When Deena challenged me with those four painful questions three years ago, I started reading books about sales. Two months into my quest, Phillip forwarded an email invitation for a free conference call about objection handling. I cleared my schedule to be on the call. Because he was a sales trainer, I assumed Eric had always been good at sales. However, that is not true.
Do you feel like a sales failure?“I actually start off as a sales failure,” Eric shares. “I was terrible at it! The first sales team that I was on was comprised of about 15 sales people. I was the bottom producer my entire first year. At the end of that year I missed quota two months in a row and was written up because of it. My sales manager told me I had one more month or I would be let go.“Dr. Moines took a scientific approach to selling. He wrote his PhD dissertation on what separates sales super stars from average sales people. If you ask people who are naturally gifted at selling how they close so many sales, they will often say they don’t know. They just do it. Dr. Moines studied these sales super stars to uncover what makes them so successful.“Through his extensive research , he observed several striking traits they shared in common. They told the same stories, presentation after presentation. They closed in the same way. They asked similar probing questions and prepared for their clients in the same way. Dr. Moine literally cracked the code!”
Systems work!Dr. Moines taught Eric a system for selling based on his research. When Dr. Moine said, “Do this here, do that here,” Eric did it. He taught Eric to create an outline of the presentation that he was going to deliver. To this day, if Eric has a presentation tomorrow, today he is going to spend time creating the outline of what he is going to cover and in what order.That first month , Eric made his quota of $10,000. The following month, he sold more than five times the quota, becoming the top producer in his division! Since then, he’s never looked back. According to Eric, “It’s kind of like riding a bike. Once you learn how to do it, you know how to do it for the rest of your life. ”
You are reading an excerpt from my new book, “Black Belt Selling–Closing with Confidence”
To purchase your copy on Kindle, go to this link.