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Direct Sales Training:
Jared is an exceptionally good closing manager. He is the manager that closes the difficult deals. One day I asked Jared to tell me his negotiation skills success secret.

Jared said his secret is like the TV show CSI (Crime Scene Investigation). Only Jared’s CSI stands for “Customer Selling Investigation.”

Jared explained that when he was a new closer and didn’t close a sale he would do a CSI on the deal. He would interview the salesperson that worked the deal. In most cases he was able to quickly determine the missing ingredients in the deal. Maybe the salesperson did a poor job fact finding with the customer and didn’t know their hot buttons. Maybe they didn’t identify the customer’s main motivation for considering the purchase. Maybe there was a poor product selection in matching the customer’s needs.

Would you find it easier to get a sale if you could read your customer’s mind?

Assuming you said yes, here’s how to do it. Ask the right questions and listen carefully to the answers, your customer will tell you everything you want to know. Easy, eh?

Well it sounds easy, but it takes self-discipline to do it right. Let’s start with the questions to ask.

The first type is what are known as ‘open’ questions, meaning that they usually produce informative answers of some length - as opposed to ‘closed’ questions which do the opposite.

Years ago when my wife and I were newlyweds we decided to buy an entertainment center. Mary did all the research on entertainment centers.

Once we decided what it was we wanted in an entertainment center then we started to figure out where to buy it at. We studied the sales and promotions the different electronics stores offered. Finally we decided what we wanted and where we were going to buy it from.

Everyday, people from all over the world send me their selling challenges.
This one just came in from Julie in Atlanta, Georgia:

“Ari, I’m not a typical salesperson. I’m easy-going, I focus on client needs, and I do my best not to exert any sales pressure. But I still end up getting stuck in the cat-and-mouse sales game, and I don’t understand why. I call a prospect, and, if they don’t say ‘no’ right away, we have a pleasant conversation. They lead me to believe that they’re interested in my service, but the next thing I know I find myself back in the ‘chasing’ game. Please help!”

Favorite sales training:

Mark was a student in one of my sales seminars. When Mark entered the room the first day of sales training he stood out as different. I observed the following about him:

• English was not Mark’s native language and it was a little difficult to understand him at times.
  
• Mark dressed a little different, not really bad, just different than most of the others
  
• Mark was a little slower to get the concepts I was teaching and that was probably from the language difference
  

Those are factual observations but none of them is why Mark stood out to me.

It’s very easy to start generating a lot of leads because it’s a very scientific process. Most marketing guru’s say run this ad or make this type of offer and you’ll have an explosion of people responding and those leads will show up in your inbox.

Nothing that you’ve done has made them come there, it’s all been very scientific, you’ve run a very specific direct response ad and people are responding to an offer that you’ve made, and that is where the lead conversion process starts. Now you have to do something, and your mindset is really going to make a big difference at this point.

If you really want to learn how to improve your sales then these seven secrets from the pros will energize you like nothing you’ve seen before. The reason these sales secrets are so powerful is because no one in the sales training industry is talking about them and they are literally the most important critical success factors to you becoming a great salesperson. Lets get started.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

There’s a wonderful way to step into the world of the person you’re cold calling. Just focus on their everyday problems. Start by talking about their issues, not your solutions. And make it specific and compelling to them.

Don’t go into a sales pitch, which is what you would do if you were operating out of the old traditional cold calling mindset. Try to keep in mind that who you are and what you have to offer are irrelevant at this moment.

All that matters is the person you’ve called and the problems they may be having that, down the road, the two of you may decide you can help solve.

There is a lot of articles on the internet about what NLP is, how great it is for improving just about everything and why we should all learn something about the subject. Whilst I agree with all of this I think that there is a need to sometimes explain what makes NLP so great. This article sets out some of the reasons why every sales professional would do well in attending a NLP practitioner course.

Selling with NLP

When something fails it is human nature to blame something else. When a company implements a software system into their organisation and it doesn’t work the most common argument why this is, falls squarely at the feet of the software itself. However, one of the most avoidable reasons why a software system doesn’t work is because the people using it don’t know how it works.