection just disappears like cigarette smoke if you're getting objections it's we say there's nothing wrong with losing a sale because you could not answer an objection but it is unforgivable to lose a sale twice because you still have not found an answer if you don't know how to answer a particular objection whether it's price or quality or something else ask other people what do you say when the customer says this in your office someone has come up with the right

answer call the top salesperson in your industry even in another company and say what do you say when the customer says this and if there's an answer they'll say this is what we say but you must find out the answers part number six is closing the sale and closing the sale is uh simply I'll give you the simplest of all closing techniques it increases people's sales by five or 10 times and it's called the Invitational close the Invitational close says that you when you have made your presentation you ask the customer this question how do

you like this so far if the customer says well it looks quite good you say then why don't you give it a try why don't you give it a try when you ask a customer the Invitational close most powerful closing technique ever discovered why don't you give it a try the customer can only say well sure I'll give it a try or they can say well no and which case you ask why not why not now a second closing technique is called the reverse close and when a prospect says uh uh would you why don't

you give it a try and the prospect gives you an answer you say if we could take care of that to you for you to your complete satisfaction would you give it a try so you say if we could would you if we could satisfy you on that would you take it Prospect says yes if you could satisfy me said then what would it take to satisfy you on that point the most important word in life it's for Success the most important word in sales is the word ask ask politely ask confident ask warmly ask

charmingly but ask for what you want ask the customer to take it today ask the customer invite them to buy ask them why they're hesitating but don't be afraid to ask remember before you ask the answer is probably no if after you ask the answer is still no you've lost 10 seconds out of your life so don't be afraid to ask and the more you ask ask politely ask confidently ask courteously the more you ask the more confident you'll become and the more sales you'll make the last Point has to do with getting resales and

referrals and resales and referrals are really the key to your future and the way that you get resales and referrals is you ask for resales and referrals do you know anyone else who might be interested in this product or service and always ask your happy customers if they'll give you the names of additional people as I say the most important key to success in selling is to ask so let me wrap up with just saying this they IBM did a study when they got into trouble in the 90s and they paid $3 million for a

major accounting firm to come in or major consulting firm to come in and study their company Nationwide and the accounting firm came back and said we found the reason for your problem and they said well what is it they said low sales they said yes we know that what's the solution they said High sales and they saidwell thank you very much but this this company it's called McKenzie and Company but one of the best management consulting companies in the world they always have an answer and the answer always works they said the answer is to

get more of your people out into the field face to face with your customers so IBM had 400,000 staff they took 100,000 Engineers they put them through a crash course in selling and they put them out on the street calling on those 80% of customers that nobody had ever called on and IBM in one year turned around like a great ship in the ocean and became one of the most successful businesses in the world so the last piece of advice I can give you is to get out there spend more time face to face with

more customers and don't be afraid of the word no thank you very much [Music] w