Closing plans

Traditional selling approaches suggest that the “close” comes after the presentation is made.  One-liners are memorized, salespeople are reminded to always ask for the business, and in high pressure sales salespeople are taught the ABC rule: Always Be Closing.  However, as selling gets more complex and trust becomes the key to winning the business, the [&hellip

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What Motivates Your Prospect to Buy?

A good prospect will have some unresolved business or personal issues.  Sales trainers commonly call this the prospect’s “pain.”  It’s the difference between the prospect’s current reality (situation) and tomorrow’s expectations – the difference between what they have and what they want.  If the gap is wide enough, they will take action.  If it’s not, [&hellip

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Controlling the Sales Process

As demonstrated in The Buyer’s Trap, salespeople seem to have lost their ability to take and maintain control of the sales process.  The Meeting Agreement is one of the best sales tactics you can master in order to regain control of the process and build an incredible amount of trust with the buyer.  This simple, [&hellip

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Making a Great First Impression

When you meet someone for the first time, subconsciously you form an opinion of that person in the first few seconds.  These are called snap judgments, and they’re formed in the “blink” of an eye.  In fact, best selling author Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink supports this theory. Rightly or wrongly, the first few seconds of [&hellip

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Your Ideal Prospect

Prospecting is a process of sifting through many leads until you find one that fits your criteria.  As such, prospecting is a discarding activity. Think of the 49er’s back in the California Gold Rush days.  Those miners sifted through a lot of gravel in the Sierra Nevada mountain streambeds looking for a small fleck or [&hellip

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Upgrading Your Referrals

When receiving a referral, most salespeople are quite happy to get a name and a number to call.  They thank the referring source and then start the process of making a cold call on the (often unsuspecting) referral.  This is usually a frustrating process that yields poor results. A better way is to “upgrade” your [&hellip

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Rejecting Rejection

As the story goes, when Colonel Harlan Sanders left Kentucky with his pressure cooker and his recipe for fried chicken, he received over 300 rejections before he found someone who shared the same passion for the recipe that he did. Novelist Stephen King got so tired of publishers rejecting his first novel Carrie that he [&hellip

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You’re a 10! Now Sell Like One!

How we feel about ourselves plays a huge part in how successful we will be.  The Inner Game (how you manage yourself) is as important as the Outer Game (how you sell).  Selling is one of the toughest businesses there is.  Salespeople have to face skeptical, even antagonistic, prospects that reject their selling propositions on [&hellip

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“Send Me Some Information”

This put-off is as old as the hills.  It kept many a marketing department busy coming up with new collateral material.  And salespeople historically took it as a real sign of interest. Prospects learned long ago that asking for information was a fail-safe way to get rid of salespeople quickly.  Whether you respond by snail [&hellip

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