The Art of Closing
I like to share experiences I have with sales people I encounter, especially when they illustrate how easy it can be to determine the needs of a customer and close a sale. This experience also shows me how easily we can overcomplicate the sales process if we aren’t paying attention to what our prospects and customers are saying.

I called a local cable company because I was interested in switching providers. After moving some equipment from the office to my home, I needed to improve our access to the Internet. I know very little about the world of hooking technology together. Without that skill I had to trust the technician that my new service provider sent out. I was fortunate to get a good one that not only knew his stuff but was also a true sales professional.

Are You Sure You Know The Right Answer?
I had an experience last week that shines a bright light on inexperience. We all have to start someplace as sales people. Most often we start with minimal training, minimal product knowledge, a desk, and a telephone. It’s the ‘baptism by fire’ approach. We flounder until we gain enough experience to be reasonably successful. The quotas and expectations are high and the success rate is low. This is a pretty brutal but common path to sales proficiency. We get beat up, our confidence suffers, and not many of us make it. The first months or years are tough. If it is difficult on us personally, it is no less difficult for our prospects and customers. They get beat up as well while we flounder. Carnage is obvious on both sides of the relationship.

Unless we’ve learned some real effective tools and skills, the underlying fear of prospecting and face-to-face contact with our customer base stays with us. So our longevity in the business doesn’t guarantee that we’re effective sales people. We have experience but are we really masters of our trade? Reaching that level has much to do with the kind of training and mentoring we got in the beginning.

What Can The IT World Teach Us About Tailoring A Client's Portfolio?
My training and coaching philosophy is based on a few foundational principles of which planning is fundamental. The road to more appointments, referrals, and sales is paved by effective and diligent planning. The confidence that we grow and maintain, that is so well received by our customers and prospects, comes in large part from being prepared. Our product knowledge, telephone skills, adaptability, asking key questions, and more are important components of planning. As effective as I’ve been at preparation and planning in my professional life, I was recently taught a few things by the technology world. They took this skill to a new level.

I’ve been working the past few months with a small web development team on the creation of The Producer’s Spotlight and another new venture. Working with technical people has given me a whole new level of appreciation for how crucial clear and thorough planning is. Their level of detail is similar to creating a set of blueprints. Imagine how closely your dream home would match the finished product if there were no blueprints. In the world of technology, drawing a vision on a napkin will result in a product that will do little to make that vision a reality. There is a lot of fancy and powerful technology on the Internet today. After working with the folks who live in that world, good old-fashioned planning is behind every success story.

Where Is Your Focus?
These are difficult times we’re going through. As is true for all economic downturns, fear and uncertainty creep into our lives. In the time it took to write this article, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) fell 100 points. What we’re experiencing today is not unprecedented. I went through Black Monday (October 19, 1987) as a stock broker. The DJIA fell 508 points. Stock markets around the world plummeted. It was a terrible bloodletting. We have many more examples of the same trend: Black Monday and Tuesday (October 28 and 29) which followed Black Thursday (October 24), commonly known as the Stock Market Crash of 1929; on December 12, 1914, following the outbreak of World War I the Market fell 24%, and on September 11, 2001, the Market took a dramatic downturn as a result of the World Trade Center tragedy in New York City. History has proven that these conditions are not permanent. There are a host of investors that are already betting that this one isn’t either. So what do we do now that we find ourselves in the midst of another downward cycle and what are the expectations of our prospects and clients?

Listening Is Not Enough
This segment is a story about a friend of mine who sought out the help of a financial adviser to set up and manage a retirement account. It is to some degree a story about how effective listening is in developing our relationships with current and prospective customers. As I think through my friend’s experience, I realize this has much more to do with acting on what we hear. If we are skilled at the art of listening and understand the needs of our clients and yet offer them products that do not serve those needs, we have still missed the mark.

My friend Jeff is a unique fellow. His lifestyle is extremely simple and the vision he has carved out for the future is unique. Without going into detail, it is enough to say that financial advisers seldom hear stories like this.

Slaying The Referral Demons
Referrals can be one of the easiest paths to more appointments and sales. ‘Can be’ is the pivotal term in this equation. For some of you, the ease with which you ask for and receive a referral depends on the relationship you have developed with your client or prospect. For the rest of you, asking for referrals is uncomfortable regardless of the relationship you have with the folks you talk to.

For those of you in the first category, if you’re asking a good friend, family member, or an established customer to suggest folks you can speak with, the asking for and getting referrals goes easier. You’ve already built the rapport, trust, and confidence necessary to ask for a name or two. It may be less comfortable for you and your customers in the early stages of a business relationship. It is tricky business for most people to offer the name of someone they know to someone they don’t know or trust. I have to be pretty clear that the folks in my ‘circle’ are going to be treated well before I give their name out. I learned that the hard way. The people we contact each day are no different. What your clients and prospects think and feel about you and how you’ve presented yourself and your products is the determining factor in giving out referrals. Our gatekeeper is not only looking out for us individually. They are also taking care of our friends and family as well.

Are All Your Cards On The Table?
The following story comes by way of a telephone call I received a few days ago. As annoyed as I was with this inexperienced stockbroker, I was troubled as well by the ‘tools’ and training his company had given him to be successful. It was a sad comment about how so many of you are sent out into the sales world. These techniques and tactics only serve to perpetuate the ‘salesman’ legacy I spoke about in ‘Their Perception is Their Reality’. It is no wonder why this legacy continues and why it is so difficult to forge out a different approach.

One message I will repeatedly drum into sales people on this site, in my workshops, and in my individual coaching sessions is you never know who that prospect is on the other end of the telephone. If your preparation for a sales call is built on little or no creativity, if the foundation of your pitch is deception, old and tired lines, and ‘getting your foot in the door’ any way you can, then you should be prepared to run into folks like me once in a while. As was true for this young man, playing games of deception can be unpleasant and embarrassing. This story, unfortunately, will sound familiar to most of you. For that reason it is one worth telling and holding up as an example of what I’d like to help change.

So this rookie stockbroker introduced himself politely and said, “We spoke three months ago about an investment opportunity and you asked me to call you back.” Without hesitating, catching his breath, or giving me a second to respond, he launched into his pitch.

Never Judge A Book By It's Cover
Some of you have heard the following story before. It is an old story but a timeless one. It underscores the central theme of this web site. We’ve all been taught to judge people from the outside, from the cover of the book. From the perspective of this teaching, it makes sense to categorize people based on what we see on the surface. But we all know the cover of a book never reveals the details, the richness of what lies beyond it. No matter how catchy the title, we have to turn some pages to find the real story. This true tale is a classic depiction of what happens when someone makes the effort to push beyond what is on the surface of things, beyond the one-dimensional world of appearance. It is how life works when we value relationships.

Their Perception Is Their Reality

Today I’d like to focus on a different aspect of the objection. Day in and day out our customers and prospects present us with just about every kind of objection imaginable. They are an inevitable component of the sales call. We have all had some kind of training or coaching on either overcoming or working with objections. Although an objection seems harmless enough they have been and will continue to be the source of anxiety, fear, and confusion for sales people. In most cases the objection is an opportunity to learn more about a customer or prospect. By offering objections, a person is telling us something about themselves, about their needs, desires, dreams, and more. But it is the initial objection, the first few seconds of a call that I want to talk about today. We can learn something else about our prospects in those several moments.

So let’s back up and address the very first objections we face when the person on the other end of the phone says hello. This objection is perhaps the most difficult to work through. Depending on the individual, it may be impossible.

I have spent some time and energy over the past many few years listening to sound clips from sales calls. I’ve heard just about every tactic and technique in the book. It is my job to evaluate how sales people present themselves so I can more effectively coach them. Recently I started paying more attention to the prospective customer and became curious about something.

Learning To Say No
My son Joshua has a 1974 bright orange VW bus. He was planning on traveling to Nashville to pursue his dream in music. I wanted to make sure everything was in working order for the trip. I was given a recommendation for a top-notch mechanic that works on classic VW’s. This guy was supposed to be one of the best in the city.

I called this mechanic shortly after 8 o’clock on a Tuesday morning. Someone answered the phone with a “Hello, this is Bill.”  I asked him if he had a few minutes so I could explain the problems my son was having with his bus. Bill told me his shop didn’t open until 9:00 and that I need to call back later. As far as Bill was concerned that was the end of the conversation. I filled the deafening silence with “Okay goodbye” and hung up.