Consistency Selling

Powerful Sales Results. Every Lead. Every Time.

Weldon Long

• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781626345454
• eBook ISBN: 9781626345461
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

Are your sales results always awesome? Or do some months leave you wondering if you'll be able to pay your mortgage?
?One of the most difficult parts of being a professional salesperson is managing the emotional peaks and valleys that accompany the ups and downs of sales. But according to Weldon Long, there is no challenge you can't overcome, and he shows how salespeople can thrive in the face of adversity if they are just willing to create the right mindset and implement the right sales process— consistently. Unreliable performance and unpredictable results are likely, says Long, because you aren't doing the same thing consistently on every sales call. If sales activities are random, results will be random. And random sales activities will never accidentally start producing consistent sales results, just as consistent sales activities will never start producing random results. It just can't happen. Whether it's a bad economy, a cheap competitor, bad leads, or a personal challenge, Long provides step-by-step advice on how you can make committed, consistent activities part of your daily sales routine so you will consistently be rewarded with the sales you deserve. Weldon Long is a successful entrepreneur, sales expert, and author, who—in 2003—walked out of a homeless shelter where he was living and within sixty months, had grown a sales organization to over $20 million in sales.

Part One covers some basic concepts that I find are critical to our overall success in sales. First and foremost, I will give you an overview of the Prosperity Mindset, which I believe is critical to having a successful sales career. With a Prosperity Mindset you will conquer the vicissitudes of the sales profession and stay hyper-focused on building your financial dreams. Nothing will hold you back. Nothing will deter you from reaching your true potential.

Then, I will expand on our discussion of sales process versus sales result. You must be able to distinguish between your job and the prospect’s job. The process is YOUR job. The result is the PROSPECT’S job. And you must learn not to do the prospect’s job for them, lest you find yourself with skinny children.

After that, we will discuss different types of customers and make sure you are focusing on the right ones. You’re never going to own 100 percent of your market, so it’s important to know who you are and which customers you are pursuing. Yugo dealerships can’t afford to give Land Rover service. They shouldn’t even try.

I will then discuss the concept of risk in the context of the prospect’s decision-making process. Remember: The higher the risk, the harder it is to say yes; the lower the risk, the easier it is to say yes. I will give you specific techniques to systematically lower the risk for your prospects and make it easier for them to say “yes” to you.

Finally, I will discuss the framework of my sales process, which I call the “sales hallway.” The sales hallway is a metaphor for the sales process; whether you use my sales process or your company’s existing sales process, the sales hallway provides a simple framework through which you will better understand the dynamics and challenges of a sales call.

Let’s get started!

CHAPTER 1

THE PROSPERITY MINDSET—SUCCESS IS AN INSIDE JOB

I can’t stress enough that your sales success and income will be a direct reflection of what you do—not what your customer or your boss or your competitors do.

If you want to create massive and transformational success in your sales career, you need three things: the Prosperity Mindset, the Consistency Selling method, and the consistent implementation of both.

All three are necessary because if you are thinking the right things on a sales call and doing the right things on a sales call—on a consistent basis, you can only create the right sales results.

In this chapter, I will give you an overview of how to create a Prosperity Mindset that will allow you to accomplish anything you want. If you would like a more detailed discussion of the process behind the Prosperity Mindset, I highly recommend that you read my book The Power of Consistency.

Of course, there will always be people who will seek to rationalize and justify poor sales performance by blaming forces outside themselves: the economy, the customer, the boss, or the leads. There will always be that guy who says, “I don’t understand what’s going on. I mean, I’m doing all the right things—but I can’t seem to close any business.”

That’s balderdash. If he were really doing all the right things, over time he would create the right results, because you can’t do the right things in sales and accidentally produce the wrong results.

SUCCESS IS AN INSIDE JOB

The first step in creating massive and transformational change in your sales results is acknowledging that you are the responsible party. Success is an inside job. That’s what the Prosperity Mindset is all about.

I’ll illustrate what I mean by the following example. John runs 10 leads and closes 4 of them with an average sale of $5,000 for a total of $20,000 in revenue on his 10 leads. Jane runs 10 leads and closes 5 of them with an average sale of $8,000 for a total of $40,000 in revenue on her 10 leads. Most people would agree that there are sales professionals performing at John’s level and at Jane’s level. But would you agree that there are sales professionals performing at John’s level and Jane’s level in the same town, in the same economy, and with the same customers?

Would you be willing to admit there are sales professionals performing at John’s level and Jane’s level in the same company, in the same economy, with the same customers, the same boss, and the same leads?

Think about this: If you have one person performing at John’s level and another performing at Jane’s level, and they both face identical external factors, their individual sales results CANNOT be a reflection of external factors. The difference between them relies on INTERNAL factors—and that difference is their MINDSET.

If our sales results were really about the external factors, then all the salespeople in a company facing the same economy and competitors would produce identical sales results. But we know this just isn’t true. We know that not everyone creates the same sales results. There are always some folks outperforming other folks in the same company with the same external challenges.

A PROSPERITY MINDSET THRIVES IN ADVERSITY

When I refer to the Prosperity Mindset, I am talking about a mindset that is designed and constructed to thrive in the face of adversity. It’s a mindset that prospers in the face of difficulty—in the face of external challenges.

External challenges can never be allowed to determine your prosperity, because there will always be external challenges. If you are waiting for the external challenges to improve before you create wealth and prosperity, you might as well get comfortable with mediocrity.

What external challenges can be allowed to do is determine how hard you are going to have to work to create the wealth and prosperity you want. In other words, if your economy, your boss, and your leads suck, you are going to have to work harder to create success than you would if your economy, boss, and leads are great.

To reiterate: Having a bad economy, a bad boss, or bad leads DOES NOT mean you cannot create wealth and prosperity for your family. It just means you will have to work harder.

• • •

You don’t have to be a PhD to understand how to train your brain to do the things you need to do to have the things you want to have. Creating a Prosperity Mindset and programming your brain to make decisions consistent with what you want in your life and career is an easy process. And as I’ve said before, creating a Prosperity Mindset is easy. It’s just a little bit easier to make excuses and not do it. The tendency of human nature is to find reasons and excuses to justify not doing the work. It’s not uncommon to find many reasons to postpone doing what we know we should do. You need to find just one really good reason to do it.

For example, when my book The Power of Consistency was released in 2013, it hit #5 on The New York Times Bestsellers list and #2 on The Wall Street Journal Business Bestsellers list. Shortly thereafter, I received a call from a gentleman named Ed Nottingham.

Ed worked for a Fortune 500 company and had devoted his career to teaching executives the relationship between their habitual thoughts, their habitual actions, and their habitual results. In addition to writing a book of his own called It’s Not as Bad as It Seems, Mr. Nottingham is a PhD and a clinical psychologist.

As we discussed our respective work on the subject of mindset as it relates to success, he said, “You know, Weldon, your book is a very simple explanation of how our neurology affects our choices and the decisions we make. And your explanation of the principles that serve as the underpinnings of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy is so easy to understand.”

To which I jokingly replied, “There’s a name for this stuff?”

For me, creating a Prosperity Mindset was just common sense. After all, most of us were taught to “Be careful what you wish for” since childhood, and that little wisdom from Mom is at the heart of creating a Prosperity Mindset.

A PROSPERITY MINDSET IS JUST COMMON SENSE

As we discuss the Prosperity Mindset concept, you will likely think back and recognize times in your life where your thoughts created your results.

We all understand the relationship between success in life and the right mindset. It is very uncommon to see someone with a negative, miserable attitude become successful in sales. Likewise, it is very uncommon to see someone with an ambitious, enthusiastic attitude fail in sales.

Having a Prosperity Mindset is the first step in creating wealth and prosperity in your sales career. When you have a Prosperity Mindset, you have the keys to the kingdom, because nothing will hold you back, and nothing will deter you from achieving your main objectives.

A PROSPERITY MINDSET

·With a Prosperity Mindset, you will rarely get distracted from your key priorities.

·With a Prosperity Mindset, you will succeed, regardless of the external challenges.

·With a Prosperity Mindset, you will thrive in the face of any difficulty.

·With a Prosperity Mindset, you will prosper in the face of any obstacles, whether the obstacle is your economy, your boss, or your leads.

I can’t imagine facing my family one day and saying, “We can’t go to Disneyland” or “We can’t do this or have that,” simply because I am unwilling to work harder in the face of external challenges. I couldn’t look myself in the mirror. I can’t imagine saying, “It’s just too hard!”

When the housing market collapsed and took the entire economy with it in 2008, we had just finished our most successful year of sales. Suddenly, my business was hit with the same economic challenges facing every business in the country.

What amazed me was how many companies in my industry and other industries were closing their doors and facing real financial collapse. My Prosperity Mindset would never allow the external economy to determine my destiny, so I decided we were going to have to reorganize and work harder just to hang on to what we had worked so hard to achieve.

And that’s what we did. I was fine with working twice as hard and getting twice as good at sales to just tread water. It beat ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Stephen M. R. Covey
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• CH. 1 ››› The Prosperity Mindset—Success Is an Inside Job
• CH. 2 ››› Sales Process versus Sales Result
• CH. 3 ››› Understanding Market Segmentation—Different Strokes for Different Folks
• CH. 4 ››› Risk and the Purchasing Decision
• CH. 5 ››› The Sales Hallway
• PART TWO
• CH. 6 ››› Relationship Building (Part 1)—Build Trust, and Close the “I Need Multi-Proposals” Door
• CH. 7 ››› Relationship Building (Part 2)—Build Trust, and Close the “I Need a Cheaper Price” Door
• CH. 8 ››› Investigate the Problem—Build Trust, and Close the “I Need to Think about It” Door
• CH. 9 ››› Sell Your Company and Solutions—Build Trust, and Seal the “I Need a Cheaper Price” Door Shut
• CH. 10 ››› Conclude the Sales Opportunity—Leverage Trust and Consistency, and Ask for the Order
• Conclusion
• Index
• About the Author