I just lied to you when I said I could tell you how to sell anything to anyone.  Right there, in the title, I told a lie.  But I have a reason.  You see, I’m tired of ads popping up on my Facebook page and my LinkedIn profile promising “THE SECRET TO CLOSING EVERY DEAL AT THE HIGHEST PROFIT EVER!”  “WORKS EVERY TIME!”  I’ve had it up to here, because if someone tells you that anything “WORKS EVERY TIME!” in sales, they’re lying to you.  Nothing “works every time” in sales, because we sell to human beings with their own frames of reference, worldviews, needs, and perceived solutions.

Those ads are designed to sell one thing – whatever course they are peddling.  They sell to salespeople who are desperate and want a “magic button” solution.  Hint – there is no magic button.  I’m sure that there is some benefit in all of these courses, but their “works every time” promise will always remain unfulfilled.  In fact, I’ve had people advise me to sell my own training that way, and I simply refuse.  I have more respect for your intellect than that.  With all of that said, let’s talk about a 5-step program that will actually increase your sales – a program you can implement on your own in a couple of hours a week.  And best of all, I’m not going to charge you for this program; I’m giving this knowledge to you.  The work is up to you.

Successful selling happens in five steps:  Prospecting, Discovery, Presentation, Proposal, and Closing.  What if you took, say, 20 focused minutes every day, picked one of those steps, and refined your technique in those 20 minutes?  It could look like this:

Monday – Prospecting:  Let’s face it.  Most salespeople – probably 90% or more – are boring when it comes to prospecting.  “Hi, Mr. Smith, this is xxxx from xxxxx company.  I’d like to talk to you about your printing supplies.  Do you have a minute?”  Or even worse – “Hi, Mr. Smith.  I’d like to quote on your next order of printing supplies.”  Yaaawwwwwnnnnnn.  Those approaches will get you off the phone in seconds.  Be interesting.  Explain – QUICKLY AND CONCISELY – how you have solved problems for other customers, and might be able to solve problems for Mr. Smith.  Spend 20 minutes working on your approach statement and try it out on customers and co-workers.

Tuesday – Discovery:  This is the most important phase in the selling process.  It’s also the most shortcut.  It’s the most important because if you don’t discover what your customer really needs, what their priorities are, and how they define success, you’ll never be able to solve their problems.  It’s shortcut because too many salespeople are anxious to get to their “pitch.”  Don’t be that salesperson.  Try this – each Tuesday, spend 20 minutes coming up with two new questions that you can ask customers.  Then try them out.  Figure out what works well.  Keep what works, throw away what doesn’t, and rinse and repeat.

Wednesday – Presentation:  I’m not a fan of carefully scripted and rehearsed presentations. It’s more important to be able to think on your feet, and draw good presentation statements out of your head, than to spend hours rehearsing a big presentation.  Learn your product or service.  Each Wednesday, spend 20 minutes learning at least one feature/benefit coupling of your products that you don’t know.  Internalize it so you can recall it on the spot when your customer needs you to.  And think of your presentations in groups of three.  For every problem your customer faces, you should have three reasons your product will solve it.

Thursday – Proposal:  The key to the proposal is confidence.  You must be able to quote a specific price/service/product offering and not waffle.  Get rid of the weasel words like “last shot at the price,” etc.  Every Thursday, spend 20 minutes creating a concise proposal document (hypothetical or real), and then practice quoting it to the customer in a way that both communicates the value of your offering and communicates that this is the last word on the price.  Role play with other salespeople if possible.

Friday – Closing:  This is the part of the sales process that all of the “win every deal” charlatans focus on.  Spoiler alert – it’s also the simplest.  All you have to do is just ask for the business in a forthright manner.  That won’t take up many Fridays, will it?  So, after you have mastered that skill, use this 20 minutes to go back over the previous week’s activities and do a strong postmortem on your wins and losses.  Use that to target your 20-minute days for the next week.

Now, you’ll notice that there’s no “magic button” there.  I don’t promise that you’ll “CLOSE EVERY DEAL,”  or even “HOW TO SELL ANYTHING TO ANYONE!”  But successful selling is a process, and by using that process to guide you toward incremental improvement, I can guarantee that in six months’ time, you will be a MUCH better salesperson than you are now – even if you’re great right now.

And continuously practicing to improve your sales skills is the one thing you can do that really does WORK EVERY TIME.  That’s no lie.

Time for another old blog post.  I wrote this one, admittedly, in a fit of pique – but it still holds up well.  There’s really not much I’d change, but I will add some tips on how to manage your schedule at the end.

“Scheduling Integrity” is an important part of sales professionalism.  If you don’t know what that is, read on.

Well, the phone just rang.  Looking at the number, I knew what was about to happen.  Sure enough, it’s a person that had requested a meeting with me today, and that meeting was scheduled for a few hours away.  And she was calling to ask if I would reschedule.

“Reschedule.”  That word really is a pain in my rear end, to tell you the truth.  The call went like this:  “Hi, Troy, we have a meeting today.  I’ve had a conflict come up, and I need to know if we can reschedule.”  I agreed to do so, but not happily.  See, I know what “something came up” means, and so does everyone else.  “Something came up” means “Something better came up.”  The problem is that, while something better came up for the other person, now I have an hour of my business time that I’ve already committed – and I can’t sub in another meeting.

I’ve come up with a term for this, and it’s “schedule integrity.”  Basically, it means that when you make a meeting, you take it seriously and honor it.  When someone – anyone – agrees to meet with you, they are making a commitment to you.  Your commitment to them should be at least as serious; more so if you are the requester of the meeting.  Cancelling a meeting that YOU requested is a big sign of disrespect.  It shows that you don’t know how to manage your schedule.

You see, in most meeting dynamics, there is the person who expects to ask for something, and the person who will be asked.  We’re talking about the basic customer/salesperson relationship here.  It happens in networking environments, as well.  A while back, I was asked to “meet and do some networking” with someone that I know.  An hour before the meeting, he did the ‘cancel and reschedule’ number.  On the rescheduled meeting, he canceled a half-hour before the meeting.  I haven’t rescheduled, and I won’t.  Again, a lack of respect.

It’s not tough to avoid these situations.  When you request and get a meeting, consider that time locked on your schedule, and set new meetings at times that don’t conflict.  That’s what adults – and professionals – do.  And as I noted, the dynamics are different depending on whether you are the requester or not, but if you request meetings with someone that continually reschedules, consider that a message that your meeting won’t happen, and won’t be productive if it does.

If this were an occasional situation, I wouldn’t take the time to blog about it; however, I am constantly amazed by how many salespeople fly by the seat of their pants with respect to scheduling.  Professionals always have something scheduled, make the most of their time, and respect the scheduling of others.  If you don’t have this trait, and you’re wondering why you’re not part of the ‘elite’ group of salespeople, here’s a big indicator.  This is basic time management.

These rules do of course change in the event of personal sickness and personal emergencies.  I had a candidate reschedule an interview on Monday with no penalty due to illness: I prefer to keep the vomit reflex as far from my office as possible.  But I find that situations like that are the exception and not the rule.

Bottom line – if you want to be respected as a professional, and treated as one by your customers and associates, step one is to have (or adopt) schedule integrity.

Now that you understand schedule integrity, here are some tips on how to manage your  schedule:

1. Maximize customer face time during face-time hours.  Every industry has hours that their customers will be more available – you should be working to maximize yours. 
2. Regularly disqualify old proposals so you’re not spending time chasing things that won’t close.  Here’s a video giving ideas on how to do this.
3. Build prospecting time into your schedule a week ahead – make an appointment with yourself and keep it. Schedule integrity matters for commitments to yourself.
4. Don’t let “better things” come up.  When you make an appointment, consider it inviolate for all but the most dire of emergencies.  “I can close a sale over here” is not a dire emergency – if a customer calls requesting a meeting time that you already have booked, simply explain that you’re booked and land on a new time.  The fear is that the customer will decide to buy elsewhere because you’re in demand.  Nonsense – customers appreciate that you keep your commitments, and will understand that you will treat THEIR commitments the same way.
5. Underbook yourself.  That’s right, I said UNDERbook.  If you plan a day when you’re going hammer and tongs from meeting to meeting, I will guarantee that something will come up and you’ll miss a meeting.  Don’t be that guy or gal.  Book a strong week but a reasonable one.  With technology the way it is today, if you end up with 30 extra minutes between meetings, you can always do productive work in your car.
6. Always give the customer value for time spent.  More on that here.

If you respect your schedule and those of your customers, they will respect you and yours.

I’m often asked how to create an effective sales presentation. Creating a great sales presentation isn’t hard – but you have to remember who the star of the show is.  Hint – it’s not YOU.  Too many salespeople think that the presentation is all about THEM and THEIR stuff, and not about the CUSTOMER.  This is one of the primary aspects I work to get across in my training.

Here’s the thing – the customer cares what YOU can do for THEM.  They care about THEIR problems.  So any tutorial on how to create an effective sales presentation begins with that focus, like this one does.  It’s a great video, and it’s a good investment of five minutes of your time.

For more on sales presentations, here’s a video of me speaking at a convention in Vegas a few years ago!

I’m starting a new series called “60 Second Sales Tips,” and the point is pretty apparent – to give one great sales tip that only takes you a minute to watch.  Here’s the first, and it’s about a word tat you should stop using, if you’re using it.

One of the biggest time wasters in sales is a backlog of non-viable proposals clogging up a sales funnel.  Salespeople tend to be the eternal optimists, thinking that “one more call” might get the deal done, when in fact, the customer has declared the deal dead – they just haven’t told you.

Still, when is it time to let go of that optimism and disqualify proposals? That’s hard.  Some of it is gut feel, and some of it is science.  Ultimately, your customer will tell you to disqualify proposals – you just have to be listening.  Here are five signs that it’s time.

One of the best ways to avoid burnout in sales is to have a good work/life balance. You have to have time to be YOU – but that also means knowing how to build your work time. Here are some ideas.

Salespeople who sell from fear, rather than from an approach of giving customers positive reasons to buy, tend to lose out.  One of the most common fear-based approaches is the old “I don’t want to give the customer too much info, because I’m just doing free consulting” approach.  This is why that works against you.

Recently I learned of the “180 Day Challenge;” which is the idea that if you do anything every day for six months, you will get exponentially better results.  So, I’m taking it (my challenge is a daily video), and I challenge you to do the same.

I see the posts all the time on LinkedIn.  “Hey, can someone give me a great script for prospecting/presenting/closing/etc.”?  Sometimes I even get asked the same question myself – and my answer is always the same.  No.  I can’t give you a great sales script, and no one else can.  There’s no such thing.

Scripts are for actors and theater.  In a script, everyone knows their lines and rehearses them, and the result is predictable – which is pretty much the opposite of selling, where your customer doesn’t know their lines and the result isn’t predictable.  The key to selling is something that all the “scripters” don’t tell you.

The key to selling is authenticity.  Here’s the thing – whether you are reading a script, or just memorizing and reciting it, your customers know.  And as soon as you are perceived to be inauthentic, customers will RUN from you.

The desire for a ‘great script’ is obvious.  It’s fear and insecurity.  Salespeople believe that the right combination of magic words will get the result that they want, and that if someone smarter and more experienced than them builds that combination of words, then they’ll sell, right?

The truth is that the most important words in selling come not from YOU, but from the CUSTOMER.  The real win in selling isn’t about the words you say, but the questions you ask – and even those have to be expressed in your own words and your own personality, or again, customers will perceive you as inauthentic and won’t buy from you.

So – how do you get an audience with your customers?  Have an idea of how you can solve their problems and explain what that is in a concise sentence or two – the words depend on you and your personality.

Ask good questions that get at their needs, in your own words.

Present to those needs, again in your own words.

Ask for the business, naturally.

That’s it.  Be YOURSELF.  It’s okay to be the best version of yourself that you can be, but be yourself.

And if a sales trainer tells you that they will give you a “Script,” find yourself a new sales trainer.

12 Business Books I Recommend

What’s on my Bookshelf?

A  couple of days ago, I got a LinkedIn message from a friend from Switzerland.  He said he’d been watching my videos, and was trying to identify the books on my bookshelf behind me.  I’ll tell you a little secret – I read a lot of business books, but I don’t KEEP that many.  The ones that I do are ones that I refer to and use on a regular basis. I responded with some recommendations, and then I decided to show you what’s on my bookshelf.  These are the books that the Sales Navigator reads and recommends.