Happy Holiday Greetings to all my faithful blog readers.

As a holiday gift from me to you please click on the picture to get your copy of the Christmas E-Book from the Top Sales Experts.

Enjoy!

Oh, and if you think your friends would like a copy too please be sure to send them a link to this page so they can get their own copy.

Time Strategies: 3 Things You Never Want to Do

You may be shocked to learn the three things you should never do are exactly what you're told to do by your sales manager/mentor. But when you do these three things you're setting yourself up for an arduous struggle and, in all likelihood, failure. And that’s exactly why over 90% of the people entering the industry will fail in less than three years.

The first thing you never want to do that you’re told you have to do it cold call. It’s time to put that dog to bed. Cold calling has never been a high pay-off activity and now with the legal ramifications and people’s increased intolerance it’s an even worse thing to do.

When you cold call you immediately put yourself in the needy category. Why else would you be calling an absolute stranger begging them for an appointment? And that’s not the position you ever want to be in.

How much time does it take you to make those 100 cold calls you’re supposed to make? It takes hours. And at the end of the day you’re lucky if you’ve talked to 3 people and scheduled an appointment with one person who may or may not keep their appointment.

Then when you meet with that person you find they aren’t likely to do business with you because they’re defensive and don’t trust you. But you keep wasting your time and theirs chasing after them anyway. And how much time do you have invested in all this activity without any results to show for it?

The second thing you never want to do is hang out at chamber networking events. The reason is obvious. The only people at those events are other starving sales people who are desperate for a sale.

The third thing you never want to do is pitch someone. And your “presentation” is nothing more than a pitch designed to produce a manipulative sales conversation. People hate to be sold and your presentation further reinforces their belief that they can’t trust you.

But you have to get business, so how are you supposed to do that? Instead of spinning your wheels wasting your time on all the things you should never do learn how to do the things you should do and do them. That means you need to learn how to: identify with a specific group of people in a way that gets them to reach out to you, interact with your ideal prospects on their turf, start and build a connection based on mutual respect and trust, and hold a conversation with a prospect that helps them to buy.

Sales Strategies: What Top Producers Understand

You want to be a top producer, but you're stuck being average. You do what you're supposed to do according to the industry experts yet it isn't working. You’re frustrated and exhausted and you don’t know what you don’t know.

You’re not alone, and if you keep doing what you’ve been doing you’ll stay stuck and frustrated. The thing about success is that it can actually be the very thing that stifles future growth. The very things it took to get you to the level of success you enjoy today will keep you trapped at that level.

You aren’t where you want to be, but you’re comfortable enough to have grown complacent. That puts you smack dab in the danger zone. You don’t know what you don’t know, and you aren’t aggressively seeking the knowledge and skills you need to take you to the next level.

Top producers understand that if you aren’t moving forward you’re moving backward. Once you start that backward slide it’s ten times harder to regain momentum than it is to keep momentum going. You may be surprised to learn that top producers spend a great deal of time focusing on improving the fundamentals of sales and marketing.

You may be even more surprised to learn that top producers don’t do the things that industry experts tell them to do, and they don’t do those things for very good reason. The best of the best don’t cold call either face-to-face or via the phone, that don’t use canned marketing communications, and they never waste their time networking where the scavengers network. They didn’t become the best of the best because anyone handed them any breaks. They got there by learning from people outside their industry.

Why would they turn to people outside their industry for help when they could tap into the top producers in their industry? If you think about it for more than a few seconds the answers become obvious: the best doers aren’t necessarily the best coaches and mentors, the best aren’t likely to want to share their secrets and have you directly competing with them, and even if you tried to clone them it wouldn’t necessarily work for you because you aren’t the same people.

You’ll never reach the top if you try to be a copy cat version of someone else. Yes, there are sales systems you need to understand and follow. But the whole purpose of a sales system is to keep you focused on the prospect so you can help them to buy.

And that brings me to perhaps the most important thing a top producer understands. A top producer understands that if you want to sell you have to stop selling, and learn how to help people buy. It takes work on the upfront to learn how to do that, but top producers are never afraid to work on things that have a high pay-off rather than spinning their wheels on a bunch of activities that produce nothing. And isn’t that what you’re doing now?

Time Strategies: Are You Sitting in the Coffee Shop Licking Your Wounds?

After a poor sales conversation do you get off tracking spending time and energy feeling sorry for yourself? You may not be consciously aware that you're doing it, but what do you do immediately after a sales call that doesn't work out? In essence, many salespeople call time out.

I’m not discouraging you from taking a time out. In fact, I’m encouraging you to take a time out. But it’s how you use that time out that will provide a real benefit for you.

During prime selling time it’s not uncommon to find salespeople sitting in the local coffee shop reading the paper. A poor sales conversation can be really upsetting even demoralizing. You need time to regroup before you head to the next one, so you don’t have a repeat of the previous experience.

While the experience is fresh in your mind it’s the best time to actually learn from the experience, and make adaptations so you don’t repeat it. In all likelihood you got a stall or objection, or you just didn’t connect from the start and never had a conversation with the other person to begin with. If you’re going to get value from this experience there are a couple things you need to do.

Identify the point where things started to go wrong. If you didn’t connect from the onset, was it because: you didn’t do your homework before making the appointment, you didn’t adapt your communication style to one that was more comfortable to the prospect, or did you try to sell the prospect and manipulate them to do what you wanted them to do not what was best for them? Did you fail to listen to what the prospect was saying causing the prospect to feel disrespected?

If you don’t know it, when you get a stall or objection when your solution is a good match for the prospect it’s because you didn’t help the prospect to discover the value in your solution. That means you either don’t understand the buying process, or you just need more practice. But in the meantime all is not lost.

Make a list of all the stalls and objections you know you’ll get or could get. Here are some common general objections:

• I don’t have enough money
• It’s too complicated or too simple
• It isn’t all that important to me
• I’ll just wait and do it later
• I want to look into other options.

Start with these and add to your list until you’ve thought of as many as possible. Now start thinking of examples and stories of other people or other situations where people thought these things too. Use stories to make a point that removes the validity of that objection for the prospect.

Stories are a non-threatening way of getting the prospect to look at things from another perspective. They help people to gain a deeper understanding, and they increase your connection with the prospect. As you work through this thought process you’ll start to regain your confidence and get fired up for the next insurance sales conversation, and you’ll be much better prepared when you get there.