Finding Your Personal Motivation, Part II
When people find out that I am a “motivational speaker” they often ask me to motivate them as if it is something that I can do for them or to them. We’re often at a party or in a pub and it is posed as something of a challenge however, many times, it is deadly serious too.
Motivation is internal and the ability to motivate yourself is something that you can learn to do if you set your mind to it. There are many different ways to build self-motivation and hundreds of techniques that you could use. Here is part ii of my video short Finding Your Personal Motivation and these are some of my favourite strategies that you can use to help to develop your own personal motivation.
10 Sales Training Tips That Will Help You To Make More Sales
I am feeling short , sharp and snappy today so here are 10 sales training tips that will help you to win more business…
- Play from a 10.
Attitude is your ability to access your skill. If you’re not on top of your game, you won’t make many sales. We all know that, yet many salespeople don’t fire on all cylinders when they need to. Try measuring your attitude on a scale of 1 to 10 and concentrate on ensuring that you are on top of your game for all important sales tasks such as prospecting, meetings, presentations, negotiations… - Believe & achieve.
If you believe you can, you’re probably right. If you believe you can’t, you more than definitely are! What you believe is one of the biggest predictors of what you will accomplish. Believe you can maintain profit margins, guess what you’ll fight to achieve? Believe you can’t, and guess what? Oh dear! Ask yourself, “What do I need to believe to achieve sales success?” - Care about your clients.
Many clients don’t engage with salespeople fully or honestly because they have been “abused” by a salesperson who was only interested in themselves at some point or other. Most salespeople care only about the sales and themselves, not their clients. Prove you are different by focusing on adopting the mindset of genuinely caring about your clients. - Set big goals.
Set your sights on the stars. Go for gold. Think big and go for it. Mediocre goals and targets are for sales wimps not sales superstars! What do you want to achieve in 2010? What clients do you want to engage with? How much revenue do you want to secure? What are your goals for yourself, your business and your life? - Take action.
Nothing happens when no-one does anything. Most people sit chatting, surfing the internet and faffing around with their “to-do” piles whilst sales winners make money. What can you do today that will take you one step close to your dreams and goals? - Ask great questions.
Sales superstars ask great questions. Great questions come from a mindset of genuine interest in the client, their business and their life. Do an audit of your questioning skills and habits. Plan and design some new questions to try out. What can you do to improve your questioning techniques? - Listen.
No point asking questions if you don’t listen to the answers. Listen to what your clients say. Listen to what they nearly say. Listen to what they didn’t say. Listen to what they meant. Listen to genuinely understand. Listen without an agenda. The objective of listening is to understand, really understand, what your clients are talking about… from their perspective. How would you rate your listening habits? - Add value.
How can you add value for your clients? How can you help your clients? Without knowing how you add value you will be constantly battling with your clients over price. You should be selling on value not price. What questions can you ask your clients to better understand why they want and need you and how you add value. - Match don’t pitch.
Pitch – the worst and most misleading word in selling. Pitch is what you do to a baseball, not a client.Dictionary: Pitch – to throw, fling, hurl, or toss. So that’s going to work then! You shouldn’t talk solutions until you know what a client wants and needs and why. Match don’t pitch. Ask yourself, “What does this client want and need and why?” Don’t guess, ask! - Keep learning.
Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone loses sales. Everyone gets knocked down by the express train that is life. How fast are you going to get up and what are you going to learn so that you can perform better next time? Great salespeople keep theirsales techniques and sales strategies sharp by reading sales books, attending sales seminars, learning from others and self-assessment. Do you?
What Would You Achieve If You Knew You Couldn’t Fail?
I was meeting with a good friend of mine, Andy Smith (NLP and EI trainer), the other day and, over a tasty Chinese buffet lunch, we were talking about “things that truly make a difference”. Interestingly, and despite all of the training courses that we had both been on, we were in total agreement that you could track back the things that had truly made a difference for us to a handful of techniques and strategies. Perhaps more interesting still was the fact that, even with our very different backgrounds, it was very similar topics that had made the difference for both of us…
And, most interesting of all, the really powerful techniques that really changed our lives were the simplest ones.
Now, I’ve talked before about how sales people and business owners ask for the “advanced” sales training strategies, rushing headlong into studying “advanced sales skills” when they’re not even covering the sales training basics so I’m not going to say again how important nailing important sales principles and reviewing and practising them regularly is…
I am however going to share with you one of my favourite ever questions…
What would you achieve if you knew you couldn’t fail?
A simple question, and one which is easily overlooked. Don’t make this mistaake. Really thinking about this question and your answers to it could well change your sales results, your career prospects and your life.
I was reminded of the power of this important question this week when one of my readers sent me the following passage…
“Let’s imagine that for one day only, you will be guaranteed success on every single new business call that you make, and you absolutely cannot fail……..
What time would you set your alarm in the morning?
What time would you start prospecting?
What time would you finish prospecting?
How many new business calls would you make?
How long would you take for lunch?
How long would you spend socialising?
How long would you spend in the supermarket?
How long would you spend chatting to colleagues?
How long would you spend on ‘admin’?Now, compare your answers to the questions above to what you actually did do today.”
You’ve probably seen a question like this before. You may have even thought, “Good question”. Perhaps you were even slightly motivated by it. But you probably moved on and read something else without really benefitting from the inherent wisdom behind this question.
If you want a great day, stop now and take a break. Get a coffee and consider…
How would you spend your time today if you knew you couldn’t fail? What would you do? Who would you prospect? What would you ask of them? What would you achieve? What would you ask for that you’re currently not asking for? Who would you ring who you are currently avoiding? What price would you aim for? What targets would you set for yourself? What would you stop doing? How would you deal with distractions? How would you protect your valuable time?
You get my point.
What are you going to achieve today?
A Sales Training Tip For Estate Agents… And Everyone Else
I have a hobby, it’s called “door-kicking”. It’s a little like “tyre-kicking” but it doesn’t involve cars, it involves houses. When I’m not following my twin passions of motivational speaking and sales training, I love looking around houses… show-houses, old houses, new houses, penthouse flats, country cottages, farms… anything really. You could say that I am an estate agent’s nightmare but then I have bought every house I have ever owned when I was on a “door-kicking” outing.
Anyway, last month I was looking around a house without any serious intention and I loved it. Infact, I loved it so much that I negotiated with the seller then and there and put an offer in. She accepted and my Sunday afternoon jolly had just become a house buying trip! Next day, I contacted one of the well-known national estate agencies and asked them to come around to value my house which they did. The estate agent was polite, efficient and courteous. He valued the house at what I thought was a realistic price in the current market and told me how they operate. It sounded fine so I asked what the market was like at the moment in the local area. He said that it was picking up, that houses were moving again and that he should have no problem selling my house.
Based on this, I agreed to put the house on the market with ABC Estate Agency and they took over the process of selling my house. This, from what I have seen so far, seems to consist of…
- Take some measurements and some photos.
- Write up a description.
- Upload house onto RightMove and ABC’s company website.
- Sit back and wait for the proverbial chicken to fly into open mouth.
Are you joking me? These are the same estate agents who have been moaning about how quiet things are, right?
So, as you do, I checked out RightMove to look at my house only to see that…
- The house does not come up when you search my village.
- One of the rooms has been missed off the description of the property description altogether.
- Several of the measurements are wrong.
- The pictures are poor lousy.
- The room descriptions are non-existent.
- I could go on but I won’t because it is too depressing that anyone could be so inept.
If I ran an estate agency and the most junior person on my sales team had been responsible for this description I would have been kicking ass. Let alone, the most senior consultant in charge of the branch!
But hey, no-one is perfect and everyone can make mistakes…
So I emailed them… but they did not respond.
So I repeated the email… no response.
So I rang them and got their voicemail, “Sorry we are not in the office…” (well, I know you’re not showing anyone around my house, that’s for sure!) and decided to get into my car and drive down to their offices. With my (growing) annoyance kept well under check I explained to the one agent in the office the importance of 1) getting things right, 2) making a strong first impression through the advertisement and 3) the power of words like “mature, landscaped garden”, “stylish, open plan living” and “exclusive, residential area” (not just “garden”!”).
He looked bemused so I left a message for the sales manager to call me.
Surprise, surprise, 4 hours later and no call. These guys clearly need a motivational speaker and some sales training! So let’s fill in the gaps and put this into context…
Over the last few weeks I have visited with at least 8 estate agents. Out of all 8 only 1 took my name and contact details. The others knew that I was looking for a house but never asked for my details. Why not? I can only conclude laziness and having had it so good for so long that they do not even know how to do the job properly anymore. Our estate agent’s brain should have been whirring with people he could call the moment I listed my property… apparently not. So here we are, several days weeks on the market, no update calls from the sales agent and no viewings.
Now I accept my fault in this. I am a sales training expert and I should have made the time to see several estate agencies to “interview” them as potential salespeople just like I would for a client. After all, they are going to sell my house for me and interviewing salespeople is something that I am good at!
So about now you could be forgiven for thinking, “Well this is fine Gavin, but what does it have to do with me? I’m not an estate agent!” Good question… and the answer is… “Well, quite a lot … potentially.”
Estate agents are not alone in having had it too easy for the last few years. Estate agents are not alone in cutting corners when they get the chance. Estate agents are not alone when it comes to taking the easy route. Estate agents are not alone when it comes to doing the all important “sales” bit pretty badly.
As a sales motivational speaker I spend a lot of time working with, talking to and consulting with salespeople, sales managers, sales directors and business owners from a multitude of different industries. A rare few do everything they can to succeed but a far larger majority fail to achieve their full potential due to a lack of application in even the most simple of areas.
Simply put – many salespeople fall at the first hurdle because they just don’t apply themselves consistently enough.
As a motivational speaker I always strive to raise my game and challenge myself to push for the next level. I am constantly astounded by how even the slightest increase in your game can increase results dramatically. Raising your game by even 10% can make a huge difference to the sales results and successes that you achieve – both in your job and in your life.
So this weeks’ challenge is to raise your game. What area can you seek to improve to get a leap in your sales results?
Sales Survey 2009, The State Of Sales In The UK
I recently partnered Aaron Wallis sales recruitment in producing The State of Sales in the UK, a sales survey, the largest of it’s kind in the UK. Over a period of 6 weeks nearly 800 sales professionals competed the survey and the answers made interesting reading. I am going to be talking about some of the finding and what they mean for you in future blog posts but for now here are the headline findings…
- An impressive 31% of sales professionals are currently over target (28% of respondents were non-targeted) and despite what the media states only 4 in 10 sales professionals are either ‘on target’ or ‘below target’.
- Getting clients to make decisions, cold calling and sales admin/paperwork were cited as the 3 most difficult aspects of selling in 2009. (This would explain why my most popular training programmes this year are my cold calling, face to face selling and sales mindset programmes.)
- The two biggest motivators to keep sales staff (or what they’d look for in a new job) were i) opportunities for progression/career development, and ii) Their employer’s products, reputation and competitive edge.
- ‘Aggressive and Dictatorial’ were the most popular words to describe their line manager’s style though this was thankfully followed by ‘Supportive and Empowering’.
- 58% felt they did not receive enough training in their role and 36% had not received a single day of training in the last 12 months.
- The majority, 64%, would prefer the opportunity to earn £10,000 in commission than receive a straightforward £5,000 basic salary increase.
- Half would not accept a 50% pay rise if it would severely impact on their ‘work-life’ balance.
- ‘Better management and direction’ was cited as the biggest way to make a salesperson more successful (2nd was ‘Increased Marketing’, 3rd ‘Better Work/Life Balance’ and 4th ‘Training’).
- 96% of the respondents enjoy working in sales. Of the remaining 4% only 1 in 10 had planned to embark on a career in sales.
- A whopping 72% judged their career to date to be ‘7 out of 10’ or more.
- The way that the respondents personally measured success was i) ‘being respected by friends, boss and peers’ followed by ii) ‘loving relationships’ and iii) ‘peace of mind’. Status and material wealth was deemed as the major success measure by just 13% of the sales professionals surveyed.
- 70% of those that were unemployed had been recently made redundant.
- Only 11% of those in employment felt that their employer was dealing well with the financial crisis.
- Over 4 in 10 of the female respondents were Sales Managers, Sales Directors and Managing Directors, almost a two fold increase on 2007’s results. However all respondents that earned over £100K in the last 12 months were male.
- 53% had been 100% honest in every interview they have attended throughout their career.
- 44% were educated to HND or higher.
- Despite the economic situation 52% were given an increase on their 2009 targets.
- 56% of respondents felt that sales was the most influential department/division of their business.
- 65% felt that they could perform their line manager’s role more effectively than them (84% of these were male!) even though more than 8 out of 10 described their relationship with their boss as average or better!
- Surprisingly three quarters of respondents did not feel that an increase in green initiatives by their employer would have any positive increase on sales.
- More than 8 out of 10 of respondents considered themselves to regularly work under stress levels of medium or higher.
- 79% of respondents typically worked in excess of 40 hours per week with a third of the total working in excess of 50 hours.
Want to read more? Check out the full Sales Survey 2009.
How To Get That Great Sales Job…
I get asked a lot of questions as a sales speaker and sales training consultant and this week I was asked a question by several salespeople and a magazine about how to position yourself to get that sales job in today’s market so I thought that I would jot down my thoughts…
2009 has been a tough year. For many, a very tough year. I have written several sales training articles and reports about what salespeople, entrepreneurs and business owners need to do in today’s economy to succeed but what about salespeople looking for new sales roles? What can they do? How can they help themselves to secure the jobs and careers moves that they want and desire?
- Maintain a positive mental attitude.
Finding the right role in any market requires motivation and to get the best out of yourself before and during your job search you need to focus on maintaining that positivity and ignoring the negativity that many people are displaying. - Have belief.
Much of your mental positivity, or lack thereof, will stem from your beliefs. Do you believe that you can secure your dream job? Or do you believe that you cannot? Simple beliefs such as these will determine how you feel and therefore how you act. Take time to focus on what you need to believe to succeed and seek out evidence and examples that support those beliefs. - Decide on your perfect company and role.
Spend some time deciding who the perfect company you’d like to work for would be. Many people do not spend enough time thinking about this and end up in the wrong jobs. It is important that you know what kind of company you want to work for, what kind of people you want to work with and what kind of role you want to do. - Utilize your networks.
Utilizing your networks is a powerful way of finding the right role. Recruiters always use their networks and the more successful the recruiter, the more extensive their network is likely to be. Finding a new role through your network makes sense as it is likely to be a good fit and you have an immediate “referral”. What’s more, in today’s market many employers are trying to utilize their networks to find suitable candidates to try and save money so you would be daft not to utilize yours. - Take massive action.
Finding the right role means taking action. To succeed in finding the right role for you today you need to be proactive. Many candidates ask me, “How proactive?” The answer is simple, “Do what it takes?” You need to accept that there may well be fewer jobs and more qualified applicants so take this as a cue to step up to the plate and up your batting averages. - Tailor your CV and application form.
Every job application should be aimed at winning that specific job. When employers have more choice they are able to pick the best. Make sure that your CV and application form is as good as it can possible be for every role that you apply for. - Do your homework.
Basic common sense dictates that you should do your homework about the role, the company and the individual interviewing you where possible. Start with the internet and your favourite search engine, move on to sites like LinkedIn, speak to your personal network, read the company website in detail and even consider ringing the company and asking for brochures, missions statements and product details. - Think about how you add value and sell the sizzle and the steak.
Yes, people want to know what you’ve done, where you worked and what your qualifications are but just as importantly they want to know how you can add value for them and their business. In today’s marketplace, companies tend to be holding back on “headcount” recruitment and filling important “value” based roles. If you can demonstrate how you can add value perhaps through examples of how you added value in previous roles then you will stand out from more mediocre candidates. - Plan & prepare answers to the most likely questions.
Think about the most likely questions and plan how you will answer them. Think about what you want to convey and how you want to convey it. There is never a second chance to make a strong first impression. - Learn from your interviews and don’t give up.
In today’s market it is likely that you may well apply for, interview for and fail to get some of the roles that you go for. This is to be expected. How you respond to these setbacks is critical. Don’t get despondent and allow it to affect your next actions and interviews, use it as a learning experience to make your next interviews more successful.
And remember, you make your own luck in this world. Good luck!
Sales Training Tips: It’s Not All About You You Know!
What are your goals? What are your aims? How many sales do you need to make this month? What is your annual sales target? What does your product or service do? How much sales activity do you need to do every month? How many cold calls do you need to make to close enough sales? How many networking meetings do you need to attend? How many client sales meetings do you need to run? How many sales presentations do you need to make? What does your sales conversion ratio need to be? What price do you need to sell at? What do you need to achieve in sales negotiations? What do you want to achieve in your sales role? What do you want to achieve in your life? What do you want your legacy to be?
All great questions, what do they have in common?Attend a typical sales meeting and you may hear the following questions thrown around…
What are our sales targets? What sales activity do we need to undertake? What are our sales KPIs? What do we need to do this month to hit our targets?
All great questions, what do they have in common? Have you got it yet?
They’re all about you and what you want. They’re all about your company and what your company needs to achieve and do. Most people live their lives on “Me! Me! Me!” but that’s not good enough when your clients live their lives on “Me! Me! Me!” too. To be a truly great salesperson you need the “Me! Me! Me!” drive and ambition but when you get in front of prospects and clients you need to be “You! You! You!”. We are, after all, supposed to be servicing our clients.
When did you last ask, “How can I help my clients this week?”
Targets, KPIs, activity reports, conversion ratios, sales skills – they are all very important and they are all things which I help clients with when helping with sales force development and sales training but in the midst of this important stuff we must not forget about our clients, their needs and their agendas. To achieve uncommon sales success in today’s challenging markets you need to demonstrate to your clients and your prospects that you really, truly believe and care about them and the only way that you can do this consistently is by genuinely, really, truly caring about them.
Sales training and sales seminar delegates often tell me that they cannot get their clients to open up to them fully. Many think that either a) this is not possible much of the time or that b) they are missing some magical technique that will enable them to achieve this in their sales meetings. Both thoughts are wrong.
Clients do not open up to salespeople because they know that they do not really care about them, because they know that they are not really interested in them, because they do not trust them to enough to share with them fully and because they know that they only want to make a sale.
They worry that anything they share with the salesperson will be taken down and used in evidence to sell against them.
You may think that this is harsh but if you take a deep breath, go inside and get honest with yourself, brutally honest, you know that it is true… at least some of the time! Even if not for you, for some of your peers and sales colleagues in any case!
Learning to truly care about your clients, to embrace this new paradigm of selling and to make your sales calls about your clients and not all about you is something that I cover in my sales training and sales development programmes. It’s incredibly powerful and effective to use and this non-pressurized and client-centric approach makes selling easy for even the most sales shy. For experienced salespeople, making your sales calls more client-centric will help you to build stronger relationships with your clients, sell on value not price, shortening sales cycles and close more deals.
Sales training question of the week: What can you do today to make every sales call you conduct all about your clients rather than all about you?
Check Out This Loser!
Check out this loser…
- 1831 – Lost his job
- 1832 – Defeated in run for Illinois State Legislature
- 1833 – Failed in business
- 1835 – Sweetheart died
- 1836 – Had nervous breakdown
- 1838 – Defeated in run for Illinois House Speaker
- 1843 – Defeated in run for nomination for U.S. Congress
- 1848 – Lost re-nomination
- 1849 – Rejected for land officer position
- 1854 – Defeated in run for U.S. Senate
- 1856 – Defeated in run for nomination for Vice President
- 1858 – Again defeated in run for U.S. Senate
Sorry! Did I say loser?
Meet Abraham Lincoln, elected President of the United States of America 1860.
Success in sales, in business and in life means playing the long game and that means cultivating two powerful attributes – tenacity and persistence. If you keep going after everyone else gives up and goes home then you are going to be very successful.
To be successful in 2009 you need more than your fair share of tenacity and persistence. In my role as a sales motivational speaker, sales training expert and sales consultant I meet a lot of successful and inspirational people and they all say the same thing…
There are only three ways to outsell the market,
1. Out work it
2. Out live it, or
3. Out smart it.
Why not all three?
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