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ONLINE SALES TRAINING

The Essentials

This section covers the fundamental parts of the program and forms a basis for the remainder of the program. This module consists of 3 parts:
The Process For Growth (2 lessons):
The Attributes of the Optimal Salesperson – If you ever wondered what it takes to be a top producer, this module will answer that question.
The Process for Growth – This lesson describes the process you must go through to have true and lasting growth to the next level.
Sales Process Essentials (3 lessons):
ME-Centered vs. Prospect-Centered selling – This module explains the importance of focusing on your prospect rather than on yourself and your product or service.
Baseline Selling Model – This module explains the process of moving the prospect from being introduced to closing.
Getting A Commitment – This module gives the basic process that we will use to get commitments throughout the program.
Essential Sales Techniques – These are the 2 most important sales techniques:
The Push Away – This is the most powerful and effective sales technique in the program.
The Struggle – This is another powerful and counter-intuitive technique.

Prospecting

Prospecting is the life blood of the Optimal Salesperson. This part of the program is crucial if you are to meet your financial goals. This module consists of 4 lessons:
The Life Cycle of a Project – This explains the importance of getting in early to eliminate the competition.
Creating Pain Hooks – This is essential to making effective prospecting calls and planning your sales conversations.
Getting to 1st Base by Cold Call – Nobody likes cold calling but at least this approach will make you much more effective.
Getting to 1st Base by Introductions – This is a process I call Prospecting Magic. Master this, and prospecting is easy.

Qualifying

The process of qualifying a prospect is the most misunderstood part of selling. The purpose of qualifying is to make sure that the prospect is worth spending your personal time and the company’s resources on chasing it. This module consists of 4 parts:
A Compelling Reason to Buy (2 lessons): If there is no compelling reason to buy, then there will be no sale.
The 3 Essential Elements of the Compelling Reason to Buy – This lesson discusses the building blocks of the compelling reason so that you have a standard to compare your selling situation to.
The Process of Finding Pain – This lesson gives you a process for finding whether the prospect has enough pain to move forward.
The 17 Questions That Only Top Sales People Have The Guts to Ask – Watch live role plays of how to ask them.
Discussing Money (2 lessons): Discussing money is one of the more common problems faced by salespeople.
Hidden Obstacles to Discussing Money – Learn what makes discussing money so difficult for the majority of salespeople
Uncovering the Price Point – If you learn how to do this you will never create sticker shock in your prospect

Focus on Us (1 lesson):
Commanding the Prospect’s Attention – This counterintuitive process will take the focus off of your competition and keep the prospect thinking about you.
The Decision Process (4 lessons):
Determining the Decision Process – This will describe how you can always know where you are in the buyer’s process.
The Journey From Qualified To Closable – This lesson explains how to take a qualified prospect to the point where you can close.
Selling To Multiple Decision Makers – Learn how to handle long cycle complex sales without getting frustrated.
General Guidelines for Writing Proposals –This lesson will explain when and how you should write them and some general guidelines as to how to write them.

Closing With Confidence
Closing is where the salesperson gets paid. This lesson describes four essential elements to closing the deal.

Interpersonal Skills

Interpersonal skills are like tools to help you move the prospect through the sales process. The more tools you have, the more effective you can be. This module consists of 7 lessons:
Fast Forward – This saves you time and effort, uncovers the future, and helps you establish commitments.
Connecting to the Prospect – This lesson describes the process you go through as you develop a relationship with a prospect.
Developing Bonding and Rapport – Bonding with the prospect is an integral part of finding pain in the prospect. This module explains how the process works.
Conversation Extenders – This module gives you some verbal devices to keep the prospect talking.
Tonality and Body Language –This module explains how we communicate and how to make sure the prospect is “hearing” what we mean to say.
Building Credibility – This module explains the basic building blocks of credibility and how to develop and maintain credibility throughout the sales process.
Dealing with Voice Mail – This module explains when and how to leave a message and when not to.

Hidden Weaknesses

Success in sales has more to do with your beliefs and other hidden weaknesses than it does with anything else. The weaknesses won’t go away overnight but when it happens, you will see immediate results. This module consists of 9 lessons:
Goal Setting – This module reminds you of why it is important, and the role they play in your success.
Desire – Desire is the most crucial attribute of the optimal salesperson. Without it, there will be no growth.
Commitment – Learn the difference between conditional and unconditional commitment.
Responsibility – This module discusses excuse making, how debilitating it is, how to avoid seeing yourself as the victim of what goes on in the world.
General Process for Overcoming Self-limiting Beliefs and Hidden Weaknesses – This module gives a step-by-step method to identify and overcome self-limiting beliefs and hidden weaknesses.
Overcoming Need for Approval – This module explains the step-by-step process for achieving a state of not caring what people think of you.
Overcoming Money Weakness – This module will explain the proper mindset about money and the step-by-step method to eliminate it.
Overcoming a Non-Supportive Buy Cycle – This module takes you through the step-by-step process to eliminate a weak buy cycle.
Staying In The Moment – This module takes you through the step by step method to control your emotions during sales call.

Inside of You
Excuses kill personal growth. Personal growth happens when we overcome a self-limiting belief (like people buy based on price) or a hidden weakness (like a high need to be liked). When you make an excuse for lack of performance (our prices are too high, our software is too slow) then you are not focusing your energy where it needs to be focused. You are looking outside and not inside. The biggest problem is that by not looking inside yourself you will never uncover the obstacles that are holding you back. So even if the software gets faster, and your prices get lower, your performance will only increase marginally and will only last as long as those conditions persist. You will be like a basketball player who can only score when guarded by someone shorter and slower than him. You want to be more like the top basketball players who work on their game all summer, so that when the season starts they can score from anywhere on the court no matter who is guarding them.

Why Information is not enough
Joe Friday Just wanted the facts … the information … unadorned. Salespeople need more than information. Just knowing what the prospect wants is not enough. You need to know why they need it. What happens if they don’t get it? What is the context behind the need? Is there a compelling reason to have it? Is there a cost monetary or otherwise to not having it? How is their life affected by not having it? Who else thinks we need it? Who else is affected by not having it? How is the operation affected by not having it? How did we get along without it up to now? Are there alternatives they have considered and rejected? Why did they reject them? Anyway, you get the idea. If you were the salesperson who only knew what the prospect needed, don’t you think you would be at a disadvantage to the competitor who had the answers in great detail to all of the above questions? Don’t be that salesperson!

It’s Not About When, It’s About Why
Urgency is an integral part of the compelling reason to buy. It may seem that knowing when they need something defines the urgency. However, consider the difference between these two situations. “I need it by June 3rd because I am making a presentation to the board of directors on June 4th.” OR “ I want it by June 3rd “. Sometimes it is a good idea to ask what happens if you don’t get it by June 3rd? If they say “no big deal we’ll get it in July, then there really is no urgency. If they describe a problem that will occur then there is real urgency to get the purchase made. Knowing when the decision must be made is good to know. But knowing why it must be made by then is critical to establishing urgency.

Body Language
Reading what a person means by their facial expression or the way they hold their body can be very dangerous. Reading body language can tell you things if you are expert at it. But it can lead to misinterpretations and confusion if you just have a passing acquaintance with how to interpret what you see. One thing you can and should do is notice when the body language shifts dramatically and ask a question about it. Don’t interpret anything, don’t assume, don’t guess, just ask. The video gives a couple of good examples at about the 1 minute mark.

Look for Consequences
To determine the prospect’s compelling reason to buy we need to understand more than what the problem is. We need to understand and get the prospect to verbalize what consequences the prospect will have (or is having) if the problem is not addressed. If the consequences are not severe, then you may be dealing with a situation where it would be nice to have the problem addressed but there is no compelling reason to fix it now. If there is no compelling reason to address the problem the sale will be derailed by even the slightest obstacle. Understanding what will happen if the problem is not addressed gets you one step closer to understanding the pain the prospect is in and whether there is urgency to eliminate it. Remember that it is extremely important to have the prospect verbalize the pain. It is not enough that you know that it must exist based on your experience.

Make A Commitment
If you are not selling enough check your commitment. It is not the commitment to work hard that is most important. It is not even the commitment to working smart (whatever that means) that matters. What matters is your commitment to follow your sales process. You don’t just quote because the prospect asked you to if they are not yet qualified. You don’t make premature presentations. You ask the tough questions. You talk about money naturally. You do all of the things you know you have to do but sometimes avoid. If you are not committed to doing all of these things then you not expect the prospect to make commitments to buy from you. If you do your par the rest will take care of itself. By the way, if you don’t have a sales process that you follow religiously, then be committed to get one and follow it.

Use Your Knowledge
Most salespeople know a lot and totally misuse the knowledge. They feel compelled to dispense what they know to the prospect in great detail and at the slightest provocation, thinking all the while that they are building credibility and demonstrating why the prospect should buy from them. Think about that for a while and then think how you react to salespeople who do that to you when you are the buyer. In reality, the best use of your knowledge is as a basis from which to ask questions. If you know the product and know the industry then you can ask more intelligent questions and glean more information than the novice who can only ask superficial questions. You will be able to recognize pain indicators when you hear them and follow up to get to the compelling reason to buy. Meanwhile, the novice misses the opportunity to follow up because they do not understand or appreciate the significance of what the prospect says. You know a lot and when you use that knowledge correctly then you have a much better chance of demonstrating your knowledge y the intelligent questions you ask.

Have Elevator Questions
The proverbial elevator pitch should be replaced by elevator questions. No one wants to hear a pitch … EVER! The easiest way to start a conversation in networking situations, chamber events, and yes even elevators is to ask questions. It can be innocuous (like “Did you go to Harvard or just liked the T-Shirt?”), or it can be business oriented (So what do you do?) In either case you get the conversation going by focusing on them and then you can lead it to a discussion of issues they may be having that you can help with. Eventually you will get a chance to tell them what you do and, magically, it will be right on target and help you create a connection and possibly a new client.

Asking the Tough Questions
A tough sales question is tough only because your belief system has made it tough. A high school boy believes he is not attractive to girls. It will be a very tough question for him to ask a girl out on a date. Similarly, if you believe you should not talk about money with a sales prospect, asking a prospect what they are willing to spend will be a very tough question indeed. The secret to asking a tough sales question is to make a question easy to ask and you do that by changing your belief systems. Your product will solve the client’s problems and is worth the price you are asking for it. You have a right to be paid for the great solution you offer. If the prospect doesn’t have the budget, why waste your valuable time? Change your belief system so that it becomes right and appropriate for you to ask the money question. The money question will no longer be tough at all. Go ask that girl out on a date because you are worth it! It’s easy.

Price is a conceptual thing, not an objective thing
Price is a conceptual thing, not an objective thing. We tend to think of price as something fixed and objective. No matter how much a prospect desparately must have what we offer, we are certain they will never buy it if it costs more than a standard price they are willing to pay. If your product or service is greater than an established price, you are too expensive. If it is less, your solution is affordable. Throw that thinking away! Price is not objective. It is conceptual. Price is directly related to the pain your product or service eliminates. If a magic wand that would heal a loved one of a terminal disease is available for purchase for $ 1 million, you would find a way to raise that amount of money to buy that wand. Similarly, if your product or service resolves a huge problem a prospect is burdened with, they would pay a king’s ransom for your solution! Price is directly proportional to the pain that the item being purchased solves. Discover your prospect’s inner pain. Find a solution that your products or services offers to end that prospect’s pain. Feel good about the expense of what you have to offer. It’s worth the price! It solves a huge problem for a client! Price is conceptual – believe your solution solves the deep pain of prospects and you will know it is priceless.