Thank 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 make this worth your while. We are living in a very interesting economic time today, perhaps the most difficult and challenging economic time of our history.
And this has always been a challenge for us as salespeople is to sell against entrenched 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 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 others simply respond by becoming more busy and more aggressive and it's very important for you and I well many years ago when I started off I did not graduate from high school and I could only get labouring jobs and my first labouring 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 of you know lot about sawmills. I worked on farms and ranches, and I worked on a ship in the North Atlantic. When I was 23 years old, I was working on a farm and sleeping on the hay in the farmer's barn. At the end of the harvest, I was uneducated, I was unskilled, and I was once more unemployed.
And when I could no longer find a laboring job like you, I got into sales. Sales is... the ultimate default job in our society. Nobody goes forward into sales as we fall back into sales when nothing else is working.
It's like driving a car and backing up and hitting something. You get out to see what it is, and it's a sales job. And 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, the 80-20 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. You can make a wonderful living in selling, and you can fulfill all of your dreams. In the Western world, 5% of people who get into sales 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 be rejected more often. And I began starting at six, seven or eight o'clock 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. Ka-flop, ka-flop, ka-flop, ka-flop. And I had to lean forward so my shoes didn't fall off.
If I ran, my shoes would fall off. So this was my start. And after about six months, 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 ten 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 prospective customer. He would make sales in the afternoon, and he would quit at 4.30 or 5.00. 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 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 happened. 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 said, your sales 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 called the blah, blah sell.
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, thank you very much for coming. in, let me think about it, call me back next year, maybe, 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.
logical process of selling and the process has seven steps and the first step is to prospect and to speak to the right people 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 seventh 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 I 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. 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 second time. the first five times or the first ten times. So I made a resolution that if I heard a good idea, I would try it five or ten times before I pass judgment. Ten percent 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. 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 a goal, they simply say, How could I achieve this goal?
And they try this, and they try that, and they try something else, but it never occurs to them that they will not eventually be successful. So, they think about what 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 transformed 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 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 homes check the movies go shopping drink coffee Start late leave early long lunch hours. How am I doing so far? Does 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 is 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 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 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 year the latest one was about 2008 and eight, 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. this recession.
And they said, we're bringing you into 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 newspapers? We are in advertising business. is down and business is going to be slow and we're 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. 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 introduced them to a stopwatch.
It costs maybe 5 or 10 euros. 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'd just keep clicking it, and it would keep adding up. At the end of a day, they could see how many minutes they'd 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. Thank you. to this group.
I said, you know that 80 or 90 percent 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, I'm 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. history because the salespeople started calling on people they'd 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-to-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-to-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 to face with customers, you double the probability that you will double your income. will increase your income. And so you can 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 have a good friend, his name is Frank Pasetta, and Frank Pasetta started off as a junior salesman with Xerox. many years ago. And he was a very good salesman and he wanted to be 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 offices, 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 will move to Cleveland, which is called, in English, it's called the mistake on the lake.
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 o'clock Monday morning. So 8 o'clock Monday morning he is there waiting and one or two salespeople of 32 all together came into the office and then one or two more and they're smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and by 830 the sales team was there.
destroyed every sales 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 ladies and gentlemen he said thank you for being here I am your new sales manager and 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'd taken a painting off the wall or something. They said, we'd 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. This sales meeting is... over, everyone out, out, out.
And he herded them out like cattle, herded them out the door. I know because 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. this book.
So they were all out, and they went out to the hallway, and they said, what do we do now? They're not used to spending much time with 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 eight o'clock. 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.
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 to. need a place to sit. And this sales meeting is now over, so out, go and call a 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. And 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-to-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 face time. Human beings are very much, they have what is called a cybernetic guidance mechanism, like a guided missile. A 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 were making one sale out of ten. That means that they were getting rejected nine out of ten times, but they kept on, kept on. When they learned proper sales techniques, they started to make two sales out of ten, three sales out of ten, four sales.
One gentleman in my course came one year, came back the following year, he was making nine sales out of every ten calls. His income went up several hundred percent. He went from living in a small house to living in a big 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 no's. So your job now is to see how many no's you can collect each day.
Just be polite, be friendly, be charming, as you already are, I'm sure, and just collect no's. all the time. The more no's 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 830 in the morning telemarketing but the telemarketers 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 no's nose 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'd go ding. Everybody would start dying.
And they would start dying and get as many no's as they can. And finally, one person would get 10 no's. 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 eight-hour shifts. All their incomes, dripled, 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 one and a half percent of the population graduates from university and starts in the workforce each year.
So at the beginning of 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 middle, 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'd 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 at negotiating, you are very good at 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 skill will help me the most? So I'm going to give you just a quick exercise, this exercise is life-changing if you take it. Ask yourself this question.
If you could wave a magic wand, this is 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 three-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 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 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 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 a... specialist, and finally to another specialist, and they sent me for a test, and the test told me 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 my 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 of 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. Let me think it over.
I'll get back to you. I will get back to you 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, and it's part of stage number one, is to establish rapport and trust. Credibility. And you establish rapport and trust 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 conversation. 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 it, much about the sale, what will happen is you will have neither the relationship nor the sale.
So how do you build a high quality 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... people are simply those who ask really good questions.
Now, the second part of listening is to pause before replying. When 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, one, two, three, and you say, four, five, six, A, B, C, D, yeah.
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. 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. 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 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? I mean, it's like their seat was electrified. And I go.
customers love it. I mean, they just, 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. Non-professionals go in and just...
So what you do is I've prepared an agenda for our meeting, and you take a piece of your stationery, this is Nordic Business Forum, 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 numbers.
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 one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Well, customers are astonished. They take it like this, and it's got their name and their time and their business on it.
And they sit, and then you have a copy yourself. And you say, 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. 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 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 is the best.
child says, me, me, mine, mine, me, me. All customers care. They're just children with better 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 antecedents, 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 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 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 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 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, it's 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 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 have 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. 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 they learned how to answer objections the way Ben Feldman 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, 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 simply, I'll give you the simplest of all closing techniques. It increases your sales. It increases people's sales by five or ten times, and it's called the Invitational Close.
The Invitational Close says that 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, the 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, in which case you ask, why not? Why not? Now, a second closing technique is called the reverse close. And when a prospect says, why don't you give it a try, and the prospect gives you an answer, you say, if we could take care of that for you to your complete satisfaction, would you give it a try?
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, then what would it take to satisfy you on that point? The most important word in life for success, the most important word in sales is the word ask.
Ask politely, ask confidently. 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. 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 will 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, and 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... saying this. 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 have 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 said, well, thank you very much, but this company, it's called McKinsey & 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.
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. Thank you.