Have you ever noticed that the very top salespeople in the sales force rarely attend the sales meetings that are mandatory for everyone else? Have you ever wondered why?
The usual explanation is that their high sales performance causes them to be excused from having to attend the sales meetings. But what if it’s the other way around?
What if their great success in selling is because they don’t attend the sales meetings?
In trying to learn what we now call the High Probability Selling Paradigm, I found that it works to understand how most people think and/or intuitively react. Security and Reliability are the most important motivations of most people who are ready, willing, and able to satisfy a need that they have. That is usually expressed as:
We call those people “High Probability Prospects.” They make up 0.5 to 2 percent of the market for most products and services. An efficient way to find them is to make prospecting offers to a highly targeted prospecting list.
Here are the upcoming sales training workshops from High Probability Selling, as of 25 September 2010.
For notes and general information about our workshops, please visit www.highprobsell.com/workshops/
It is very difficult to hit a baseball, thrown at over 80 miles per hour, with a regulation sized bat. You get to swing the bat at the ball up to three times, each time you get up to bat. If you get a hit one out of every four times at bat, that’s up to twelve attempts to hit the ball. Almost any team will pay you $2,000,000 a year to do that. You also get a three month vacation and free coaching. If you can get a hit one out of every three times you go to bat, you can make upwards of $5,000,000 per year. That is the sports entertainment business.
In most other businesses, salespeople only make about $165,000 per year to sell one out of four prospects. On average they get about 4 attempts to sell each prospect. Salespeople who sell three out of four prospects and only need to make 2 attempts per prospect, often make upwards of $700,000 – and they have to pay for their own coaching. However, it’s a lot easier than hitting a baseball.
This may be the single most important buying concept that most salespeople never learn.
Prospects who are merely “interested” are not ready to buy. Yet, salespeople try to get prospects interested in their products and services. Those salespeople believe that educating prospects is a good sales strategy, and that a prospect will feel obligated in some way. However, this makes the prospect feel uncomfortable. Therefore, when prospects really are ready, willing, and able to buy, they seldom buy from the salesperson who educated them.
The good news is that, at any given time, a small percentage of the market for your type of products and services is ready, willing, and able to buy. The best salespeople know how to find them and close sales with them quickly. Meanwhile, the other salespeople are spending their time with prospects that are not ready to buy.
Here are the upcoming sales training workshops from High Probability Selling, as of Wed 25 Aug 2010.
For notes and general information about our workshops, please visit www.highprobsell.com/workshops.
It’s harder to trust someone whose first thought is to influence my purchase decision. Even if I can see that they only want to steer me toward something they think will be good for me, I know that they are not focused on listening to what I want, and that it’s going to be a time-consuming transaction at best. If I wanted their help in making a purchase decision, I would ask for it.
Trust takes more than just good intentions. Knowing that someone’s intention is to persuade me to go with something that they believe will be better for me is not enough, and especially if they haven’t listened. Many terrible things have been done by people with good intentions. I also need to trust in their ability to hear me well, and also in their ability to make good judgments based upon what they hear. If they start out with anything at all that suggests a desire to influence me, then they have failed on both of those counts.
I would rather do business with someone who listens to what I want and helps me get it, than with someone who wants to change my mind.
Here are the upcoming sales training workshops from High Probability Selling, as of Fri 6 Aug 2010.
For notes and general information about our workshops, please visit www.highprobsell.com/workshops.
High Probability Selling is more about being than doing. It requires a radical change in a person, not just a radical change in action.
Who you are is revealed to other people by what you do. People make conscious and unconscious decisions about who you really are, in response to things you do both consciously and unconsciously. Very few people are fooled when you pretend to be someone you are not. It feels wrong.
We teach High Probability Selling as a sales process, the details of what to do and how to do it. Using this process will change who you are. If it does not change you, it is not likely to work for you.
When you start using High Probability Selling, people will see a new person. This is the kind of person that decision makers prefer to deal with. People who cannot be or become that kind of person usually cannot “get themselves” to follow the process. It feels wrong.
If you want to understand more about this, we recommend that you read the book “High Probability Selling” by Jacques Werth and Nicholas Ruben. It tells the story of a person who is learning, doing, and being transformed by High Probability Selling.
Note: You can read the Intro and the first 4 chapters of the book “High Probability Selling” online.
For most salespeople, establishing a relationship with someone is the most difficult and confronting aspect of High Probability Selling. It requires the salesperson to forget about selling and just be a person. It’s also the single most important step in High Probability Selling.
It’s a time when you don’t talk about your product at all. Your only purpose is to get to know the prospect and determine whether he or she is someone you can trust and respect. That decision is key because it determines whether you’re willing to do business with that person. You learn that through conversation and by asking questions.
When you don’t trust and respect someone, it’s very tough to hide it. If you don’t, they’ll know it almost as soon as you do, and they won’t want to do business with you. But more importantly, you’ll know it and you won’t want to do business with them. If you try to do business with someone you don’t trust and respect, you’ll never have a workable relationship. And if the relationship isn’t workable, it’ll be difficult and unrewarding at best, forever.
Put yourself in the prospect’s place. If you were the prospect and you felt that someone was trying to get you to do something, you would naturally try to protect yourself. That’s where resistance, suspicion and hostility come from. Whatever the salesperson does or says in that kind of environment will be construed as manipulative, insincere and inevitably creates resistance.
In High Probability Selling we only do business with people we trust and respect. When you’re establishing a relationship with a prospect, your purpose is to discover who the person inside the prospect is and how he or she got to be there, both personally and professionally. How you do that varies. Everyone’s style is different.
In order to determine whether you trust and respect someone, you have to really get to know them – find out what makes them tick. What motivates them and why? What incidents or feelings shaped who they are? How they wound up in their current job? The search goes way beyond surface amenities.
It’s not a matter of prying or trying to manipulate. You only have a limited period of time to spend on a call and you sincerely want to develop a relationship that means something. All meaningful relationships, professional or personal, are based on mutual trust and respect. If you can develop that kind of relationship with a customer you have such a competitive edge that is very difficult for anyone else to overcome. Everyone prefers to do business with someone they trust and respect. If you don’t develop that kind of relationship with a customer and get to know who they are at a personal level, you’re just another salesperson to them.
In order to do what I’m suggesting, you have to be sincerely interested in the prospect. That kind of sincerity can’t be faked. People know when you’re asking questions and only pretending to be interested in the answers. When that happens the prospect will abruptly cut you short.
Remember, your purpose in discovering what makes a prospect tick isn’t to uncover any “hot buttons” or what it will take to convince, persuade or manipulate someone to buy. It’s to see whether they are the kind of person you’re willing to do business with – to see whether you trust and respect them.
To do that you probably have to operate in a way that’s goes against everything you’ve been taught or conditioned to do in sales. You have to let go of “trying to please,” “dancing to the prospect’s tune,” “getting them to like you,” “being interested in what they’re interested in” and “flattering them.” You’re not there to impress, entice, or “build rapport.” You’re not there to “get them to buy.” You’re there to discover whether there’s a mutually acceptable basis for doing business, or not.
Editor’s Note: This blog post is excerpted from the book, “High Probability Selling” by Jacques Werth and Nicholas Ruben.
Here are the workshops currently being offered by High Probability Selling.
The next High Probability Prospecting Workshop starts 20 July and runs for 6 consecutive Tuesdays. The price is $775. More details
The next High Probability Selling Workshop starts 25 August and runs for 6 consecutive Wednesdays. The price is $775. More details
The next High Probability Closing Workshop hasn’t been scheduled yet. More details
This is an overview of the things we Believe In, the fundamental beliefs at the core of High Probability Selling, the things we stand for. Our best customers are the people who share our deepest beliefs.
We thank Simon Sinek for his TED talk on How great leaders inspire action, which inspired us to feature “What We Believe In” as a category in this blog.
Jacques Werth and Carl Ingalls
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