Track Selling Times: The Voice of the Sales Profession

Track Selling Times - May, 1999

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Track Selling Times
The Voice of the Sales Profession
Issue No. 114
May 1, 1999
Published by Max Sacks International,
Home of 100% Guaranteed World Class Sales Training, and
Developers of the Track Selling System™.
Author/Editor: Roy Chitwood, President, MSI
Archives of this Newsletter are available at
http://www.maxsacks.com/newsletter.html

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In this issue:
Feature:

"The Seven Deadly Sins of Selling"

Sections:

"Integrity and Consequences"

"Building a Sales Foundation, by Chip Phelps"

Focus on the Professional: Joe Brown
Ask Roy
Survey Newsletter Archives

"The Seven Deadly Sins of Selling"
by Roy E. Chitwood, CSP, CSE

There are seven deadly sins in selling.
Review the list and see how many of them you commit:

1. Talking too much, listening too little.

Most salespeople talk too much. You enter the prospect's office, spend the obligatory two minutes on pleasantries, then launch into a high-powered sales presentation.

The result: 90 percent of the time you are shown the door.

Instead, before initiating a canned presentation (which may or may not apply), try listening to the prospect to uncover their real needs, concerns and challenges.

A good salesperson is a good listener and a great salesperson is a great listener.

2. Selling the product, not the benefits.

People buy based on their answers to the question, "What will it do for me?" They look for the benefits of a purchase, not the features. Yet most presentations almost exclusively focus on features such as size, speed, megahertz or gigabytes.

The average prospect doesn't buy 'a 6.6 GB hard drive with 128 MB of RAM.' They buy a system that responds to their needs instantly, is easy to use and has enough space to store all of their files. During your next sales call, give the benefits more coverage than the features, and watch your closing ratio climb.

3. Never asking for the order.

62 percent of salespeople never actually ask for the order. Instead, they keep talking on and on until the prospect either says 'yes' or terminates the interview. Many are terrified of hearing the word 'no' and seek to avoid it by continuing to talk or scheduling another appointment. However, a 'no' today is much better than a 'no' in three months.

Make a point of asking for the order.

4. Pushing for the close.

When failure to ask for the order is not the problem, the pendulum usually swings to pushing too hard for the close. Instead of realizing that a resistant prospect needs to be helped to make the decision to 'buy,' some invent various trick closes to 'sell' the person.

Underlying objections and refusal to buy, however, are usually undisclosed or poorly understood needs. Once you know these, it is possible to move the sale forward and smoothly complete the transaction.

5. Wasting selling time.

In every industry there are certain golden hours - those times in the day when it is most productive to visit prospects. This might be in the morning, the afternoon, or in the case of various consumer-based products, the early evening.

Unfortunately, many salespeople waste these precious golden hours in 'busy work' which could easily be done off 'prime time.' Instead, reserve your golden hours exclusively for prospect calls and schedule developing proposals, support activities and other paperwork during off-peak periods.

6. Not identifying prospects from suspects.

Probably the greatest misuse of a salesperson's time is presenting to someone who doesn't have the need, the authority or the money to buy. Learn to identify and gain access to decision-makers and to qualify your prospects before engaging in lengthy sales presentations.

7. Making a sale, not a customer.

What happens when a sale is made to 'earn a commission', 'make the quota' or 'keep the doors open'? In all likelihood, that is the last time that prospect buys from you. Why? They never really became your customer.

Successful salespeople quickly learn that the only reason to make a sale is to help a customer fulfill a specific need. That's why the greatest advertisement any salesperson or company can have is a happy satisfied customer.

How many of the seven deadly sales sins are you suffering from?

To eliminate them, transform selling into an orderly procedure in which each step contributes to the whole and results in a smooth transition from introduction to completion of the sale.

And that's what the Track Selling System is all about.

Integrity Pays:
"Integrity and Consequences"

Anneli Driessen, Ph.D, is President of WIN Inc., an executive coaching, counseling and consulting company based in Victoria, BC., Canada. Anneli personally coaches and counsels CEOs and is a member of Sales & Marketing Executives International with a CMS in sales and marketing.

"If you look up the definition and derivation of the word 'integrity,' you see that it means whole, complete or made up of parts which constitute a unity. Thus the words, thoughts and actions of a person of integrity will be in full alignment.

For those who violate integrity and lack such alignment, however, there is a price to pay. By only thinking of the short term benefits instead of the big picture, they are creating something negative for themselves."

Do you have any anecdotes to illustrate this?

"I had one client who'd become involved in fraud to the tune of $150,000. While the money brought its own advantages, his life soon became a disaster area.

His marriage was falling apart, and someone found out about the money and began to blackmail him. Should he not comply to the blackmailers wishes, he faced many years in prison, leaving his wife to provide for the children on her own."

"I advised him that the only ethical course was to pay the money back to the company in its entirety. To do this, he had to suffer a severe reduction in living standards, subject himself and his business to two stressful years and suffer social embarrassment due to loss of status through no longer being able to afford the best cars and the most lavish office suites.

However, the upside was significant. His marriage remains intact, his family life happy, he managed to avoid jail and is no longer being blackmailed."

What do you think about anyone who comes up short on the subject of integrity?

"They are making a really dumb decision and on some level, it shows a lack of intelligence. There simply is no other way than to follow the path of integrity.

Any other choice will bring only short-term gain, and the consequences will always come back to haunt the individual in the future."

Anneli Driessen can be contacted at: Anneli@Annelicoach.com

World Class Sales Management:
"Building a Sales Foundation"

By Chip Phelps, Executive Business Group Leader
Excell Executive Leadership Exchange, Portland, OR

I've been in sales for about 25 years. My present company, Excell, supports and develops leaders who are committed to business and personal growth by providing a structure and process for the confidential exchange of vital knowledge, resources and solutions.

Earlier in my career, I was in the top ten percent of salespeople for a major national organization, but over the years I'd lost the golden touch and began to lack confidence. I realized that my prior success had been built on a rickety foundation.

That's when I turned to the Track Selling System.

It's amazing to realize after all these years that it's extremely difficult to function in sales or sales management without having an exactly laid out sales procedure. Yet that's what I'd been doing. Now I have a model to proceed through the entire sales process that can be used as a guide and as a troubleshooting tool.

This morning, for instance, I was demonstrating features and benefits to a prospect and it didn't go quite as well as I wanted. By looking over the seven steps of the Track Selling System, I realized that I'd forgotten to ask for a reaction to each benefit.

Now, instead of wondering what went wrong or worrying about my lack of confidence, I know what to do to get the sale back on track. As a result, I'm much more confident.

But the best thing about this sales methodology is that it puts the sales manager and the salespeople on the same sales page. No longer do opinions or personalities reign in sales decisions.

With a clearly defined sales procedure, both sides can see where the sale went off the rails and know what needs to be done to salvage the cycle.

As a result, the sales manager is now in a position to track each sale and can manage its speed of conclusion, based on the needs of the customer. This makes selling a much more relaxed activity as it is based on a solid foundation.

Chip Phelps can be reached at Chip@TRIAX.com

Focus on the Professional - Joe Brown

Joe Brown has been a salesman for six years at Johnston & Culberson in Spokane, WA, third party administrators for workmans' compensation.

"Before I began my sales career I managed a saw mill. It was commodity selling, the loyalty factor was low and I really didn't care for selling at all. Then I became a consultant. While I enjoyed it, I wasn't adept at really helping an owner or GM to uncover their real needs. I could often see the problem but usually failed to demonstrate why they needed to handle it now."

How has this changed with the Track Selling System?

"Now I can see the importance of formulating exact questions before you go in to see the prospect. If I'd done this in my earlier careers I would have been a lot more successful."

How important do you feel question formulation is in sales?

"Vital. I do it religiously and its one of my most successful actions. It has forced me to listen to the prospect instead of telling how great my product is. It's amazing what I found out about businesses and people as a result of just listening and letting people talk."

What about your sales performance?

"I specialize in an area that didn't exist when I first arrived at the firm, yet now it's one of our fastest growing segments with an average annual increase of 30-40 percent. We're even recognized as one of the state leaders in this zone. I'd give a lot of the credit to that to the Track Selling System."

Has the Track Selling System helped you in other ways?

"I am very creative on how I approach people for the first visit and have an 80 percent success rate of closing those I meet face-to-face. I'm actually blown away when someone decides not to accept our services as I'm sure they are missing out on a tremendous opportunity. This is based on a firm commitment to our product and what it can do to help and the people who support it."

Joe Brown can be contacted at: Joebrown@iea.com

Ask Roy

Larry Giampaolo from Farmington Hills, MI, asks,

What can I tell him to get him off my back?

Roy's Answer:

Track Selling System

That will provide you with a comfortable approach to selling that moves effortlessly into the close in a non-confrontational manner.

Reader Survey

1. What do you think of Track Selling Times?
2. What else would you like to see included?
3. If you have sales questions for Roy, or know of a salesperson, sales manager or integrity story that should be featured in Track Selling Times, mail it to:

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