The Sales Success Handbook: Your Personal Guide to the Systems and Strategies of Highly Effective Salespeople

By Anthony J. lozzi

The Sales Success Handbook is a comprehensive and easy-to-use guide for anyone who wants to enjoy the financial and personal rewards of highly effective selling.

Best-selling author Tony Iozzi provides a realistic, 'no-nonsense' formula for achieving Sales Excellence. He details the major strategies and systems used by higly successful salespeople, and outlines the critical 12 steps in the successful selling process.

reap higher personal and financial rewards master proven techniques of direct selling build a profitable client register approach your prospective clients get the order design and apply an effective client service program turn clients into advocates and keep them loyal to you increase sales and recognition through effective public relations organize to increase productivity design a business plan that really works

The Sales Success Handbook includes a very practical and unique 'Directory for performance self-diagnosis' that helps you to meet a wide range of day-to-day sales challenges such as low productivity, making sales but not enough income, inability to find enough customers, or a loss of self-motivation.

Whether you want to sell insurance, cars, cosmetics, houses or any other product or service directly to the consumer, this difinitive work on professional selling will help you to develop your own personal, workable sales system that gets the results you really want. At its heart lies a philosophy of self-motivation, integrity, honesty and self-esteem. The Sales Success Handbook will show you how to realize your outstanding sales future. Make it yours.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 14, 2000
• ISBN: 9781475918014

Anthony J. lozzi

In a career spanning some 30 years, Toni Iozzi has amassed success experiences as a businessman, consultant to government, lecturer at the Air Force's Officers Training School, public relations consultant, marketer, sales manager, sales trainer, salesman, public speaker and motivator.

Book preview

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Part 1  The essence of highly effective selling

1  An introduction to the science of selling

2  The four major strategies of highly effective salespeople

Part 2  The highly effective selling process

3  Building a profitable client register

Appendix 3.1 Example survey postcards

Appendix 3.2 Recommendations visual

4  Approaching your prospective clients

Appendix 4.1 Examples of pre-call letters

Appendix 4.2 Examples of call dialogues

5  Succeeding at your introductory meeting

6  Succeeding at your planning meeting

Appendix 6.1 Client Service Information Profiles  7

Succeeding at your sales presentation

8  Getting the order

9  Designing an effective client service program

Appendix 9.1 Example keep-in-touch letters

10  Keeping your clients

Appendix 10.1 Preservation tools

11  Increasing sales with effective public relations

Part 3  Highly effective organisation

12  Organising to achieve Sales Excellence

13  Designing a business plan that works

Part 4  Successful problem solving

14  The directory for performance self-diagnosis

References

Preface

You Can Sell Anything is a comprehensive and systematic guide for creating wealth through the major strategies of highly effective salespeople.

By adopting its strategies and systems you will enjoy more job satisfaction through your increased knowledge, skill and independence. You Can Sell Anything aims to help you develop your own personal, workable sales system and then to reap its benefits and financial rewards. It gets to the heart of the sales challenge and does not detour from it.

After its introduction to selling it rolls up its sleeves and works with you through sales systems that have stood the test of time.

It’s a no bull, no hype program with proven sales techniques built on Self-leadership and Personal Excellence. At its very heart is a philosophy of self-motivation, integrity, honesty and self-esteem. It offers you:

• A menu of ideas. Whether you are selling insurance, investments, vacations, housing or cars, or wanting to establish a distribution system for organisations such as Amway, Nutri-metics or any other network marketing sales company, you will find the ideas in this book an invaluable source of knowledge, guidance and support to help you achieve outstanding success and, with it, an outstanding income.

• A resource. You Can Sell Anything shows you how to design a personal, workable sales system so you control your work, rather than have your work control you.

• A work of reference. It is not a book you will want to put on the shelf and forget. It will serve as your working partner—always being there for you.

Keep it in your brief case. Use it as a working tool. Refresh your memory between sales calls. Put it to work for you. Make it yours.

• Tools. You’ll find model business plans, sales systems, strategies, call dialogues, promotion programs, pre-call letters, proven responses and all the tools you’ll need for sales success in today’s challenging environment.

• A directory for performance self-diagnosis. A unique directory helps you pinpoint the causes of low productivity, bottle-necks, disorganisation and other problems without needing to refer to a sales manager. It offers suggestions for meeting a wide range of day-to-day sales challenges.

• Skills. If you provide the drive and Self-leadership, the concepts, strategies, systems and tools in this handbook can show you how to become one of the world’s highly effective salespeople.

You Can Sell Anything draws on the themes and philosophies of its companion book You Can Succeed Anywhere because a focus on only one of the seven major spheres of life (such as work) rarely achieves a successful, balanced and happy life. For this reason it is recommended both books be studied and applied simultaneously. Together they provide one of the most comprehensive development programs available.

Finally, it’s up to you. You Can Sell Anything and You Can Succeed Anywhere have the knowhow and skills to help you achieve the success you’ve always wanted. Together we can meet the challenge of your greater future; of increasing your wealth and happiness; of giving control of your life to you.

Acknowledgments

In this blueprint for your sales success I have added my own experiences to the observations, techniques and philosophies of highly effective salespeople from a variety of industries. It is a composite of my own successful ideas and those that have been developed over the years by people who have achieved Sales and Personal Excellence. I have given credit wherever I have been able to recall the source of some basic idea or point developed by someone else. To those I have been unable to recall I offer my unreserved apologies and thanks.

My love and thanks go to my wife, Gayle, for her assistance in the preparation of the manuscript and for her continuing love and support over the last 28 happy years.

Part 1

The essence of highly effective selling

1

An introduction to the science of selling

REGARDLESS of your education, background or previous employment history, your success in selling is limited only by how well you can lead yourself to apply the skills of highly effective salespeople.

As a salesperson you are a member of a profession that rewards those who help other people to help themselves. From its beginning, selling has rewarded results, not theory. University degrees don’t count; neither do sporting prowess nor pedigree.

That’s great news! It means you are not stuck with what or where you are. Effective selling depends on your ability, not on your background.

More than any other field selling has been responsible for improving our standard of living, providing jobs, bolstering the economy and offering success-minded individuals a ‘level playing field’ to see how far they can go.

Why choose a sales career?

For one thing, to make money or to earn a living you have to sell something. If you are a direct salesperson you determine what your service is worth through the commissions you are able to generate. If you are a non-sales employee, your employer will determine what your service is worth by fixing a wage. In both these cases you are selling your ability to bring value to the marketplace. One is ‘indoor’, the other ‘outdoor’ or ‘field staff. One generally pays commission or a retainer plus commission, the other pays a predetermined income.

Usually ‘outdoor and commission-only’ salespeople have the opportunity to reap the biggest rewards. These people are the true believers—those who eschew a comfortable indoor job for the chance to earn as much as their talent and products will allow them. They feel that there is no such thing as security—only opportunity.

Highly effective salespeople have their own reasons for choosing selling as their life’s work. These include freedom, the chance to earn an above average income, meeting a variety of people, helping enrich people’s lives and independence. Whatever their reasons, selling enables them to become a self-made, self-led person. It can provide the opportunity to become one of the most highly paid people in the country.

There are no tricks, no preconditions. The more they earn, the more their company loves them.

The market for salespeople

A casual look at the ‘positions vacant’ columns of your daily newspaper will show a variety of employers who are always in the market for salespeople. Some advertisements are quite misleading and promise thousands of dollars in weekly earnings without setting out job details, funds required to start and so on. Usually those advertisements are accompanied by the promise: ‘no experience necessary’. These jobs can cause many applicants unnecessary anguish.

However there are many reputable sales companies that offer rewarding and highly satisfying careers. Nevertheless you need to accept that a career as a salesperson requires as much—if not more—work and dedication as does any other job that promises high rewards. For the majority of salespeople it can take months, if not years, to learn their profession exceedingly well.

As most sales positions offering the highest rewards tend to be commission-based, it would be wise to have a reserve fund of six to 12 months income before you start calling. That’s because commission selling is very much like running your own business. It takes time to make it profitable. But when you hang in there and apply yourself, you’ll discover the rumours you’ve heard about highly effective salespeople being among the highest paid earners are most certainly true.

The aim of this book for your sales success is to help you become one of them.

The buyer’s perspective

Selling and buying have evolved together. Nowadays the public is better educated. People have an increased ability to grasp concepts. They know (or have heard of) the tricks some unethical salespeople apply. They are wary, and have been conditioned to respond to salespeople in certain ways through experience and stereotyping. They use a number of conditioned replies to defer sales success.

From the early days of buying to satisfy needs, today people buy just as often to satisfy wants. They might buy to satisfy their self-image, to make a statement to others, for vanity, for the person they would like to be. The highly effective salesperson needs to be something of a psychologist as well as an adviser.

The community’s eyes and ears

Today you can get more information out of one Sunday newspaper than you could in the lifetime of someone who lived in the sixteenth century. Keeping up with all the new trends, ideas, technology and products is an impossible task for any individual.

Salespeople bring the latest developments to a client’s attention. For example, a business would soon stagnate if it stopped seeing salespeople because it would have ceased to educate itself on the latest innovations and improvements.

Even buyers hate to be ‘sold’

Have you ever walked into a store where, before you had a chance to look around, sales clerks pounced and asked if they could help you? If you’re anything like me, you would have found that irritating. That’s because we love to buy, but hate to be ‘sold’. Moreover, we like to buy from someone we can trust. We want to have confidence in the integrity of their advice and in their ability to provide after-sales service.

We all have idiosyncratic reasons for buying a thing or for not buying it. Generally the reasons people don’t buy include:

• No trust. This means: I hear what you are saying, I can see I have a need and how your product can meet that need, I know I need it now but I don’t trust you or your company to do the job for me.

• No need. This means: I trust you and your company. I can see how your product can help other people and why they should buy it but I don’t need it.

• No help. This means: I trust you and your company. I can see I have a need but I can’t see how your product can meet that need.

• No hurry. This means: I trust you and your company. I can see I have a need and how your product is perfect for it but I’ve got no reason to buy it now.

• No money. This means: I trust you and your company. I can see I have a need, that your product meets that need and that I should buy it now—but I can’t afford it! (In other words, for me to afford it I will have to give up something else. Prove to me it’s worth it. Or I want it, but can’t see a way of paying for it. Show me how.)

• Many of those ‘ownership deferrals’ can be pre-empted during the prospecting, introductory meeting, planning and presentation stages of the sales process.

Being an effective salesperson takes practice

Most people practise their favourite sport, or learning a new musical instrument or dance step. Few people practise the skills that they use to earn their income. Doing a job is not the same as practising to do it well.

In sales it is a common assumption that ‘you learn as you go’. That might be fine for the few individuals for whom the process comes easily. However most of us need practice to acquire and keep any new skill. Perfect practice makes perfect. It produces highly effective salespeople.

You would be wise to lavish the best part of your attention to the sales process; that part of the sale you can control, by practising—and perfecting—your skills until they become as natural to you as breathing. The emphasis is on working at it until you get it right.

Why do some salespeople succeed where others fail?

Companies can give you the best products, the best support, the best point-of-sale materials, and the best training, but they can’t give you the want to do the things you need to do.

To succeed as a salesperson you need to want to do all the things required for success, every day. You need to want to learn, want to call people, want to work hard, want to be organised, want to sell, want to succeed. If highly effective salespeople have a secret, it is this: they want to do the things low-achieving salespeople don’t want to do. Highly effective salespeople want to do them because they are committed to achieving Sales and Personal Excellence.

That means you need to regard selling as a long-term career right up to retirement. That’s right! As your vocation in life! As your vehicle for achieving your specific Major Life Goal.

Those who see selling as a short-term job, as a way to make a quick dollar or as something to do until something better comes along are likely to be low achievers and are more likely to fail.If you have to be forced to attend sales meetings or training sessions, prodded to do your prospecting, cajoled into studying and bludgeoned into organising your day, there is a very good chance that you will not be successful because you are not committed to selling as your profession.

When you commit to a purpose, then fate moves too. All sorts of help comes from quarters you would not expect. There is power in a person of commitment—the power of purpose. People are attracted to it and want to help you.

The ineffective salesperson

In the sales profession I have met many ‘personalities’, some more successful than others. Can you recognise any of the following?

Hard workers

They work long hours. Nothing is too much trouble for them. They achieve a reasonable income through volume of effort and usually do not earn as much as others who work, not hard, but smart. They reason that working harder will make up for deficiencies in skill or knowledge.

Their motto is ‘there are always more people to see’, but hard work alone will not guarantee success.

Creatives

They are always brimming with ideas. They spend hours designing leaflets, starting new systems and setting up sure-fire schemes that keep them busy. Their problem is that they seldom see people. They’re hooked on ideas, not on helping people to own and enjoy the benefits of their product or service. Rarely can they keep their minds on one thing long enough for it to work. And if it does, they will usually ‘improve’ it until it ceases to work at all. That’s because the first success forced them out of their comfort zone.

Creatives fear repeated success because it would make them repeatedly uncomfortable.

Entrepreneurs

Many sales entrepreneurs suffer from an obsession called ‘big-case-itis’. They see themselves as corporate high-fliers putting together one massive deal after another. Not for them the small businesses, the mums and dads, the singles, the pedestrian market.

Usually entrepreneurs aren’t around long enough to learn that big cases are not necessarily those that produce big rewards.

Naturals

Who needs study? Practice? They’re naturals. They have been endowed with the sales success gene. Naturals want to go from rags to riches in one easy step. Often they start well. However, they are almost invariably sprinters. Once they have sold to the few businesses they know or to their family and friends, they decline rapidly. They do not have the discipline to train for the long distance race. They are poor Self-leaders.

Heavies

Can these people close? They can cajole, persuade, bully or shame any customer into buying—if only to get rid of them. They know that whatever happens, they will get that signature on that contract.

They also know dozens of ways to close a sale and usually will try them all. They use their knowledge to defeat the customer rather than to defeat the customer’s problem or to meet needs or wants. They are unlikely to survive in the sales business, as no-one likes being subjected to that sort of treatment.

Heavies will have few recommendations, high cancellation rates and few sales.

Logicians

What could be more effective? Computer print-outs, reports, tables, evidence! Surely they would convince even a moron to buy! Anyone with an ounce of logic should clamour for the product. The numbers prove it’s the only way to go, right? Wrong.

What customers want might not be logical at all. In many cases wants will outweigh needs in a buying decision. ‘Emotion sells, logic confirms’, is another old saying worth remembering. Highly effective salespeople deal with people, not with numbers.

Systems experts

They are easy to recognise because they spend most of their time in the office. They have filing systems, index cards, computers, printers and cross-referencing cards. They create a system that takes most of their time to maintain and to update. Unfortunately it does not leave them time to see enough prospective clients.

Technicians

What these people don’t know about their products isn’t worth knowing. They can tell you about products long superseded. They need to display this knowledge, so they make a point of educating their customers to know everything too. The result is information overload, customer confusion, boredom and few sales.

‘Nice guys’

They are so nice they hope customers will buy because of their niceness. It doesn’t matter if customers really need or want the product. How could they say no to such nice people? But they can put them off again and again. ‘Nice guys’ are too nice to probe for the customer’s real intention. They won’t ask customers for a decision; the customers might think they are not nice.

At work they let others take business opportunities away from them. They agree with everyone and ‘go with the flow’. Unfortunately they confuse being business-like with not being nice, and lose many sales opportunities. Customers like to see them, but usually buy from someone else.

Whiners/pukers/morale saboteurs

‘Guess what’s happened now!’ is a typical opening line. They love to whine, whinge and puke over everyone until they feel better. By doing that they are also programming excuses for later failure. They are playing Dr E. Berne’s game of ‘wooden leg’ (i.e. they can later reply: ‘What did you expect from someone with a wooden leg?’).

Their colleagues are much happier when whiners are away. They are masters of ‘stinkin’thinkin". Workmates listen to them—they can’t get away—but have little respect for anyone who lifts themselves up by dragging others down.

Comfort-zoners

Phew! Made it for one more pay day! As long as they can keep ahead of their creditors and earn enough to survive, comfort-zoners are relatively happy. They won’t do anything to increase earnings because that would mean more effort and venturing out of their comfort zone. They almost fear success. They adjust, acquiesce, lower their sights. Their goal is to meet minimum requirements. As long as they can do that they are OK for one more pay.

Big spenders

You only live once, right? So spend! That’s what money’s for! Classy suits, expensive watches, Italian shoes, vacations, frequent dining out—those are some of the hallmarks of big spenders. Outwardly they display all the trappings of success. Below the surface can lurk people with debts—people who frequently need advances against commissions to get by from one month to the next.

Senior statespersons

They are happy to listen to and advise other salespeople in the team. They live on past achievements and no longer see the need to put in a real effort.

Usually they are good members of the sales team but are happy to rest on their laurels and to have new salespeople come to them for wisdom and guidance. They might have achieved excellence in work knowledge but have lost the ability to lead themselves into doing things. They could be more productive in a training role.

Barricade builders

They love being disorganised. They procrastinate and will get around to doing everything… one day. The piles of paperwork, unworked leads and enquiries heaped on their desks are a barricade that gives them an excuse not to see people.

They feel exposed without their barricade and will seldom catch up because they have so much to do. Customers would only interfere with their plans.

Clutchers at straws

They have this person who will buy that, that person who will buy this and a dozen more who will buy something else. They’re all hot and will buy soon. The trouble is, soon rarely comes. They do all the work, run around in a world of delusion and waste everyone’s time.

Instead of testing the customer to determine genuine interest, ‘clutchers at straws’ will hang on to the slightest word of encouragement as if it were a promise to buy. Every time they are asked ‘what about this prospect and that client?’ they will have another reason to delay bringing in the contract.

Perpetual students

They haven’t time to sell. They must study this, do that course, learn that legislation, ask so-and-so about this and that. They are hooked on amassing knowledge, not on helping people enjoy the benefits of their product