sales presentation
Sales Presentation
Vocabulary
| mention | make sure | exception |
| scream | average | increment |
| assume | competition | this brings us to |
| trust | century | breakthrough |
| suspect | prospect | take the time |
| afford | credibility | sincerely |
| all over | spend time | short-term |
| series | identify | fire extinguisher |
| fill in | trustworthy | confidence |
| pounce | satisfied | cost-effective |
| stuff | lasting | impression |
| award | find out | look it up |
| brag | approach | feed back |
| proud | start off | skepticism |
| gap | based on | thank heavens |
| grant | magic wand | from now on |
| pulse | patient | heart rate |
| result | and so on | blood pressure |
| process | diagnosis | situation |
| hell | recommend | sounds good |
| benefit | malpractice | close the sale |
| gather | transform | prescription |
| schedule | shift (3) | look forward to |
| eager | take notes |
Video
Transcript
Host
If we can talk about sales now, you mentioned earlier the fact that companies have really, really got to make sure, or you’ve got to make sure your product is exceptionally good.
If you’ve got an exceptionally good sales person watching this right now and they think their product is average at best, what advice would you give them?
Should they just leave and go find out a company where the product is good or scream at management that they need to incrementally improve their product?
Brian Tracy
Well they should probably have their managers look at the first part of this interview.
The second part is if you’re in sales, as I was for many years, you don’t really have a choice over the product. You have to assume that your company has produced a good product or service and that they have priced it well in a competitive market.
So your job is to sell more of it.
Relationship Sales
And this brings us to the great breakthrough of the 21st century: it’s that all sales in the 21st century are relationship sales.
The relationship sales means that people do not buy the product or service, they buy how they feel about the person selling it. And then the product or service becomes important.
So the first job of the sales professional is to take the time to develop a relationship of trust and credibility with the prospect. Sincerely.
Prospect and Suspects
We say step one is to separate prospects from suspects.
A prospect is someone who needs it…who wants it….who can afford it….and can use it….and they have all of those needs now.
A suspect is someone who may need or want it sometime in the future.
Don’t spend all of your time — or any of your time — speaking to people who don’t have a need in the short-term future.
Ask Questions to Identify
So you ask him some questions: what are you doing now? How’s that working? And what are your plans for the future?
If they say, well, we’re perfectly satisfied. And we don’t have any money. And business is terrible. And we’re not making any changes.
Then you say, “great. You have a wonderful day. Here’s my business card, and call me if every things change.
Prospects
And you keep looking for people who have the need. We say that if you’re selling fire extinguishers and a person’s hair is on fire, that’s a good prospect.
They need your product and they need it now, and they need it immediately.
And so there’s a whole series of things we teach you no how to identify the best prospects, how to find them, how to approach them so on.
Build Credibility
The second thing is to build credibility with them.
In sales and in life, credibility is everything. Your trustworthiness, your believability — how much I can trust you; how much confidence I feel in dealing with you — is the most important single factor, not only as a salesperson, but as a human being.
Perfect Trust Relationship
And so you’ll find that your very best relationships in life are with people with whom you have a perfect trust relationship: your spouse, your best friends, your best customers.
I work with people on multi-million dollar deals whom I’ve never met, on the telephone or by email because we have a trust relationship.
And we can enter into agreements and we can make commitments and we can actually spend money and put in hours because we trust each other. There’s no problem.
And so trust between a customer and a salesperson is really important.
Build Trust by Asking Questions
And you build trust by asking questions — not by talking about your company or your service — by asking really good questions and listening closely to the answers.
And working to understand your customers.
One of the things I say is position yourself as a doctor of selling.
Don’t Jump into Product or Service
Many salespeople kill the sale by walking in and saying, “Hello I’m Brian Tracy. Let met tell you about my product or service.” That’s like going to a party and saying, “Oh, you’re a pretty girl,” and jumping all over them.
Wait! Wait! Wait!
It’s too soon. It’s too soon to pounce. Most sales people go in and pounce. Because they’re nervous.
Go Slow
Instead what you do is go slow.
And what you say is, “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions and see if we can’t help you achieve your goals in a cost-effective way. Would that be alright?”
People will relax if you offered to ask them questions and make no effort to sell, at all.
Because you don’t even know if this is a prospect or a suspect yet.
Kill the Sale
So if you start to sell before you are clear, and before the customer is clear that a need exists, you’ll kill the sale.
So just go slow and ask questions and ask questions about them.
One of the things we teach our sales professions is to prepare thoroughly for every meeting. Go on to Google. Do whatever you need to do to find out everything you can about the prospect before you meet them for the first time.
The First Impression is Lasting
Remember, the first impression is lasting. And a customer today can tell if you’re prepared or not within 30 seconds.
If you walk in and you say, “Thank you very much for your time. I had no idea your company had been here for 33 years, you have 270 people, 12 branches, and your best selling product is this is that, and they just won the Quality Award last year.”
They’ll say, “how do you know all this stuff?”
“Well, I went to your website. And I looked it up.”
Websites
And what do people put on their website? They put the things they’re most proud of.
They put what we call the bragging page. They put things on their bragging page.
So you go to their website, and you’ll learn the things that they are most proud of as a company.
Few People Look at Websites
And if you feed it back to them, and say, “I looked at your website,” Wow! that’s a pretty good material. They’ll say, “we can’t even get own people to look at our website, much less outside people.
Credibility and Trust Goes Up
And you know, your credibility goes straight up, and their fears and skepticism and negativity go straight down.
And there’s an inverse relationship between the two: as your credibility goes up, their fear goes down.
Fear and Skepticism Goes Down
Now they start off with a high level of fear and skepticism. But as you begin to build credibility, by doing your homework, and then by asking good questions to fill in the gaps and listening closely to the answers, they start to go, “I’m dealing with a professional. Thank heavens.”
Doctor Analogy
So here’s why I teach my professionals: I say imagine that you’re a doctor of selling. I have my diploma granter here in the form of a magic wand. I’m going to make all of you into doctors from now on.
The only difference is that you make house calls. And like other doctors, you have to go see them where ever they are.
So what does a doctor do anywhere in the world?
Medical Examination
A doctor follows three steps in a doctor relationship, a doctor-patient relationship. The first step is the examination, where the doctor asks a lot of questions, takes tests, pulse, heart rate, blood pressure, and so on.
And then they do tests and then they sit down, and they say, “here are the results of our tests, this is the questioning process in selling as well.
Medical Diagnosis
Here’s the diagnosis. Here’s what we think you need. Here’s the situation that we think you have. And the customer says, “yes, that sounds like what I have, that’s what I need.
Restaurant Analogy
The waiter says, “This is what I recommend for you based on what you want to eat,”
And you say, “Yeah, that sounds good.”
Then the prescription. Now here is what I suggest. And this is where you offer your product or service or close the sale.
So it’s always examination, diagnosis agreed upon, and prescription.
Sales Malpractice
What most salespeople do is commit what we call “sales malpractice”. As they walk in, they go straight to prescription.
And they start talking about what the product or service will do and how long their company’s been in business and how long they been in business…
Customers Don’t Care
Customers don’t care about that. The customer only cares is how will your product or service transform my life or work in some way? How will it change me? How will it help me or benefit me.
And I don’t even want to know that until I get to know you, and so I trust you. And you get to know me, so that your recommendation has some value.
This and That
Imagine if you went to a restaurant with many dishes and you say, “what would you recommend?” And I say “This and this.”
“Don’t you want to know what I like or what I want or…”
“Ah, no everybody likes this.”
Well that’s how most salespeople sell. They assume that whatever someone else bought this person wants as well. So they start talking about the product.
Social Gathering
That’s the same as pouncing on a girl at a social gathering when you meet her for the first time.
So don’t do the pounce. Just stop and be prepared to go back a second time. Take notes carefully in the sales presentation and say, “may I think about what you have said for a couple of days and come back to you with some ideas on how we might be able to help you?”
A Couple of Days to a Week
What is the customer going to say?
The customer is going to say, “absolutely!”
What if a doctor does a complete examination and says, “Ok I’d ike to get all of these results together and then see you again in about a week. Would that be alright?
Of course!
Recommendations
You start to shift your whole schedule. You are looking forward eagerly to hearing what the doctor has found out, and what his recommendations are, what her recommendations would be.
And this is the beginning of the relationship-based selling process. People who sell like this earn ten times as much as people who sell the other way.
Questions
1. A sales person can only be exceptional if he or she sells an exceptional product? True or false? What does Brian say a sales person has to assume? A sales person has to assume….
2. What is the great breakthrough of sales in the 21st century?
3. What is the first job of a sales person regarding number 4?
6. The first step is…..
7. Describe a suspect.
8. Describe a prospect.
9. How do you identify prospects and suspects?
10. What should you do with prospects and suspects?
11. What is the second step in sales?
12. Is credibility and trust important? Give examples
13. How do you build trust with a prospect?
14. How many analogies to selling does Brian give?
15. Is it important to prepare thoroughly before a sales meeting? How do you prepare?
16. What do they say about first impressions?
17. What do people and businesses put on their websites?
18. How do people and prospects feel in the beginning of sales meetings and presentations?
19. Describe the analogy with doctors, waiters, and potential boyfriends?
20. Most salespeople commit “sales malpractice”. What does this mean?
21. “Stop and be prepared to go back a second time”. Elaborate on this.
A. Are you a sales person? Do you know anyone who is a salesperson?
B. How do you sell your products or services?
C. Who are the best sales people in your field or industry?
D. Is the sales technique described by Brian the same in your country?
