6. Closing the sale. Many average to good salespeople prospect, make contacts, qualify, present, and handle objections so well that they manage to get by without learning to close competently. And that, of course, is what keeps them from being great. Closing contains elements of both art and science, and those elements can be learned.
7. Referrals. After you’ve satisfied the needs of your client and closed the sale, you have earned the right to your next prospect. By that I mean getting referral business from each and every client. That is the seventh and final basic. If they’re happy, they’ll want someone else to be happy, too. I’ll teach you simple steps to getting solid, qualified referrals every time, if you’re willing to learn.
But many of us have forgotten how to learn, so let’s quickly review the steps to learning that apply not only to everything in this book, but to anything you choose to study.
Money Study: The Learning-to-Earn-Fast Five-some
Money study—I call it that to emphasize how vital it is to learn how to acquire new knowledge quickly and thoroughly. Knowing how to learn fast is the key to rapid personal growth and quick sales success. As adults, it’s easy to fall into the habit of skimming over new knowledge, of avoiding any organized effort to grasp and hold new knowledge. That’s no good at all. That’s how you achieve the status of being average. Superior earning ability grows out of the superior performance that superior learning makes easy. The place to start being superior is to acquire and use a superior learning system. Here it is:
1. Impact. You’ve noticed that the more you’re interested in a subject, the more easily you remember details about it. To learn something with greater thoroughness and speed, first take a few moments to psych yourself up. Dwell on how much the knowledge is going to help you; visualize the benefits you’re going to get from possessing it. Form a clear and vivid picture in your mind as to why you’re learning this material. Then, each time you start to study it take just a second or two to recall that vivid picture of the benefits you’re seeking. Do that and you’ll intensify the impact of the material, and make it yours faster.
2. Repetition. Repetition is the mother of learning. Repeat anything often enough and it will start to become you. All the great salespeople I know started with words they knew worked. They tailored those words to their own products and services and molded them to their own personalities. Having done that, they proceeded to repeat and review the statements until they controlled those words. Then they delivered them with conviction—and the results they wanted were there.
In four words, they used repetition effectively. What is effective repetition? It’s far more than bleary-eyed singsong in the middle of the night. Effective repetition means your review is wide-awake and intensive. Effective repetition means you cut the material apart and sew it back together to fit you. Effective repetition means you hear it, write it, read it, and speak it. Effective repetition means you dramatize the material and make it dance in your head. Effective repetition means you make a good investment of effort to make good material yours.
These first two steps are vital. They’re the foundation and the floor of a powerfully constructed selling career. But don’t stop when you’ve completed them—don’t even slow down—because you can’t live in a house with no walls. Push on immediately to the next step of learning.
I frequently return to cities where I’ve already given my sales seminar and, on these occasions, I always see dozens of Champions who are coming back through the program again. The ones who tell me they’ve doubled or quadrupled their incomes say that it happened because they worked energetically through the next step.
3. Utilization. The basic law of possession is Use it or lose it. This law applies to all learning, and it applies with special force to sales skills. Use them or lose them.
There’s a wonderful truth about skills and knowledge: They don’t wear out with use. Quite the contrary. Knowledge takes on greater depth and meaning through hard use; skills become strong and tough through hard use.
And the hard use of sales skills and knowledge is the only road to high earnings. Learning for the mere sake of learning is sterile. It’s a form of play. For any kind of learning to have meaning, it must not only be capable of utilization, it must be used. Unused learning is fertilizer left in the sack.
Bring out your skills and knowledge; spread them on the fertile soil of your territory. Let them bloom.
Discover the golden hours when your offering sells best. Then get in front of as many people as possible during that time. Put the strategies, words, and phrases to use. If you use them properly, they’ll work. You’ll earn money while honing your skills for the next presentation.
Get in front of the executives considering corporate jets, computers, or whatever you’re marketing. Meet with the families in need of your appliances. Get into the kitchens of the people now wasting the money they should be insuring the futures of their loved ones with. Now is the time to use the powerful sales statements you’ve organized for the benefit of others. You’ve turned yourself into a sales machine; now turn that machine on. Produce results.
The moment you get into high gear and start using your material efficiently, you’ll glimpse your bright new destiny. At that moment, you’ll be ready to break out above average and join the ranks of the excellent. You’ll be ready to fly higher and farther because of your newly learned abilities. You’ll be ready to take the fourth step toward learning and toward greatness.
4. Internalization. This occurs when you’ve exploited impact, when you’ve molded the standard material to your needs and made it yours, when you’ve made your new skills strong through hard use. You’ve utilized them so efficiently that your first good results generate the energy to accelerate you into super performance. All of a sudden, these new concepts stopped churning within you and a new reality was born: You and the concepts became one. They have literally become you. You have become them.
I’ve had Champions bring their spouses to my program to say hello. In a few minutes, the spouse says, “My husband [or wife] sounds just like you.”
But it really isn’t that way. They aren’t hearing their spouses imitate my words and manner of speaking: they’re hearing their spouses express themselves with the language of achievement that’s common to both of us. We have been using the same techniques. Now we voice the similar experiences of success that have grown out of the shared knowledge we’ve both internalized.
Internalization is the next-to-last step to completing any learning. When the day comes that you can truly say you’ve internalized all the concepts of this book, or have internalized all the concepts of any other body of learning you aspire to, then and only then are you capable of greatness with that learning. In the case of the learning we’re primarily concerned with here, you’ll be capable of going on to greatness in sales—and you’ll also be in great danger of sliding back into average performance. That’s where step 5 comes in to play.
5. Reinforcement. When you achieve the status of super professional salesperson, you’ll be tempted to despise the very labors and methods that put you there. When you’re still struggling upward, you’ll find it easy to say, “Oh, no, not me. When I get there, I won’t forget how I did it.” But you will, and some of that is good. You don’t want to dwell on past difficulties except to laugh about them.
Still, the toughest task I have as a trainer always is with the super professionals who are slipping. They don’t want to believe the explanation for their troubles is that they’ve stopped doing what made them super professional in the first place.
Can there be any other reason for them to slip back into average performance? You might say, Maxie Kwotabuster’s sales are down because of his three-martini