Posted by Brian Tracy on Dec 11, 2008
What are your values? What do you stand for?
Decide What You Stand For
What are the organizing principles of your life? What are your core beliefs? What virtues do you aspire to, and hold in high regard when you see them demonstrated by others? What will you not stand for? What would you sacrifice for, suffer for, and even die for? These are extremely important questions that are only asked by about three percent of the population, and that small minority tends to be the movers and shakers in every society.What are your values? What do you stand for? What are the organizing principles of your life? What are your core beliefs? What virtues do you aspire to, and hold in high regard when you see them demonstrated by others? What will you not stand for? What would you sacrifice for, suffer for, and even die for? These are extremely important questions that are only asked by about three percent of the population, and that small minority tends to be the movers and shakers in every society.
Write Out Your Key Values
When I first began this values clarification exercise some years ago, I wrote out a list of 163 qualities that I aspired to. I think I eventually came up with every virtue, value or positive descriptive adjective that referred to personality and character in the dictionary. And I agreed with all of them. I felt that they were all important and I wanted to incorporate every single one of them into my character.
Focus on Very Few Core Beliefs
But then reality sets in. I realized that it is very hard to learn even one new quality, or to change even one thing about myself, let alone dozens of things. So I scaled down my ambitions and began narrowing the values down to a small number that I could manage and work with. Once I had settled on about five core beliefs, I was then able to get to work on myself and start making some progress in character development.
Select Your Five Key Values
You should do the same. You should write down the five values that you feel are the most important for you to live by. Once you have those five values, you then organize them in order of priority. Which is the most important value in your hierarchy of values? Which would be second? Which would be third, and so on?
Learn to Make Better Decisions
Every choice or decision you make is based on your values. Whenever you decide between alternatives, you invariably choose the alternative that you value the most. Because you can only do one thing at a time, everything you do is a demonstration of what you consider to be the most important at that moment. Therefore, organizing your values in an order of priority is the starting point of personal strategic planning. It is only when you are clear about what you value, and in what order, that you are capable of planning and organizing the other activities of your life.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action:
First, clarify your core beliefs and your unifying principles. Write them down and compare your life today with the values that are really important to you. How are you doing?
Second, organize your values in order of their importance to you. Which of your values is most important? Which is second? And so on. Do your current choices reflect this order of values?
The Exceptional Life Package
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Tags: Sales Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Dec 2, 2008
To improve your sales performance, adopt the Golden Rule mentality.
The Golden Rule says to, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It also says, "Love your neighbor as yourself." The Golden Rule mentality in sales, says simply, "Sell unto others as you would have them sell unto you."
Different Strokes For Different Folks
What does this mean? Aren’t there all kinds of different personalities that require different approaches and techniques? Well, yes and no. Practicing the golden rule in selling simply means that you sell to other people the way you would like to be sold to. You sell with the same honesty, integrity, understanding, empathy and thoughtfulness that you would like someone else to use in selling to you.
Seek First to Understand
If you would like a salesperson to take the time to thoroughly understand you and your situation before making a recommendation, you practice the same thing with your customers. If you would like a salesperson to give you honest information and to help you make an intelligent buying decision, you practice the same with your customer. If you would like a salesperson to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the strengths or weaknesses of his or her product or service, and that of his or her competitors, then you do the same with your product or service and your competitors.
Care About Your Customers
Perhaps the most important part of golden rule selling is the emotional component embraced in the word, "caring." Top sales professionals care about their customers. They care about themselves, their companies, their products and services, and they really care about helping their customers to make good buying decisions. If you think about the very best salespeople you know, you will recognize that they are caring individuals.
They Don’t Care How Much You Know
If you think about your very best customers, you will recall that these are invariably people you care about, and who care about you. When you think about the people you buy from, you will recall that they seem to care about you more than the average. In every part of your business life, you will find that the significant people all have the denominator of caring as part of their character and their personalities.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, resolve today to sell to your customers with the same honesty, empathy and understanding that you would like them to use in selling to you.
Second, take time to genuinely care about your customers, their individual needs and their unique situations. Make people feel important and they will make you feel important.
Customers for Life
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Tags: Sales Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Dec 1, 2008
What is selling?
In its simplest terms, selling is the process of helping a person to conclude that your product or service is of greater value to him than the price you are asking for.
How Markets Work
Our market society is based on the principles of freedom and mutual benefit. Each party to a transaction only enters into it when he feels that he will be better off as a result of the transaction than he would be without it.
The Three Options
In a free market, the customer always has three options with any purchase decision. First, the customer can buy your product or service. Second, the customer can buy the product or service from someone else. Third, the customer can decide to buy nothing at all.
Convincing the Customer
For the customer to buy your particular product or service, he or she must be convinced that it is not only the best choice available but he must also be persuaded that there is no better way for him to spend the equivalent amount of money. Your job as a salesperson is to convince the customer that all these conditions exist and then to elicit a commitment from him to take action on your offer.
Customize Your Sales Presentation
The field of professional selling has changed dramatically since World War II. In a way, selling methodologies are merely responses to customer requirements. At one time, customers were relatively unsophisticated and poorly informed about their choices. Salespeople catered to this customer with carefully planned and memorized sales presentations, loads of enthusiasm and a bag full of techniques designed to crush resistance and get the order at virtually any cost.
Treat Them With Respect
But the customer of the 1950s has matured into the customer of the 21st century. Customers are now more intelligent and knowledgeable than ever before. They are experienced buyers and they have interacted with hundreds of salespeople. They are extremely sophisticated and aware of the incredible variety of products and services that are available to them, as well as their relative strengths and weaknesses of those products. Many of them are smarter and better educated than most salespeople and they are far more careful about making a buying decision of any kind.
The Need For Speed
In addition, they are overwhelmed with work and under-supplied with time. Because of the rapidly increasing pace of change, down-sizing, restructuring and the competitive pressures surrounding them, customers today are harried and hassled. They are swamped with responsibilities, impatient, suspicious, critical, demanding, and spoiled. To sell to today’s customer requires a higher caliber of sales professional than has ever before been required. And it is only going to become tougher and more complicated in the months and years ahead.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, think continually about how you can convince your customer that your product or service is the very best available. Why does he buy, or refuse to buy?
Second, upgrade your knowledge and skills every day so you can sell more effectively. Remember, your customers only get better when you get better.
The Psychology of Selling
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Posted by Brian Tracy on Nov 20, 2008
Building and maintaining long-term selling relationships is the key behavior and skill of the top ten percent of the money earners in sales, in every field, selling every product and service.
If you could take everything we know about communications, put it all in a large pot, boil it and distill it down into its critical essence, it is about the importance of relationships in successful selling.
The Reason for Success
Most of your success in life will depend on your ability to get along well with other people, and on the quality of your relationships. Psychologist Sidney Jourard, found that 85 percent of a person’s happiness in life comes from happy interactions with other people. The reverse holds true as well: 85 percent of a person’s unhappiness or problems in life comes from difficulties in getting along with others.
Sell to Lots of People
Anyone can sell to a few people, some of the time. But only the very best human relations experts can sell to a wide variety of people, and sell to them repeatedly. The only way that you can make the kind of big money that you are capable of is by selling more easily, and more often, to the prospects you talk to, and by having those prospects open doors to others through testimonials and referrals. All top salespeople build and maintain high quality business relationships with their customers and sell to them repeatedly year after year.
Outselling Your Competition is easy when you have built long-term relationships with clients.
Decide Emotionally, Justify Logically
We are all sensitive to the quality of our relationships with other people. We are primarily emotional and we make most of our decisions on the basis of how we feel inside. We may carefully consider all of the logical and practical reasons why or why not with regard to buying a product or service, but in the final analysis we tend to go with our gut feeling. We listen to our inner voices. We obey the dictates of our hearts. We buy on the basis of how we feel about the relationship that we have with the other person. Where there is no relationship, there is no sale.
Focus on the Key Variable
Everything that you ever learned of value in the profession of selling, regarding your product or service, or personality, is only helpful to the degree to which it contributes to the building of high quality relationships with customers.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, become a relationship expert in sales. Focus first on the relationship, above all, and the sale will take care of itself.
Second, take care of your relationships once you have built them. Never take them for granted. Tend to them as you would to a flower garden.
Outselling Your Competition *** Plus Bonus CDs
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Posted by Brian Tracy on Nov 11, 2008
Are you wondering what to do to attract clients and create a surge in sales?
Are you frustrated by getting minimal response to your advertising or online promotions? Are you asking yourself,
"How can I avoid having my sales and profits dry up in this market?"
"Should I reduce spending on marketing to preserve cash?"
If you’re like most business owners and marketers, you’re doing everything you know how to bring in more sales, and you’re still not realizing the profits you want. You’ve worked for years to grow your business and now a financial meltdown that you had nothing to do with is making it harder.
What can you do? You could bury your head in the sand and hope you’ve still got a business in a few years. You could copy your competitors’ marketing, but their sales are hurting, too. Or you could ask yourself,
"Is there a way I can actually grow my business in this economy?"
Yes, there are easy and inexpensive ways to increase your profits.
Start with these 3 steps:
1. Change Your Marketing Strategy
When we get the rare cold spell here in San Diego, I change the clothing I wear. I put on a sweater or even a jacket. The same is true for your marketing strategy; when the economic climate changes, you need to respond.
In good times you can get away with fairly ineffective marketing, and the rising tide will float your boat along with everybody else’s. In an economic downturn, you can’t afford to be haphazard about your marketing. You’ll pay the price in reduced sales. Spending money on ads or mailings that barely generate sales isn’t affordable anymore.
2. Focus Your Efforts
While fusion food is popular here in San Diego, we don’t have a single restaurant that is a combination of French, Italian, Mexican and Chinese cuisines. Can you imagine a pasta dish with jalapeno cream sauce and a ginger root topping? It’d taste terrible. That’s not a time-tested combination of flavors; it’s a mess in the kitchen.
Unfortunately, most small business marketing isn’t much more than a mess in the kitchen, a collection of sales and marketing activities that don’t work together. Many businesses don’t grow as fast as they could because they don’t have an optimized marketing strategy or a system for implementing it.
3. Use Cost Effective Marketing Strategies
Let me tell you a secret. Some of the most effective marketing and selling tools are inexpensive or even free. Most people don’t use them, so when you do, you can easily beat the competition. 92% of businesses overspend on marketing. They’re wasting money on marketing that isn’t getting results.
You may be doing all the right marketing activities, but without an effective marketing system, you could be struggling for a long, unprofitable time. Now, thanks to marketing expert Charlie Cook, there’s an easy way to transform your marketing, grow your business and maximize your profits.
Magical Marketing
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Tags: Sales Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Nov 4, 2008
Fully 84 percent of sales in America take place as the result of word-of-mouth advertising.
Why People Buy
Fully 84 percent of sales in America take place as the result of word-of-mouth advertising. Some of the most important sales promotion sales activities are those that take place between customers and prospects, between friends and colleagues, in the form of advice and recommendations on what to buy, or not buy, and who to buy from.
Join the Top 10%
The only way that you can be among the top ten percent of salespeople in your industry is by having your existing customers selling for you on every occasion. Because of the importance of mega-credibility in selling, your customers must be happy to open doors to new customers for you wherever they go.
Never Prospect Again
All top salespeople eventually reach the point where they seldom have to prospect because their customers do much of their selling for them. When you live your life consistent with your personal and business mission statements, both fitting together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, your sales career will soar, as will your sales results and your earnings.
Be Clear About Who You Are
One important point with regard to vision, values and mission statements: be gentle with yourself. It has taken you your whole life to become the person you are today. If you are like everyone else, you are not perfect. You have lots of room to grow and improve. There are many changes that you can make in your character and personality in the course of becoming the excellent human being that you aspire to. But change in your personality will not come easily, and it won’t come overnight. You must be patient.
Increase your sales with Superstar Selling!
Persist Until Your Succeed
The reason that people grow and become better and better over the course of time, is because they persist gently in the direction of their goals and dreams. They don’t expect overnight transformations. When they don’t see results immediately, they don’t get discouraged. They just keep on keeping on. And you must do the same.
Put Your Ideas Into Action
Once you have a clear idea of the person you want to be and the kind of life and career you want to create, just take the first step. Read your mission statements every day as you go about your activities, think of the different ways that you could practice the virtues and qualities that you are in the process of incorporating into your own personality.
Remember, it is only your actions with regard to other people that really demonstrate the kind of person you have become. And if you persist long enough, you will eventually shape yourself into the exact person that you have imagined.
Action Exercises
First, treat every customer as if he is going to be a great source of word-of-mouth advertising for you. Remember that every person knows about 300 other people.
Second, resolve to become better and better in your dealings with others but be gentle with yourself. Behave every day in every way the best you can be and you will be sure to get results.
Superstar Selling!
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Tags: Sales Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Oct 29, 2008
There are several other reasons why the end game of selling is stressful and difficult.
Fear of Failure
There are several other reasons why the end game of selling is stressful and difficult. First and foremost is the fear of failure experienced by the prospect. Because of negative buying experiences in the past, over which you could have no control, prospects are conditioned to be suspicious, skeptical and wary of salespeople and sales approaches. They may like to buy, but they don’t like to be sold. They are afraid of making a mistake. They are afraid of paying too much and finding it for sale cheaper somewhere else.
Fear of Criticism
They are afraid of being criticized by others for making the wrong buying decision. They are afraid of buying an inappropriate product and finding out later that they should have purchased something else. This fear of failure, of making a mistake in buying your product, is the major reason why people object, hesitate and procrastinate on the buying decision.
Fear of Rejection
The second major obstacle to selling is the fear of rejection, of criticism and disapproval experienced by the salesperson. You work long and hard to prospect and cultivate a prospective buyer and you are very reluctant to say anything that might cause the prospect to tune you out and turn you off. You have a lot invested in each prospect and if you are not careful, you will find yourself being wishy-washy at the end of the sale, rather than risking incurring the displeasure of the prospect by your asking for a firm decision.
Customers Are Busy
The third reason why the end of the sale is difficult is that customers are busy and preoccupied. It isn’t that they are not interested in enjoying the benefits of your product. It’s just that they are overwhelmed with work and they find it difficult to make sufficient time available to think through your recommendations and make a buying decision. And the better they are as a prospect, the busier they tend to be. This is why you need to maintain momentum throughout the sales process and gently push it to a conclusion at the appropriate time.
Inertia is Hard to Break
The factor of inertia is the fourth reason that can also cause the sales process to come to a halt without a resolution. Customers are lazy and often quite comfortable doing what they are currently doing. Your product or service may require that they make exceptional efforts to accommodate the change or a new way of doing things. They perhaps recognize that they would be better off with your product, but the trouble and expense of installing it hardly seems to make it worth the effort. They see no pressing need or urgency to stop doing what they are doing and start doing something else with what you are selling.
Everyone Buys at the Same Time
The good news is that everybody you meet has bought and will buy, new products and services from someone, at some time. If they didn’t buy from you, they will from someone else. You must find the way to overcome the natural physical and psychological obstacles to buying and then hone your skills so that you are capable of selling to almost any qualified prospect you speak to.
Action Exercises
Now, here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, recognize the normal fear of making a buying mistake experienced by the customer. Give him every reason you can think of to be confident in dealing with you.
Second, accept that everyone you talk to is busy and you are interrupting. Always ask if this is a good time for him to give you his undivided attention. If not, arrange to see him another time.
24 Techniques for Closing the Sale
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Posted by Brian Tracy on Oct 22, 2008
Listening is the Key
Listening builds self-esteem. It has been said that, "Rapt attention is the highest form of flattery." When you listen intently to another person and it is clear that you genuinely care about what that other person is saying, his or her self-esteem goes up. His or her feeling of personal value increases. He or she feels more worthwhile and important as a human being. You can actually make another person feel terrific about himself or herself by listening in a warm, genuine, caring way to everything he or she has to say.
Pay Close Attention
When a man and a woman go out for the first time, they spend an inordinate amount of time talking and listening to each other. They look into each other’s eyes and hang on every word. They are each fascinated by the personality of the other. The more each listens to the other, the more positive and happy each of them feel and the stronger becomes the bonds of affection between them.
Become an excellent listener and learn to Communicate With Power.
Focus 100% On the Other Person
The opposite of listening is ignoring. You always listen to that which you most value. You always ignore that which you devalue. The fastest way to turn a person off, to hurt their feelings and make them feel slighted and angry is to simply ignore what they are saying or interrupt them in the middle of a thought. Ignoring or interrupting is the equivalent of an emotional slap in the face. Men especially have to be careful about their natural desire to make a remark or an observation in the middle of a conversation. This can often cause the sales conversation to come to a grinding halt.
Action Exercises
First, take every opportunity to make the other person feel important by listening attentively to what he or she says.
Second, avoid interrupting the other person by slowing down and pausing for a few moments after he or she has stopped speaking.
Communicate With Power
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Tags: Sales Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Oct 15, 2008
Have you ever lost a sale because a prospect came up with an objection?
It may have happened at the start when they said they were too busy to talk to you or later when they told you your price was too high.
Has this ever happened to you? Has a prospect ever said:
"I have to think it over."
"We have a supplier for this."
"I have to get approval from my boss."
"We really don’t need this right now."
"I have concerns about your ability to do all this."
It’s like someone out there is playing a dirty trick on you. You know your company has great products, great services and compared to your competitors are the absolute best. And you know for a fact the prospect could really benefit from your product or service. But then what happens?
Prospects start doing battle with you by throwing multiple objections at you or by just chucking one simple deal killing objection out there.
You may even have come up with or been given answers to these common objections, but trying to come back with rebuttals is like chasing the horse after it’s out of the barn. It’s usually too late!
The Secret to Selling
When I first started in sales the same thing happened to me. I’d launch into my sales pitch only to find it derailed by the simplest objection. I’d leave, frustrated and wishing I knew what to do to ensure I never had to deal with those objections again so I could close more sales. Have you ever felt this way too?
Then I discovered the simple secret to selling that turned my career and my life around. I discovered how to eliminate objections before prospects ever brought them up so that when it was time for the close, there wasn’t anything in the way of finalizing the deal.
The key to getting in the door and closing more sales is having a system for eliminating objections so prospects never bring them up. It’s that simple!
The Art of Closing the Sale can be learned and perfected.
Selling Is Like Flying A Plane – Or Should Be
Plane crashes are rare. It’s far safer to fly than drive to the grocery store in your car. Why?
The airlines don’t just wait for something to break and then try to fix it when the plane is falling out of the sky, they identify and address maintenance issues before they become problems. It’s not a perfect system, but their overall record of getting people where they want to go is excellent.
For most businesses and sales people the preventive maintenance program is missing from the sales process. You’re stuck trying to respond to objections in mid-flight when in fact it’s far easier to get rid of them before you get anywhere near the closing process.
Keep Your Selling Process in Peak Health
Only a generation ago polio struck fear in the hearts of parents everywhere, and people died often of smallpox and measles, yet you hardly hear mention of these diseases today. Why is that?
People got tired of treating deadly diseases, and thanks to our scientists, came up with quick and easy ways for preventing them.
Selling is just like your health. If you want to keep it from getting infected with deal-killing objections you need to treat them before they ever infect your sales process.
The Art of Closing the Sale
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Tags: Sales Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Sep 24, 2008
Learn to Listen Well
A vital key to sales success is listening. The ability to listen well is absolutely indispensable for success in all human relationships. The ability to be a good listener in a sales conversation is the foundation of the new model of selling. It leads to easier sales, higher earnings and greater enjoyment from the sales profession.
Being A Good Talker is Not Enough
Many salespeople have been brought up with the idea that, in order to be good at your profession, you must be a glad-hander and a good talker. You have even heard people say, "You have the ‘gift of the gab’; you should be in sales!"
Become a master communicator with How to Talk: Secrets of the Great Communicators + Bonuses!
Focus On the Other Person
Nothing could be further from the truth. As many as seventy five percent of all top salespeople are defined as introverts on psychological tests. They are very easy going and other-centered. They would much rather listen than talk. They are very interested in the thoughts and feelings of other people and they are quite comfortable sitting and listening to their prospects. They would much rather listen than talk in a sales situation. Poor salespeople dominate the talking, but top salespeople dominate the listening.
Practice "White Magic" With Everyone
Listening has even been called "white magic." It is too rarely engaged in by business people. When a salesperson develops a reputation for being an excellent listener, prospects and customers feel comfortable and secure in his or her presence. They buy more readily, and more often.
Practice the 70/30 Rule
You’ve heard it said that God gave man two ears and one mouth, and he is supposed to use them in that proportion.
Top salespeople practice the "70/30 rule." They talk and ask questions 30 percent or less of the time while they listen intently to their customers 70 percent or more of the time. They use their ears and mouth in the right ratio.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, resolve today that, from now on, you are going to dominate the listening in every sales conversation. Become comfortable with silence.
Second, practice the 70/30 rule in every sales conversation. Listen 70% of the time and only talk and ask questions 30% of the time.
How to Talk: Secrets of the Great Communicators + Bonuses!
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Tags: Sales Success
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