Unlimited Sales Success

Brian Tracy, Michael Tracy

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814433256
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

While there is no secret to being an elite sales professional, there is a set of consistently successful selling techniques that most companies don't reach their salespeople, and which most entrepreneurs think they don't have the time to learn.

If there were a single "secret" to finding untold sales success, everyone in sales would be enjoying ridiculous amounts of success. However, some things in life are too important to not take the time to learn, and this is certainly one of them!

In Unlimited Sales Success, you will discover practical, time-tested principles that can be learned and utilized by anyone, including:

• The psychology of selling: your own mindset is just as important as your customer's
• Personal sales planning and time management
• Prospecting power: get more and better appointments
• Consultative and relationship selling: position yourself as a partner with the account
• Identifying needs accurately: you'll know how to arouse their interest and overcome objections
• Influencing customer behavior: learn what triggers quick buying decisions
• Closing the sale: the five best methods ever discovered, and more!

Loaded with eye-popping facts, extremely beneficial exercises, and exhilarating stories of great selling techniques in action, Unlimited Sales Success will provide a use-it-now approach that will set you up for becoming a top sales professional in your industry today.

CHAPTER ONE

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELLING

Ambition is the spur that makes men struggle with destiny. It is heaven's own incentive to make purpose great and achievement greater.

—Donald G. Mitchell

WHY ARE SOME salespeople more successful than others?

When I started in selling many years ago, I struggled for months, barely earning enough to survive while all around me other salespeople were selling and earning much more than me, and they didn't seem to be any smarter or working any harder.

My first breakthrough was the discovery of the 80/20 rule. It says that 20 percent of the salespeople make 80 percent of the sales and earn 80 percent of the money. That means the average income of the people in the top 20 percent is sixteen times the average income of the people in the bottom 80 percent.

When I first heard that statistic, I was both inspired and discouraged. I was discouraged because I had never been good at anything in my life, let alone been in the top 20 percent. I failed school, worked at laboring jobs, and often slept on the ground with everything I owned in a backpack that I carried with me. The idea of being in the top 20 percent was exciting but overwhelming. I just did not think it could be possible for me.

Then I learned another fact: Every person in the top 20 percent started in the bottom 20 percent. Everyone who is doing well today was once doing poorly. Everyone at the front of the line of life started at the back of the line. As T. Harv Eker says, “Every master was once a disaster.”

I immediately made a decision to be in the top 20 percent. I learned later that making a decision, of any kind, and then taking action on that decision, is often the turning point in your life. Without a decision to be in the top 20 percent, it simply will not happen. You will not get to the top of your field as a matter of luck or chance. People who get to the top of any field get there after they make a decision, and then they back up that decision with hard, hard work, month after month and year after year, until they make their decision a reality.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell reports on research that says it takes about seven years and/or 10,000 hours of dedication and hard work to get to the top of your field. This doesn't just mean that you go to work and come home each day for seven years. It means that you throw your whole heart into becoming better and better, like a person running a sprint in a big race, and you work your heart out to develop your skills.

In his work on “deliberate practice,” Anders Ericsson at the University of Florida concludes that the people who get to the top invest ten years of hard work to achieve “elite performance.”

When I share these statistics with my audiences, there is often a big moan from the salespeople present. They say, “But I am thirty years old today. You are saying that it will take me seven to ten years to get to the top of my field. I have to wait to be seven to ten years older.”

This is true. But then I ask, “How much older will you be in seven to ten years, in any case?”

The fact is that time is going to pass anyway. Seven years from now, you will be seven years older. The only question is whether you will be at the top of your field and one of the highest-paid people in the industry. And this is almost totally a matter of personal choice.

Remember, you can learn any skill you need to learn in order to achieve any goal you can set for yourself. All sales skills are learnable. Everyone who is good at a particular skill today at one time could not do it at all. Many of the best salespeople I know were terrible at selling when they began, and terrified of prospecting, to boot. Today, however, they are some of the most positive and confident and highest-paid people in our society. And what they have done, you can do as well.

Self-Confidence and Self-Esteem

Just as 20 percent of salespeople make 80 percent of the sales and earn 80 percent of the money, the 80/20 rule also applies to individuals in a different way. It says that 80 percent of success is mental and emotional, not technical and physical.

The most important determinant of sales success in any field, in any economy, in any market, with any product or service, is self-confidence. When you have an unshakable belief in yourself and your ability to succeed, you become unstoppable, like a force of nature. The higher your level of self-confidence, the bigger the goals you will set for yourself, the faster you will bounce back from rejection and disappointment, and the more you will achieve in a shorter period of time.

What I also discovered was that self-confidence is determined by your self-esteem. Your self-esteem can be defined as “how much you like yourself.”

The more you like yourself, the more confidence you have. The more you like yourself, the more you like other people, including your customers. The more you like your customers, the more they like you right back, and are willing to buy from you, and recommend you to their friends.

The flip side of self-esteem is called “self-efficacy.” Self-efficacy is defined as how good you are at what you do. The more you like yourself, the better you do your work. The better you do your work, the more you like yourself. One hand washes the other. Self-esteem and self-efficacy reinforce each other.

Psychologists will say that everything you do in life affects your self-esteem in some way. Almost everything you do is to either build your self-esteem or protect it from being diminished by other people or circumstances. Your self-esteem is the “reactor core” of your personality that determines your levels of optimism, self-respect, and personal pride.

Everything you do to build your self-esteem also builds your self-confidence. When you truly like yourself or love yourself, and see yourself as a valuable and important person, you become more positive and cheerful and completely unafraid to call on customers and ask them to buy from you.

Seven Steps to Mental Fitness

Your level of self-esteem is your level of “mental fitness.” Mental fitness can be compared to physical fitness. Just as you become physically fit by doing a series of workouts, you become mentally fit by exercising mentally in a series of ways. For you to develop high levels of self-confidence and self-esteem in selling, you must learn to think and act like the most positive and successful salespeople until your self-confidence becomes so high that you become unstoppable.

People with high self-esteem can sell well in any market. People with low self-esteem cannot sell even in the very best of markets. Self-esteem is the key.

There are seven steps to mental fitness in selling and for improving how you think and feel about yourself and your potential. To become a top salesperson you must be:

1. Ambitious

2. Courageous

3. Committed to your work

4. Professional

5. Responsible

6. Thoroughly prepared for each call

7. A continuous learner

By practicing each of these principles over and over, you will eventually get into the “mental Olympics” of selling.

TOP SALESPEOPLE ARE AMBITIOUS

They have an intense desire to be successful in selling. This is perhaps the most important quality of all for success in selling, or in any other field. After twenty-two years of studying the most successful people in America, Napoleon Hill concluded that “burning desire” was the starting point of all success and all riches. This has never changed throughout history.

My friend Les Brown says, “If you want to be successful, you have got to be hungry!”

If you are ambitious and determined enough to achieve your goals and be successful, nothing can really stop you. You must have high levels of ambition to succeed in selling because of the tremendous amount of failure and rejection that you will experience in calling on new people, making sales presentations, and asking them to buy.

Ambition is the fuel in the furnace of achievement. The more ambition and drive you have, the more you will roll over the speed bumps of life. The more ambitious you are, the faster you will bounce back from disappointment. The more ambitious you are, the more you will “keep on keeping on” until you finally achieve your goals.

Resolve to Be the Best. Because of their ambition, top salespeople are determined to be the best in their fields. As it happens, selling is a “default profession.” This means that people do not grow up with a plan to enter the field of selling. Rather, it is something that they get into when they have no other choice or when nothing else works out for them. They get a sales job.

Eighty percent of people who start off in sales look upon it as an interim occupation. They are constantly looking around for something else to do. As a result, they never throw their whole hearts into selling. They never become excellent at selling, and they never succeed greatly. They tread water for most of their sales careers.

But the top people are different. They get into sales, usually accidentally, then at a certain point, something wonderful occurs to them. A light goes on. They look around them in their sales field and see that by becoming good at selling, they can achieve all of their goals. If they become the best in this profession, they can earn more money than professionals with many years of university education.

At this moment, their afterburners kick in. They make a decision to be the best in selling. They throw their whole hearts into learning, listening, and attending courses. And each time they learn and apply a new idea, their sales results improve. This in turn fuels their ambition and increases their determination to succeed.

Here is one of the great discoveries: Anything less than a commitment to excellence is an acceptance of mediocrity. Excellence or elite performance in your field is the result of many years of hard, hard work on self-improvement. Just as the average athlete who makes it to the Olympics has been training for seven to ten years, the average salesperson who reaches the top of his field has been working on himself for seven to ten years.

Earl Nightingale wrote, “Happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal.” When you commit to excellence, to being the best in your field, and you work on improving yourself every single day, you will begin to see results almost immediately.

Your level of ambition and your determination to be the best in your field is the nitroglycerin that causes your potential to explode over time.

TOP SALESPEOPLE ARE COURAGEOUS

They continually confront the fears that hold most people back. If ambition is the driving force of success, then courage is the way to unlock ambition because fear is the major obstacle to success.

When I began studying the psychology of high performance, I was amazed to discover that fear of failure is the biggest single obstacle to success and happiness in adult life. It is not failure. Everyone fails over and over. It is instead the thought or fear of failure that paralyzes performance.

Fear of failure of any kind, even if imaginary, acts as a brake on your potential. It stops you from taking action. Fear of failure causes you to procrastinate, delay, and avoid any situation where you may not succeed, especially sales situations.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote about an experience that changed his life. He was walking down the street as a ten-year-old boy in Concord, Massachusetts, when a piece of paper blew against his leg. On the piece of paper it said, “If you would be successful in life, make a habit of doing the things you fear. If you do the thing you fear, the death of fear is certain.”

His life was never the same after that. And your life can change dramatically as well when you also make a habit of doing the things you fear, until the death of fear is certain.

Glenn Ford wrote that “if you do not do the thing you fear, the fear controls your life.”

The fact is that it is impossible to succeed without failing. Top people fail more often than average or unsuccessful people. Top people do not like to fail, but they realize that it is impossible to achieve their goals unless they are willing to fail over and over again on the journey.

Just as you become what you think about most of the time, it is also true that you become what you say to yourself most of the time. There are four magic words that you can repeat, over and over, to build your self-confidence and lower the fear of failure. They are: “I can do it! I can do it! I can do it!”

Whenever you are hesitating to step out and do something that you fear, you can neutralize that emotion long enough to take action by emphatically repeating those words: “I can do it!”

Conquer the Fear of Rejection. The second major fear that sabotages your success, especially in selling, is the fear of rejection. This fear comes from early childhood experiences where we were criticized and we were the victims of “conditional love” from our parents. It is said that all emotional problems in adult life stem from “love withheld” in childhood. If you were raised in an environment that was not encouraging and supportive, you can reach adulthood with tremendous feelings of insecurity and even hypersensitivity, such that you are negatively affected by the thoughts, opinions, and attitudes of others, whether real or imagined.

In sales, fear of rejection is sometimes referred to as “call reluctance,” and it is the greatest obstacle to sales success. Unless you can overcome this fear of rejection, it is impossible for you to fulfill your true potential as a sales professional.

Fortunately, you can deliberately play tricks on your mind. You can actually reprogram yourself so that instead of fearing rejection, you actually look forward to it. You can hardly wait to get up and get rejected each morning.

When I started off selling, knocking on doors, I would create every excuse not to risk the rejection that I knew I was going to get from the first call in the morning. Then I learned something that changed my sales career: Rejection is not personal. You are probably thinking, “What? Do you mean that when a person rejects my offering of a product or service, it has nothing to do with me? It is a completely impersonal response to a commercial offer in a competitive society?” Yes!

When you call on new prospects and they respond in a negative way, it says nothing about your true value or self-worth. The prospect you are calling on doesn't even know who you are or anything about you. The rejection is completely impersonal, neutral, and not aimed at you at all.

As soon as I learned this truth, my sales activity increased significantly. I would get up every morning and I would say to myself: “Today I am going to face a lot of rejection. But I am going to use every rejection as a spur to greater effort. Each time I get rejected, I will become more positive and more determined and more eager to call on more prospects than I was before!”

In no time, I was looking forward to my first rejection. I had preprogrammed my subconscious mind to respond with feelings of optimism and enthusiasm as soon as I got rejected. Sometimes, I would actually laugh out loud at the first rejection of the day, feeling that I was unstoppable.

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