Many years of studying the elite performers in professional selling, and developing and providing sales training programs and measuring the results, has given us an edge that we’d like to pass on right here. Here are the special knowledge and skills that any professional sales person needs if he or she is to gain control of income levels and truly move into the “elite” of sales and business success!

SUPERIOR RAPPORT

Way beyond matching and mirroring, these are skills that put you deeply in synch even with people who start out being resistant to you.

If the online dating gurus ever got hold of this there’d be mayhem!

It probably wouldn’t do much good anyway, because they’d use it to try to manipulate, and manipulation is an automatic rapport breaker. To achieve the results you really want, these rapport skills must be used to enhance your relationships so that your level of connection with people is deep and genuine.

What’s the secret? Well partly of course it takes practice, but it’s important that this is correct practice. Some of the things you can do to increase your rapport skills are to take a leaf out of, believe it or not, the synchonised swimming teams!

In order to ensure that they perform “as one”, these teams use eye contact and breathing rates as an aid to match their internal states. If you were to ask them, you’d also find that they have an intention to match each others’ heart rates. Sound a bit “woo-woo”? It works.

“SPOOKY” MIND READING

An amazing level of rapport is one thing, but mind reading, where you actually know what your client is thinking, is a skill that borders on “spooky” but is certainly achievable.

Accelerated learning techniques are the key to developing incredible awareness and competence in relation to reading people. You’ll know things about your clients that even they don’t realise themselves.

How would you like to know for sure which option your client wants, what they think of each and every thing you say, when is the exact right moment to wrap up the sale? Would this be useful to you?

You can certainly gain this skill, and again it takes practice! If you’re willing to spend time with buddies or business friends who’ll silently think of things that for example they “like”, and then of things that they “don’t like”, you’ll very quickly notice the set of cues that are the giveaway for each person. The more you practice, the more you can pick this up quickly even with people you’ve never met before.

CLIENT TRAITS THAT YOU MUST KNOW IN ORDER TO MAKE SALES!

Although therapists work with several personality traits, most of them don’t know THESE! These are the traits that predict how a client will go through the decision making process - the traits that give away the very factors the client needs in order to say yes. Can you see why I say they’re essential for you to know? (And they should be essential for therapists too!)

Believe it or not, you have a natural ability to recognise and respond to these traits once you understand what they are. Everyone does. They’re incredibly easy to learn!

Take a look at the following trait and you’ll see what I mean. This particular trait is called “match/mismatch”.

Have you ever met anyone who, the minute you said “black”, they said “white”? If you said it was a fine day, they’ve declared that indeed it was a pretty ordinary day, or even “what’s fine about it!”. That was probably a person who focuses on the differences, or habitually mismatches. Sometimes we refer to this type of person as a “polarity responder”, which is a technical term meaning “pain in the butt” :-).

Just as irritating as a mismatcher is a “similarity responder” who will find a way to agree with everything you say (it doesn’t mean they’ll follow through on that by the way). They perceive everything as familiar and “same”, and find it very difficult to disagree, or cope with things they don’t understand. They will fill in the blanks in their imagination, so that it looks just like something they already know.

How This Trait Works in Real Life

Fred the sales professional is talking with Macey the general manager and Macey seems “contrary”. Initially she explains that she has a problem with one of the manufacturing processes, but when Fred refers to this later, using Macey’s own phrasing in order to cut out any misunderstanding, Macey denies that there is any problem! Macey even mismatches her own statements. (Author note: People like this do actually exist, and I can point to a particular senior manager at a major organisation who did exactly this, repeatedly throughout the encounter.)

A seemingly difficult situation becomes extremely easy to influence when you realise that the mismatcher is fatally predictable. Fred can simply say “Macey, you might not agree with me that there could be an easier way, but I wonder if you wouldn’t find it less costly to …..”

Later he says, “Macey, this new method isn’t for everyone and it may not suit you ” Macey is the easiest client of all, if you recognise her meta-program and respond to it appropriately! When you understand these personality traits, there’s no way you’ll make the mistakes that in the past have clashed with your client’s “style”.

MILLION DOLLAR QUESTIONS

Elite sales professionals use 3 little questions to understand the client’s needs on a very deep level.

These 3 questions can rightly be called “million dollar questions” because they absolutely highlight the client’s core values in relation to the product or service being offered, and even tell you the precise words the client needs to hear in order to make a decision to buy.

These questions are pure gold. They make purchase utterly compelling, and at the same time build a great relationship that fosters streams of referrals!

FINGERTIP CONTROL OF YOUR INCOME

Are you confident at the moment of hitting any sales goal you choose?

Top sales professionals certainly can and do, because they know the simple statistics that matter to every sales person, and they can turn them into a mathematical equation that literally gives them fingertip control of your income.

Possibly the first person to practise “scientific selling” was Frank Bettger (he wrote “How I Multiplied My Income and Happiness in Selling”). Selling activities may have changed slightly these days, but the science still holds.

You can calculate your own equation by making a list of all your direct and indirect selling activities along with the time it takes to perform “one unit” of each activity. That’s what’s leading to your current sales level. So you have your equation. However most people can improve that dramatically by eliminating or reducing activities that aren’t paying their way, and implementing others that are more effective. In all my years of sales training, I haven’t yet met a single sales person on commission who couldn’t at least double their income within 90 days of implementation of this method.

But to actually come through on this equation, you have to plan, document, track and analyse each activity. Otherwise you’re still flying blind, and you’re not being accountable - not even to yourself. If you are prepared to do these things then I’m excited for you, because you’re nearly there!

ABRACADABRA! FEAR OR DOUBT GONE!

Have you ever known what you had to do, and certainly been capable of doing it very well, and yet you procrastinated or self-sabotaged so it still didn’t get done? This is what fear or niggling doubt can do, so obviously it needs to go!

So what can you do if you know there’s no logical reason for you to NOT make those calls, or NOT take up that speaking invitation, but you still perspire madly every time you imagine yourself doing it?

Over the last several years there have been incredible advances in behavioural psychology and we know now how to turn off fears and doubts like a tap, only permanently. But of course it takes such a long time for these things to reach the public arena and even today very few people know of it.

It’s a technique called “NeuroStim” and it’s so effective that it’s been tested in clinical trials to eliminate depression and even severe chronic pain in just days. Permanently. It’ll make mince meat of your performance anxiety!

STATEGIC NETWORKING *PAYOFF*!

We used to recommend that our clients and students join a networking organisation and in fact our manual “Speed Business Networking - the Manual” was designed to help people network better in their organisations, and to help the organisations themselves provide a higher-quality networking experience for their members.

It’s a tragedy to us that business networking organisations still don’t seem to understand the principles of effective networking.

So today we say that if you want to be successful, you need to form your own network of business friends, and engage with it in a quality way, in business hours because after all it’s a crucial business activity. A network like this automatically delivers great relationships, superior peer-mentoring, advocacy, joint venture agreements, sharing of resources and expertise, and of course referrals.

The advantages of turning your back on the networking organisations and building your own private network are gigantic. You’ll save time, money and effort, and you no longer have to tolerate boring or rude networking practices. You’ll no longer rob yourself, family or friends of time that should be spent with them. You’ll have REAL friends in business who enrich your life personally and professionally.

CAN YOU DO IT?

Even though there is always more to learn, especially in terms of communication skills, if you can only do the 7 things I’ve discussed here, you will absolutely achieve your dreams, and you will have earned them!