11
mastery
All sales professionals in the top 10 percent use a planned presentation. The low money earners, those in the bottom 80 percent of salespeople, simply say whatever comes out of their mouths when they meet with customers.
At least, that’s how most salespeople view most sales trainers. So when Thomas’s boss brought me in to speak to him and the three-man Colliers sales team, it was no surprise that that’s exactly what I saw on their faces: no interest in hearing from yet another blowhard who’d turned to training after deciding he couldn’t handle the hard-core world of sales anymore.
To be polite, the bulldog on the team asked me how my Thanksgiving had gone the week before.
“Oh, it was good. Just cut short.”
Naturally, he asked why it’d been cut short.
I said, “Well, I had to go to bed early Thursday night as I had two TV interviews early the next morning. Of course, the rest of the family stayed up late enjoying themselves and making a racket laughing, so I got no sleep. I had to roll into KXAN at 5:30 and then into the FOX studio at 7:15. Another guest at FOX recognized me from my 5:30 segment and struck up a conversation, and then asked, ‘How are you getting all this free media? It cost me a lot of money for the opportunity to get on this show.’ I told him I’m just really good at finding the right hook and telling a good story to the news desk.
“Anyway, long story short, he asked me to come in for a whiteboard session at his company yesterday to explain what I was doing. After the session, they were so impressed, they asked me if I’d be interested in speaking at their convention, which is one of the biggest stages in America.
“So, in short, my Thanksgiving got cut into a bit, but all in all, it worked out great.”
I paused for a beat because I could tell they were blown away. Then I said, “So, tell me what I just did there.”
They looked at each other, lost.
I said, “I could see on your faces when I walked in that you all had objections in your head about getting sales training. I used a true story jam-packed with credibility points to sidestep that objection so you could see me and this training for what it could be—and what I’ll ensure it will be: amazing. So let’s get to it.”
One of them told me afterward that when I told that story, all he could think was, Oh, wow, this guy is the real deal!
If I hadn’t started off with that little story, I don’t know that two hard-core salesmen and a motivated introvert would now have “story time” marked in their calendars each week. Even though I’d already booked three training sessions in my meeting with the firm’s principals, I had to also sell the value of that training to the salesmen themselves. After all, training people who haven’t bought in to what I’m saying in the first place makes it hard to get results—and I am always focused on getting every one of my clients real-world return on their investment.
I could have said, “Your bosses have already paid for this; you have to be here, so sit down and listen up.” But that wouldn’t have helped them. I could have just ignored the facial expressions and started training an unreceptive audience and hoped they eventually came around. Instead, I did a spur-of-the-moment sales pitch, won the “sale,” and went on to have a great relationship with those guys . . . and used that exact story for the rest of the week anytime a prospective customer asked me how my Thanksgiving went.
In fact, I got the bulldog to come into Alex Murphy’s studio and record a case study for me. In it, he says that he didn’t buy into my crap at first, but the results were there—and he wouldn’t be in front of that camera if they weren’t.
That kind of goes against everything we’ve just talked about in the book up to this point, doesn’t it? From preparation, practice, and “run program” to doing something on the fly and just winging it? Seems incongruent.
In actuality, it’s just being really good at the introvert’s edge.
Once you get your sales system working, you’ll be ready to take on 80 percent of the sales situations that come your way. If you don’t read any further than this point and put everything I’ve presented into practice, you’ll still do amazingly well: better than 90 percent of your competitors. Plus, you won’t have to hustle nearly as hard! You’ll find that telling your core stories becomes natural. Then you’ll get good at incorporating new stories. Eventually, you’ll get good at incorporating new stories on the fly (like I did for Colliers).
It’s like learning to ride a bicycle. At first, you need training wheels; that’s what the examples in this book are for. Then, you learn the basics of riding; that’s what the seven steps are for. Once you get really good, you can start doing handstands and wheelies; that’s what this chapter is for.
EVERYONE LOVES OPTIONS
The seven steps help you focus on your primary customer type. But what about secondary types? Or what if you sell two quite different services? What if you have two different versions of a product: one for residential and one for commercial? Well, then you’ll need more than one offering . . . as well as the awareness to choose the appropriate one for the situation at hand.
What if you sell one-on-one as well as group training for, say, marketing consulting? The information might be similar but the sale and delivery are quite different. With the first, you’re selling to individuals buying coaching and consulting for themselves for a period of time. With the other, you’re selling a one-time event to someone buying training on behalf of employees in their company. They’d vary greatly in the deliverable, the amount of direct contact, and the price . . . and you’d need to be prepared to articulate exactly what the differences are. Obviously, you’d need two different approaches.
We identified one of Derek’s challenges as having only one product to sell to one type of client: high-end ghostwriting. Sure, he did some editing here or there, but he muddled through the process to make those sales. By and large, if you couldn’t afford his price tag, he didn’t know what to do with you.
He knew how to deliver more than just ghostwriting, but he didn’t know how to sell it. Once we got him comfortable with selling, we expanded his inventory of programs so that when he recognized that a prospect couldn’t afford ghostwriting, he knew how to sell a coaching arrangement instead. He’s approaching six-figures in earnings on non-ghostwriting services from a half-dozen authors in just two years.
If you have only one package, you’re putting yourself in a box.
PREPARING TO SCALE
On a factory line, it doesn’t matter who operates the machinery: The same raw material goes in and the same uniform product comes out.
It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) matter who comes in to work that day. It doesn’t matter if someone’s on vacation or takes a sick day. As long as the operator follows the same process, the same thing happens up and down the assembly line.
Sales works the same way. Or, at least, it can.
For the sales teams I’ve managed and hired, I don’t ask the salespeople to come up with their own approach to selling. I don’t need them to be creative. I don’t need outgoing people. I just need people who can “run program.”
These days, I almost always hire introverts. They don’t have any bad habits to undo. They don’t plan to rely on their charm and conversational skills because they usually don’t believe they have them. (It’s not true, of course. They just get so nervous trying to sell that their own personality gets buried beneath their anxiety.) They need a system.
In the advantages column: They are detail-oriented, so they do the paperwork correctly and take great notes during meetings. Those who’ve managed extroverts know this is often a recurring nightmare. Introverts are great listeners, naturally given to focusing more on what the customer is really saying.
As I mentioned earlier, when a salesperson of mine ran into a sales slump, my very first question was, “Are you sticking to the script?” Nine times out of ten, they weren’t. They’d gotten overconfident, they’d summarized parts, they had ad-libbed—something had changed. When they returned to the script, they saw their sales climb back to normal.
“But Matthew,” you might be saying, “doesn’t that go against what you’ve said about being sincere and authentic? Wouldn’t I be forcing someone to follow a sales system designed for me, not them? Wouldn’t I be making them tell my jokes and my stories?”
First, you’ve already proved that your process works with the clientele you target and attract. That’s the baseline. Second, being able to rely on a proven process allows salespeople to relax and follow the flow (just like you). They can be genuine and sincere because they don’t have to worry about their individual performance. Third, they can leverage the stories of the entire organization as opposed to just their own. Effectively, they start with decades of experience instead of little to none.
The three-man team at Colliers didn’t use stories of their own to quadruple the number of appointments they made and start locking in the whales; they spoke to the three principals—Volney, Doug, and Marc—who combined had a hundred years of commercial real estate experience. The team approached the founders with their list of the most common objections and then asked for a story of a prospect with the same objection who became a client and had a successful outcome. When they went out to sell, they told the stories not as “I had a client who . . .” but as “We had a client who . . .”
But when should your team start experimenting on their own? I wouldn’t allow it. If you have a team of just three salespeople (plus yourself), it’s nearly impossible to keep track of what works and what doesn’t if all three are trying different experiments at the same time. Only the lead salesperson gets to try out new things (ideally, that would always be you). If everybody replaces one story with another and sales go up, then you know that story works.
Just like in a factory line, you don’t allow the various operators to redesign the entire system whenever they want to. There’s one system, one process: yours.
This may seem like it assumes a basic mistrust of salespeople—and employees in general—but it’s really more about quality control. If you’re in charge of a sales team, it’s ultimately your ass on the line. A salesperson might just go find another job. However, if you’re the business owner or manager, you’re still responsible for delivering the numbers. You want to create a process that works, regardless of who works it.
I know this flies in the face of sales culture, but you actually don’t want to rely on superstars, rock stars, and hotshots. If sales were a factory line, these would be your statistical anomalies. It doesn’t matter that those anomalies produce a superior product: The problem is that your sales process isn’t reliable. Plus, if one operator can consistently produce superior results, it means that the rest of your operators are running your product line at suboptimal levels. In short, if one person can do it, every person should do it.
If you do have a superstar in your employ, it doesn’t mean you should run out and fire that person for not following your process. When I first became a sales manager, I enjoyed the sales that came from these types, and I even learned some of their stories and tricks for myself. I used them to create and perfect my script for the whole team. At that point, I didn’t even bother to train the rock star. Soon, the results of the process showed. While the rock star shone bright on some days, the introverts beat that person across the board. Soon the rock star would walk into my office and say, “What is this script you’ve been teaching everyone else?”
When you introduce scripts to your team, two things will happen. Your superstars will either come into your office wanting to know about “this script thing” or they’ll move on to another job. Either way, you’re no longer reliant on them. You’re diversified and your business is safe.
DON’T SURRENDER YOUR BUSINESS
Most business owners and executives hate sales.
Entrepreneurs start businesses because they have an idea or a skill, not because they know how to sell. Corporate executives move up the corporate ladder because of a skill; the salespeople usually make too much money on their commissions to take a pay cut by moving into a salaried position. When you look at the CEOs of the Fortune 500, few started out in sales. Most had a professional skill (engineering, finance, law) and then worked their way up the ranks to become COO or CFO before taking over the helm.
As such, the people at the top of a business don’t want to “do” sales. In a larger company, they leave it up to the sales department to magically produce the money. But I’ve seen businesses suffer major problems by assigning sales to a person or group outside the decision-maker’s circle. In large companies, the executives sit so far removed from the customers that they miss crucial conversations and early indicators that their market is changing. When sales becomes a problem, they’re not equipped to deal with it. They hire more salespeople or try to incent the ones they have. (Derek and I discovered that incentivize isn’t a real word. Who knew? Apparently, not us.) They throw money at the problem, hoping it will solve itself.
It’s worse for small companies. One of the very first people a founder hires is often a salesperson. The founders want to quickly get out of selling so they can focus on what they’re good at. They let the sales guy (or gal) go out and drum up business while they stay at their desk or workbench doing the actual work.
Don’t even think about doing this!
When you do, you hand control of your company and your well-being over to someone you just met. If they know how to bring in the money, they can hold you hostage. They can demand larger commissions in exchange for continuing to provide your sole source of revenue and customers. Also, in this model, you become the bottleneck. The salesperson can sell only as much as you have the capacity to deliver.
If you have a sales system, it’s easier to hire technicians to do the work and train them to do it as well as you. If you learn how to hire and train for technical skill, then you can continually add on more capacity as you’re able to sell it. You can hire salespeople, too. The sky’s the limit.
I’m not telling you to be the primary salesperson for the life of your business. I’m just telling you that you can’t hand sales off to someone else until you’ve mastered the process. If your salesperson walks out on you, you can step in until you replace them.
WHEN SALES AND MARKETING WORK IN UNISON
In a testimonial video he did for me, Derek said that he’s still not great at sales. He says he’s just “decent” (though I think he doesn’t give himself enough credit).
“But we put decent marketing with decent sales and . . . well, I have doubled what I charge my clients,” he says in the video.
Even if you already have a good marketing system in place, like he did, it can improve when you start leveraging what you learn from your success in sales. Take me, for instance: I didn’t realize that so many of the people I consulted for had introverted personalities until I started looking at who experienced the biggest results from working with me. Once I realized they saw themselves as introverts, I started marketing rapid growth to introverts. I didn’t set out to help introverts, but now that I know that’s who my marketing attracts, I can be more intentional in speaking directly to them.
Once you find a story that works well, it makes sense to go ahead and use it in your marketing, doesn’t it? In your ads, your website copy, your social media, your direct mailings, and anywhere else people might find you.
Depending on the medium, it may not pack the same punch as you telling it in person, but it’s better than generic two-for-one coupons or the same promise of “safe, fast, and reliable.”
In fact, the better you know your customers, the better you can speak directly to them and their situation. In his sales calls, Derek heard over and over again that the person would sit down at the computer, pull up Microsoft Word, write “Chapter One” at the top of the page, get ready to start writing the book . . . and freeze. “It’s like all my years of experience suddenly fly out the window. My mind’s as blank as the screen,” one guy told him. Once he heard this a number of times, what did Derek do? He started using that story all over his website and online ads.
One objection Alex Murphy heard over and over was that the business had “done a video and it didn’t do anything for us.” Once he and I discussed this—and he explained to me why a single video in isolation doesn’t work—I rebranded him as “the narrative strategist.”
Today, when people ask what that is, he gets to explain why a video or even a standalone video campaign doesn’t work. Your video marketing has to have a narrative arc across time and media. It’s the art of crafting a strong story across the videos, all sharing that same narrative. Suddenly, prospects understand that Alex is much more than just another video guy.
So I’ve given you a bunch of quick examples about how strong marketing can support strong sales. However, to dive deeper into the topic, the best way for me to explain it is to share the exact scripted story I use with all of my prospects.
Let me give you an example.
Wendy was a client of mine who taught Mandarin to kids and adults in California. One of the problems that she had was that she was struggling to charge $50 to $80 an hour for private language tuition. This was because there were so many other language coaches moving from other states into California willing to cut their prices to the bone, charging just $30 to $50 an hour to get their first client success stories. Wendy paid her staff more than that.
Also, because we now live in a global economy, she also had to deal with people from China offering their services for $10 to $15 an hour on Craigslist. She was losing current clients and was struggling to get new clients.
She asked me, “How do I compete in this crowded market where all I have to compete on . . . is price?”
I said, “Wendy, competing on price is a long road to the bottom, where the only person who wins actually loses, because they have to provide the service for well below what they are worth. I’d prefer to help you avoid the battle altogether.”
After reviewing the hundreds and hundreds of clients Wendy had worked with, there were two customers—just two—that she helped with so much more than just language tutoring.
The first thing she helped them with was understanding the concept of guanxi. The first time I heard it I thought they meant galaxy and they were talking about outer space, but this is actually the Chinese word for rapport.
See, if you and I had a sales meeting here in the United States or back home in Australia, at the end of that meeting I would ask you (if I was horrible at sales) if you would like to buy my product or service. If you said you wanted to think about it, I’d call you back the following week. If you still said you wanted to think about it, well, we know my chances of making that sale are going down and down, right?
(Small pause to let customer respond.)
Well, in China they will want to go out to dinner four or five times before they even want to talk business. They will probably even want to see you drunk over karaoke once or twice.
(Wait for small chuckle.)
But here is why: They are generally not talking about transactional, twelve- or fourteen-month deals like we do in the West. They are talking about fifty- to one-hundred-year contracts.
I mean this is longer than a lot of people’s marriages and lifetimes. So, for them, it’s more important to know the person they are getting into bed with than the specific terms of a contract.
The second thing she helped them with was understanding the difference between e-commerce in China and e-commerce in the Western world.
The third was the importance of respect. Wendy helped her clients understand that, while it’s great to learn Mandarin, if they don’t at least try to reduce their accent it’s seen as disrespectful and then they’re not doing business in China. Now, they don’t expect you to sound exactly like them, but they do expect you to at least try.
It’s the same as when someone hands you a business card in China. In the Western world, when we get a card at a networking event, we don’t even look at the card. We just throw it in our pocket and keep on chatting. Then we get home and pull these cards out of our pocket and we are like, “Who is that again?” Well, in China, you are expected to hold the card, cherish it, look at it, turn it over, appreciate the back, then finally pull out your card case, almost bow, put the card in your card case, and then keep on talking. Again, anything less than that, it’s disrespectful.
I mean, I just got back from speaking at Electrolux in Bangkok and saw this firsthand. Over one hundred vice presidents in the room and each time I handed one of them my card—a person who is responsible for hundreds if not thousands of staff—they would take my card and do exactly that.
So Wendy was helping these executives with these three things, and I said, “Wendy, you’re doing so much more for these people than just private language tutoring. Tell me, what are you doing for these people?”
She said, “What do you mean? These are just little things. I’m just trying to help.”
I said, “No. Wendy, you’re stuck in your functional skill. Is it fair to assume that, as a result of working with these clients, they’re going to be more successful in China?”
She replied, “Well, yeah, I hope so.”
I said, “Great, so why don’t we call you the ‘China Success Coach,’ and why don’t we call your product the ‘China Success Intensive’?”
This would be a five-week program that worked with the executive, the spouse, and any children being relocated across to China.
The program didn’t teach Mandarin; after all, Mandarin education was seen as a commodity (and Wendy agreed it was better to let the other companies fight that one out). It focused on just the core elements that she taught executives being relocated to China.
Now, you’re probably wondering, why the spouse and children? Well, we’re all in business and, of course, selling to more people means you can charge more money. But secondly, think about it: If you’re an executive being relocated to China and you get there and your spouse or child is not happy, well then, you’re probably going to get constantly called home to deal with an unhappy family, greatly reducing the chances of the executive succeeding. It’s so vitally important that the whole family unit be successful when they get there.
Wendy, excited by the idea, then asked me, “So would I reach out to sell this to executives?”
I said, “Actually no. Think about it: Who is your customer?”
She said, “Oh, you’re right . . . it would be the companies.”
I said, “No, your ideal customer is going somewhere already, and it’s easier to work with the third party they’re already working with: immigration attorneys. See, when I first moved to the United States, I needed to get a visa and then, after that, a green card. Every time, I went through an immigration attorney.”
I said, “They have relationships with all the people you are hoping to work with. They are your ideal clients.”
So, we went to some of these immigration attorneys who charge between $2,000 and $5,000 to get a client, organize all of the paperwork required to get a visa approved, and then deal with all of the bureaucracy to ensure that it happens. And we said to them, “How would you like to make a $3,000 commission for any successful introduction to an executive being relocated to China?”
They said, “That’s more than what we generally make after costs for doing the visa! What would I have to say?”
We said, “Just say this: ‘Congratulations. You’ve now been approved to go and work in China. Now, I just want to double-check: Are you as ready as you could be to be relocated across to China?’ When they say, ‘Yeah. We’ve got our visa thanks to you; we have learned Mandarin. In fact, the kids are getting pretty good at it, too, and we’ve got our house organized. I’d say we’re good’—whatever their answer, you respond with, ‘No, there is a lot more to it than that. I think you need to speak to the China Success Coach.’ That’s it.”
Wendy would then get on a call with the easiest sale in the world. I mean, these executives were terrified. I just moved from Australia to the United States and I was terrified. Imagine being relocated to a place that doesn’t even speak the same language.
The companies were also terrified. They generally had millions if not billions of dollars riding on the success or failure of these executives, so they wanted to do everything possible to ensure the success of the executives when they got there.
So, Wendy charged $30,000 for this five-week program and after paying a $3,000 commission to the immigration attorney, she made $27,000 for the easiest sale in the world instead of struggling every single day to fight for $50 to $80 an hour. That’s the power of a strong and unified message.
For you, you have to look at what your unique differentiators are. Everyone has unique experiences, a unique upbringing, unique past customers, and a unique education that perfectly qualifies them to provide a unique and highly valuable service to one specific group of people.
Once you discover who those customers are, the unified message is easy.
For Wendy, it was guanxi, e-commerce, and respect, the higher-level benefit being China success.
For me, I’m a business coach, a branding expert, a sales strategist, a social media specialist; I’m a master in neurolinguistic programming; I’m so many things and nobody cares. But when I say I’m the rapid growth guy, that I help organizations large and small obtain rapid growth, the power of that message gets me heard in a crowded market.
That’s what happens when sales and marketing work together.
THE INTROVERT’S EDGE
So now you understand the process of selling . . . but what exactly is the introvert’s edge?
You may have guessed it was your compassion, your empathy, your understanding, your unique ability to listen intently, or perhaps your ability to thoroughly prepare. But the benefits these traits offer are no secret. Plenty of research and literature underscores the advantages of these natural qualities of introverts.
The introvert’s edge is knowing how to utilize your natural strengths in a systematic and focused way. Those skills are the raw elements; this book, the catalyst; the transformation, sales illiteracy to sales mastery.
Armed with the techniques, strategies, and process within these pages, you now have the edge you’ve been looking for to go out and outsell anyone.
As Admiral David Farragut once said—and as my father often repeated—“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”