The Executive Sales Coach: Keith Rosen’s Sales Blog and Business Blog On Selling, Leadership, Managing Your Team, Business and Life » How To Close The Sale

Many of the strategies that we engage in today, whether in our thinking as well as in our actions, are often counterintuitive to what we may believe would be the solution to achieving our goals and objectives; especially as it relates to cold calling and prospecting for new business.

Here’s a sample of the top paradoxes of prospecting that make prospecting so challenging. However, once these paradoxes are woven into your thinking, you’ll notice how these contradictions will provide you with a competitive edge that no other marketing piece, feature or benefit of your product or service could even come close to.

1. You want the sale (appointment, demo) but you must detach from the outcome and have no expectation, since the sale is not the initial goal of prospecting.




2. You want the prospect to say “Yes” to taking the next step in your sales process but you have to qualify them first to see if there’s even a fit worth pursuing.




3. You want the prospect to buy from you but must learn to give value unconditionally, whether or not they buy or meet with you.




4. You want to deliver and push through your presentation but you must get the prospect’s permission even before you present.




5. You need to keep your eye on your objective, set your goals and plan your strategy for the future to determine the path to travel on but you must bring yourself back into the present moment during every prospecting conversation.




6. You want to make more money and achieve greater success in your career but you have to make the sales process about the prospect, instead of you, in order to do so.




7. You want to sell to each prospect you speak with but need to qualify them to see if you even want them as a customer. (Remember, if you want to build a business or career you hate, just find the people to work with who you just can’t stand.)

Lets face it. You and I both know that the ultimate objective of your prospecting efforts is to sell more and boost your income. However, to achieve this goal, it’s just not where you are going to focus your energy and thoughts.

If you can understand and embrace these paradoxes, you now have the opportunity to respond to each prospect in a healthier, more productive, and more enjoyable way.

Now here’s an example of a presentation that grabs attention. It has all the elements of success. The right person, (Tom Ziglar, CEO of Ziglar, Inc.), the right intention, focus, the visuals and measurable results.

Take a look and watch him, um, strip? And for the record, Tom lost, what, 71 lbs! No kidding.

Here’s the link to watch the video presentation!

And congratulations again, Tom, on an extraordinary achievement.

When presenting to a client or prospect, regardless of any steps you’ve outlined in your presentation, there’s a big difference between convincing or ‘selling’ someone and enrolling someone, especially when you’re at the point in your discussions where you’ve identified some specific problems within the organization or with them. Now, you may be at the point where you’re going to share the solution and enroll them in the solution and more so, taking action and making a change.

Convincing/Selling: Changing someone’s stand on something through the use of force or argument. This often takes the form of a complaint, or reiteration of the problem. If there are people who in involved in your discussions who may have taken a part in creating the problem in the first place, this can be construed as a “Make wrong” and they may then feel compelled to defend their stance. This creates an adversarial posture between you and the other person. Once this happens, people have tendency to further defend their position, which often results in them shutting down their listening for the remainder of the conversation.

Enrolling: Stating the current situation without making anyone wrong while sharing a new opportunity for greater results or what may be possible. Stating the benefits of what a change may bring. For example, the beginning of an enrollment conversation may begin with, “Imagine if…......What if we can create an organization where…..”

Enrolling can also take on the form of asking questions. Besides, what do people believe more, what you say, or what they say? As such, if they voice the problem or a possible solution, then they would be more willing to act on it. Resistance is lowered, and they feel ownership of the solutions and would be more apt to act on it. Here are some questions to use.

1. If I could have your three biggest problems or headaches disappear, what would they be?


2. How do the challenges you’ve shared with me affect you, especially if you do not hit your goals?


3. What is it going to cost you if you don’t make any changes and continue the way you are now?


4. What solution or greater result would be worth changing for?


5. What would your company or division be like if you no longer had to deal with those issues anymore?

Here are a few questions to use when you’re in a situation where you need to acknowledge and respect the other person’s viewpoint, even though you may not agree. Or, maybe you simply need more clarification about their position on something. Instead of making them wrong or creating any confrontational posture between you, add another truth to the situation. Here’s how.

1. Can you please share with me your thinking on that?


2. May I share my view on that?


3. Is it possible that there may be more/other facts to consider?


4. What else is true about that?


5. Is it possible that there is another approach/solution here?

Uncover the specific benefits they want to realize, as well as the cost of not changing. Now, you can be in a position of enrolling them in the idea of actually taking actions to implement change to achieve these new results, without putting anyone on the defensive.

No one likes to be sold. Everyone wants to be enrolled. BTW, look for my new book, The Art of Enrollment, coming to you in 2009.

Get the Strategies You Need to Succeed in a Slowing Economy

Philadelphia, PA
The Ritz-Carlton
June 9, 2008

If you are a manager worried about maintaining sales momentum in a shrinking economy, you will want to check out Selling Power’s Sales Leadership Conference to be held next month in Philadelphia, which I will also be attending and hope to meet you there. I’ll be sitting on the panel discussion on How To Recruit and Build a Team of A Players.

9:15 AM HOW TO RECRUIT ‘A’ PLAYERS

Top experts share how to recruit, select and build a team of ‘A’ players

Here’s the agenda:
www.sellingpower.com/leadership/PHI2008/agenda.asp

OVERVIEW:
In today’s increasingly competitive and complex business environment, you can’t expect to succeed during tough times with a “business as usual” mindset. To excel during a downturn, your sales organization needs change and change demands leadership. That’s where you come in.

Selling Power magazine’s Sales Leadership Conference is designed to help executives like you create inspired, high performance sales organizations. America’s top sales leaders give you invaluable ideas for leading your team to new heights and dramatically increasing your sales. Join the select group of forward-looking companies who will come away from this conference armed with the knowledge and power to successfully meet the future. If you are serious about staying competitive during an economic downturn, this fact-filled conference is for you!

Here’s what you can expect:

<li>Winning strategies for recruiting, hiring and developing A players in a tough economy. </li>


<li>Creating a Winning Sales Culture Learn the best practices of world class sales leaders for building the foundation for consistent success. </li>


<li> Creating the vital CEO - CSO relationship Discover how Heartland Payment Systems built a billion dollar business, created 83 sales millionaires and became the leading sales force in an intensely competitive industry. </li>


<li> Leveraging Sales 2.0 technology Learn how high performing companies harness technology to accelerate their sales pipeline, improve processes, close more business and outpace their competitors.</li>


<li> Increase Professionalism Learn how you can benefit from the new wave of professionalism in selling. Seize the opportunity to work with 32 universities that create 1,600 sales degree graduates ready to outsell your top performers.

<li> Network with an exclusive group of 175 top sales leaders (C-level), who will be eager to share their know-how, their insights and their connections to help you win. </li>

Act Now and Receive an Early Registration Discount!

This is a rare opportunity for you to receive the critical intel directly from America’s leading sales authorities. For more information or to request your invitation click here: www.sellingpower.com/leadership/phi2008/

Here’s the list of speakers: www.sellingpower.com/leadership/PHI2008/speakers.asp

With all the talk about the economy heading towards a recession, I’m busier than ever. And so are my clients. So, what gives? How much of this is fact and how much hype? Either way, I’m certainly not disputing that it’s affecting how some business owners and companies are spending lately.

So, what tips do I offer to companies, salespeople and, more specifically retailers on how to weather the recession? The same coaching I deliver to my clients, which is keeping their recession blues at pay, enabling them to drive and close new sales, and most important keeping their mental edge.

‘Weathering a recession’ sounds like surviving a storm and waiting until it passes. The “wait and see” or “lets hope things get better soon” is putting retailers out of business every day. I see it in my community. Stores that were opened one week are closed the next. Sure, you can ‘batten down the hatches’ when the eye of the storm lands but keep in mind when you open them up, there won’t be any customers sitting there waiting around for you. Instead, here’s what you need to do.

1. First, get out of your own head.
Businesses are closing their doors not due to a lack of effort but because they are still attempting to sell, manage or run their business the way it was, not the way it is today. If your marketplace has changed, then you need to change with it. Friendly reminder, don’t get sucked up into what you’re hearing on the news every day. Turn it off if you have to! What is real for you in your business in your local economy? Get out of the type of mindset that keeps you stuck in obsessing on what you need to do to survive and focus on how you can thrive. Remember all those great business ideas you were going to implement; the training your wanted to take, the marketing you wanted to do, the team building you felt would surely to make a measurable impact on your growth and success but daily business responsibilities always seemed to take precedent? Now is the time to blow the dust of those ideas and start executing on them. This begins with a change of thinking, accompanied by a change of strategy and topped off with a strong dose of reality.

2. Get back to basics.
Do you remember when you first opened your doors and achieved some measurable success? Why were you successful in the first place? What did you do then that you may not be doing now or unwilling to do now? Get on the floor of your store, cold call, prospect, do some grunt work? You need to turn around your business, fast, so time is not a luxury. Therefore, if you think there are any activities which are beneath you, then you already have one leg of your business in the grave.

3. Actually learn how to sell.
No, selling for 30 years is not what I’m suggesting as a training platform. Experience is important but experiences doesn’t equate to engaging in the healthiest of sales techniques. I’d be willing to bet (and I’m not a gambling man) the majority of retailers out there have not been coached and trained to be a sales champion, do not have a defined sales process they consistently engage in and as such, don’t know how to truly sell. And by no means consider this an attack on the retail sector. However, given that the majority of daily purchases we make are at a retail level, this is what I’m experiencing both as an executive coach and as a consumer. The “I’ve been successful in spite of myself” theory would apply here.

4. Work your leads and earn a sale.
Just a short time ago, in many sales driven companies, your salesperson can have a pulse and still get a sale simply by your customers showing up and having the money to spend. We were fooled into thinking that, “Hey, since I’m bringing in the business, I must be a great salesperson.” In today’s business climate, the same people are now struggling to generate the results they were, realizing that the marketplace has duped them into thinking they were better then the really are when it comes to professional selling. It has been the economic climate that made many salespeople seemingly productive, rather than their skill set or the core competencies needed to truly become a high performance sales professional, regardless of economic or market conditions. With today’s ever evolving market, if you are selling, managing or running your business the same way you’ve been running it for the last several years, you’re overdue to reevaluate your philosophy.

If you sell consumer products or services that is a more substantial purchase than going to the supermarket (home electronics, furniture, bridal/wedding venders, travel, boutique stores, computers, home appliances, home furnishings, clothing/shoe stores, etc.) don’t let a potential customer walk out the door without collecting some data points and permission to check in. Learn to position yourself as your customer’s trusted adviser throughout their decision making process. Abandon toxic thinking and get beyond the fact that you can afford to let any potential customer walk away from a conversation, thinking they will actually call you back on their own accord. Earn the right to call each person who buys from you – a customer. It’s during times like these where you literally have to earn their business rather than simply be an order taker.

5. Get into action. Work with a coach.

Do you wish that your efforts to earn more customers were more profitable for you? It will be if you avoid falling into these top 10 common pitfalls in the New Year.

Mistake #1. Do you want to sell or do you find yourself needing to sell instead?

Salespeople often find themselves hoping and preying and sometimes even begging, (“PLEASE just take a look…..”) for the opportunity to “Just show what I can do for you” and maybe make a sale. The salesperson may be thinking, “I really need this sale so I hope I get this! After all, I have bills to pay.” Do you think your client is going to be able to pick up on this? Of course they are. Salespeople often present themselves as if they need to make the sale. Instead, its much more effective to have the mindset of wanting to make the sale simply because it is going to benefit the customer’s life and business. This means not making selling about YOU and about how much you can benefit but how much you can assist the customer in benefiting from what you have to offer. The fact is, hungry salespeople scare away the meal. If you can shift to becoming truly sincere and caring as opposed to hungry and desperate, you will attract even more customers towards you. Create a reserve (having more of something than you actually need in order to survive, such as money, space, time, satisfaction, etc.) so that you will have the ability to go into a sales call “Coming from” a different place with a different attitude. Now, you actually want to sell because of the benefits the customer will derive, as opposed to needing to sell to serve your own desires. Otherwise, your customers will get turned of and will go elsewhere.

You can check out some of the first videos available on KeithRosenTV on Youtube. They are also available for free right here on ProfitBuilders.com.

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Here is one of the new videos discussing cold calling fear and reluctance and the best solutions to overcome them. You can check out more new video coaching content here on our site.

From this video: Here’s part of the transcript.
When coaching salespeople, the one activity that typically takes a back seat to everything else is cold calling.

Why is that why is there such a reluctance or aversion to picking up the phone and making that cold call?

Unfortunately, traditionally managers would offer a new template or a new script or maybe a new resource or collateral material in hopes that would make the salesperson more comfortable.

While this might help to a degree, it still doesn’t get the root of the issue, which is the salespersons fear of picking up the phone and making a call. Now here’s the interesting thing, if you think about the two people involved in the sales process, there’s the salesperson and the prospect. When I ask salespeople who the sales process should be about, they say “It should be about the prospect.”

If ask them who they are you making it about , and reluctantly if their being honest they say “I’m making it about me Keith”. Full transcript here.

I will be delivering a special free webinar that you can register for today. The date is approaching fast and details are below.

Date: August 1, 2007
Time: 10:00am PDT,

More Information or To Register Click Here

Permission Based Prospecting
Attract More Qualified Prospects – Close More Sales

Does this sound familiar? “If I could get in front of the prospect, the rest of the selling process becomes easier. It’s just getting in front of them that’s the challenge.” The fact is most cold calling efforts are doomed from the start. Salespeople lose sales not due to a lack of effort but because they lack a prospecting system they are comfortable with and can trust to generate greater, consistent results.

If you are prospecting the same way you have been for the last several years (including the, “calling to check in, touch base or follow-up” approach) or haven’t been prospecting at all, you’re simply making it easier for your competition to take away the new business you are working so hard to earn. So, if you love to sell but hate (or don’t like) to prospect, this program is your opportunity to maximize your cold calling potential and boost your income by learning how to get in front of the right prospects in less time and create greater selling opportunities without the fear, pressure or anxiety associated with cold calling.

In this session, Razi Imam CEO of Landslide Technologies will host this special event as I show you how to:

Strengthen your telephone communication skills.

So, the book launch is over. And a lot of work to coordinate. But all in all, it was very successful. My new book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Closing the Sale, Made the Amazon.com Best Seller List.

So, first, thank you for all of your support. And I want to thank my partners for their support in this launch as well. I couldn’t have done it without you. Keep the success stories rolling in that you’ve created as a result of implementing the strategies you’ve discovered in my book. I love to hear about them!

Well, now that this launch is over, it’s time for me to chain myself to my computer until Mid May when my NEXT book is due to my publisher (John Wiley & Sons.) I’m thrilled to be working with them on my next book which is on the subject of coaching your team to the top and how you can turnaround or terminate an underperformer in less than 30 days.

As you may know, my latest book on closing the sale was released earlier this month. So, why haven’t I made much fuss over it until now? I was waiting for a reason. Here’s the reason.

I’ve put together a very special Three Day Launch Event (Expires this Friday) and wanted to make sure you took advantage of it. You can find out more about my new book and this special launch event below. In the meantime, feel free to visit my new site where you can read the entire intro and Chapter One here. I’m confident that this book will forever change your thinking and behavior when it comes to closing the sale. And you’ll like the results you see.

Now, back to this event:

Special 3 Day Book Launch Event Ends Friday

Get my book 32% Off and hundreds of dollars worth of Bonus Items

Bottom line: Some of the leading industry experts and authors are coming together to give away for free some of their best resources which will only be available for 72 hours during this event. During this 3 day event, anyone who purchases just one copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Closing The Sale will receive all of these additional resources for free.

This book gives you the edge over your competition by showing you, step by step, how to get to “Yes” more often by aligning your selling approach with the prospect’s preferred buying process and communication style without any pressure, manipulation or confrontation. You’ll also get exactly what to say in any selling situation as well as the dialogue that the world’s greatest salespeople use to defuse objections, ask for the sale and close the deal. Plus, over 100 case studies, templates and scripts you can use with my powerful process driven selling approach.

Traditional and gimmicky closing techniques are dead. Never be scared or reluctant to ask for the sale again and enjoy the confidence and peace of mind in knowing you have a process that works. The greatest salespeople are not great closers; they are skilled openers of new selling opportunities. Whether you’re a seasoned sales pro or just starting out, tap into my unique, permission based approach to having a selling conversation with your prospects that fits your style of selling rather than having to ‘pitch and close;’ the same system that I coach thousands of salespeople, business owners and managers on each year.

Get my book 32% Off and hundreds of dollars worth of Bonus Items

**72 HOUR BONUS: Once you purchase my new book, you will be given access to additional bonus materials valued at over $1,000 from industry experts, associations and companies like Paul DiModica, Jill Konrath, Steven Gaffney, Kim George, Vince Thompson, Jacques Werth, Lori Richardson, AllBusiness.com, SalesDog.com, The National Association of Sales Professionals and other incredible authors and experts. To get these resources, you can spend hundreds of dollars separately or you can invest just $10.00 (just ten bucks), order one copy of my book today and spend not one penny more. But order right now, as this unique and time sensitive offer will expire on March 2nd at midnight.

Get my book 32% Off and More