Sales Tips from a Million Dollar Flewbie

7 Ways to Boost Your Sales by a Factor of 10

Some Very Basic Sales Tips:

I've been checking this forum for years and only recently started interacting here. I can't say that I'm killing it online...yet. I am somewhere between a newbie and a flukey; maybe a "Flewbie."

But I've noticed many of you are taking your show on the road, so to speak, and selling your services to local businesses. It's greatly needed. It is a starving market for what you offer, which helps a lot in selling it, but it will get more crowded as some big boys step in.

Now, while I can't help you create the ultimate back link building system, I do have a lot of experience in outside sales. I've been selling, training salespeople and managing sales staff for 25 years now and studying how and why some people can produce 10 times what the average salesperson does. As an outside sales person myself, I went from being the worst guy in the room to doing multiple times over what the average guy did and running and owning the company. In one venture, we started from nothing and did many millions in sales every year for years. We were up against some big big boys and thrived.

A lot of my experience is in selling marketing services to small businesses, which is exactly what many of you are essentially doing here. In managing salespeople, I've had to write and re-write training manuals and sales material over and over and over again. I've pulled just a few of the issues that I've found most useful and adapted it here.
If you have any training in sales at all, this is probably too basic for you. However, I've seen 30-year veterans make some of these mistakes.

Most of this advice is evergreen for any industry. My goal here is to help one or two of you because I received so much Warrior help, that right now I'm running a huge deficit on this forum and I'm hoping to lower that debt just a fraction. One thing that is absolutely certain is that selling is a skill that has to be learned and once you learn it you can achieve 10 times what you had as a sales newbie or in my case flewbie.

7 tips to Selling 10 times more than the average salesperson

1.) What are you selling?

This sounds simple. But many veteran sales people forget this. If you are selling SEO or Place Page Administration or a turnkey website, or a mobile site then your market is much smaller than if you are selling, hot leads or phone calls or most importantly, an increase in sales, or a decrease in cost. You may recognize this in your copyrighting courses as the features vs. benefits discussion. It's also a perspective issue.

You probably know this, but keeping it in the forefront of what you do is not so easy. We often fall in love with our own product or service and that Siren's song is so beautiful and mesmerizing that we forget the client doesn't know and love her.

"Sell the sizzle." It doesn't get simpler than that.
If we are selling a young kid a car, you normally don't talk about the type of suspension it has (a feature). You talk about how quickly the girls' heads will turn when he pulls up in it (a benefit). For him that's the ultimate benefit. That's what he's buying and that's what the good salesmen will sell him. Not the car, but the feeling the car evokes or sex appeal. He will be a hit with the ladies in this car! That's his hot button.

You have to speak to your prospects hot buttons from their perspective. Average salespeople forget this. Good salespeople know this. Great salespeople do this. You can really turbo charge your closing ratio (think CTR) if you just learn this one thing. Sell what they want to buy. Fill their needs and wants. Not yours. You may think you know what they want or need, but listen and learn. You may get surprised.


2.) Questions can get you the close better than fancy presentations.

I wish I had kept track of the number of disastrous presentations that I had turned around by asking the right question or by asking so many questions that I eventually stumbled upon right one. Questions are how you determine what your prospects hot buttons are. For SEO it might be "So do you mind telling me how many people are visiting your website every day?" "What if 10 times that many people were visiting your site? How would that affect your business?"

This concept might not be as important now with a wide open market as it's going to be when there is tons of competition and some established names selling the same services, but it's worth repeating, don't sell your services.

You might be an SEO genius or a brilliant app designer, but it's far easier to sell a busy owner or manager on bringing him more business than it is on solving a problem for him that he doesn't know he has. You can educate him on and on-page and off-page optimizing techniques until you are blue in the face, but it would be easier to tell him you can bring him more clients and then get into the nuts and bolts after he's/she's interested or probably from his/her perspective, never get in the nuts and bolts.

A quick aside that many of you already probably know, unless they've just completed a redesign many business owners don't like their websites and consider them a royal pain the ass. Keep in mind, when you are running a small business, your primary concern is cash flow. You have to bring in more money than you spend and everyday it's a challenge to figure out how to increase the inflow and decrease the outflow. That's what your boss or board expects of you. If the website or SMS program can help me today do that, then great, let's do it, how much is it, but if not; I don't have time for it. And Thanks for stopping by.

Questions are a great way to get inside your potential customers head. Ideally everything you say and do is from his/her perspective. I've seen scripts on here that end with something like this, "So please send me an email, I would love to do business with you." That is a waste of everyone's time. That sentence should never have been created. When sales people calling on me as an owner/manager said that (and a lot did), I used to respond, "Of course you would love to do business with me. You're on commission, but why should I love to do business with you?" That's what the managers want to know. That's the perspective you should come from. You must answer that question in everything you do.

A better way to end a message would be "I will check back with you in a day or two to make sure everything in the free report was clear and to see if you have any questions about implementing those tips to increase your incoming phone calls. If you want to get hold of me before then, here is my contact info......" This brings up another point: Always keep the ball in your court. If you leave it up to them to call you back, you have no excuse to call them in a couple days. If you plan to call back, tell them you will. Don't throw the ball away.

This is called the discovery, the interview, needs analysis or needs assessment. It goes by many names, but what it boils down to is asking questions and finding out what your client's hot buttons are. If you have a whole slew of services then you need to know what is right for this client. If you only sell one thing, then you need to know 1.) If they truly need it and 2.) How to present it to this particular client from the RIGHT perspective. People are different and questions give you an opportunity to not only personality type this prospect but find motivations.

Okay, I think I might have gone over the post limit here. (What is it, btw?) I can try to boil the other points down enough to fit in one post if there's any interest. Hope someone finds something of use. But remember in outside selling, prospects don't say "No" to you. What they are really saying is "Not Yet." That attitude has served me well and made me a million dollar producer in a few different arenas. And remember, selling is always an up and down ride, but it's the valleys that make the peaks possible.

Just added two more....

3.) Hyperactive Prospecting Brings Home the Bacon:

If everything else stays the same the way you sell ten times more is by interacting with ten times the number of peoples. If you are sending out emails how can you send out ten times as many? If you are doing presentations how can you do ten times the amount? Can you increase your phone calls? Hire a phone solicitor or service. How can you get ten times more outbound contacts? Ponder this and it will force you to really think. Can you get them all on a webinar, can you have an event where you invite them to hear you and a few other experts (this works very well). Can you get something in a local publication? (If you approach them right, you might.) Do you have to buy more leads? Do you have to hire some salespeople? (That always works if you get good ones, but that's another topic) Think about increasing your "at bats" whatever the method is. A lot of people get credit for saying this, but I think Wayne Gretsky said it first, "I miss 100 percent of the shots I don't take." That's true in hockey, basketball, sales and life.

A wise sales manager once said that he could tell how well a salesperson was going to do by how quickly he/she walked down the hallway. In outside sales, the hot ones are hustling and the averages ones are chatting with their buddies, a lot. In my teams, I always had one or two who outsold the entire rest of the group and they usually didn't know who the others were because they were so busy selling. They didn't have time for chit-chat.

Activity is what it boils down to. If you can have more interaction with your prospects you can make up for a host of other ills, such as poor salesmanship, lousy presentations, and inferior product (but that's not a problem for any of us, right?)
And you need to keep a record of everything. Google analytics can't be installed on your feet, but if you don't track your numbers you are just winking at the pretty girls in the dark.


4.) Close Like a Viking and Walk Out with a Check.

Study after study has shown that well-trained highly paid sales people often don't ask for the order. (That's why you only pay any salesperson you hire straight commission or mostly commission.) Many times highly paid sales people will present their product or service in a beautiful powerpoint slideshow and the decision maker will thank them and then the salesperson will leave him/her after he/she promises that, "I will think this over and get back to you next week." No he probably isn't. He is going to go back to the 5 major problems he has to resolve before lunch and then he is going to fire his friend that has been there for 15 years and deal with the auditors all afternoon. His kid is sick. His wife is mad. When is it he is going to think about your proposal? This might be your only shot with him.

You have to ask for the order, but use some technique. Don't say, "So do you want me to fix your website issues." Say, "Great! Now I can't start working on getting more buyers to your site [or insert appropriate hot button here] until next week whom, should I coordinate with, Tom or Sarah, about details." That's an assumptive close. Or "Okay now which program are we starting off with, the premium package, which will get your Google Place Page more eyeballs or the deluxe package which will do that AND make your site visible to the billion smart phone users?" That's an alternate advance. It's amazing how well these two techniques work. You should assume you will be doing business with the company; it's just a matter of working out details. After all they are crazy if they don't want to do business with you; right?

Get the after sale glow. This is Tony Robbins style technique, but after a salesperson makes a sale they have a glow. I used to chase salespeople out of the office after a sale, because I knew that their likelihood of making another sale was high. How can you get that without the sale? One way to get yourself in that heightened state is by focusing on a time that you felt good and powerful and at the top of your game.

Something else that works for me is to listen to a stand up comidian's routine before going into a big presentation. Another thing that helps is to focus on the results that you will come to you from your success. A lot of really successful salespeople get nervous and have jitters before a big call; so, if that's you, join the club. Don't let that stop you. Elvis threw-up before he went on stage in the early days. If someone that talented had nerve problems, then how can we not. It's normal. Clinch your fist and go make something happen.