Increase your sales in 3 simple steps
Are you currently a team leader who don’t seem to be able to steer your team forward, inspiring high sales performance? Or perhaps you are a sales professional or business owner who have hit a plateau in your sales because you aren’t closing as many deals as you desire? Would you like to learn how to increase your sales in 3 simple steps?
Used to be a struggling salesperson, I never knew there were secrets to selling that we cannot afford not to know. And when I finally chanced upon these secrets by studying how some of the top sales performers did it, I have developed my own sales process which I teach today which has not only seen my own sales skyrocket, but I have coached thousands of other business owners in these secrets of successful selling that have got them the results in the number too.
In this article, you are going to learn the 3 main reasons why your prospects aren’t buying from you and how you could apply my 3C Instant Close™ framework to start selling more:
Your prospects do not trust you
If you have ever wondered why you are not getting the kind of sales you desire even while you possess the “best products” at the most “competitive price”, the answer is most probably this: Trust issue. Without trust, it is impossible for us to make a sale. Yet most salespeople tend to make the mistake of jumping the gun and attempting to close a deal before trust has been built.
As you learn to invest time and effort to connect (which is the first step to mastering the 3C Instant Close™) with your prospects first by attempting to build some common grounds with them, you will realize how much easier it is for you to sell anything to them in the later stage. After all, rapport builds trust. Thus before moving hastily to close the deal in the future, always ask yourself: Have I connected enough with my prospect and build sufficient trust yet? The greater the trust, the fewer the objections.
Your prospects are not being sold the way they loved to be sold
Ever heard of the saying “different strokes work for different folks”? If the lack of trust is the first reason why your prospects are not buying from you, the second reason why you could be missing the mark is that you are not selling to your prospects the way they love to be sold.
In our sales training program, we teach business owners how to recognize certain buying traits of their prospects so that they can sell more effectively to them by conforming (which is the second step to mastering the 3C Instant Close™) their sales approach to the different buying strategies.
And the result: one of my clients who was in an online marketing business was able to achieve close to a 100% sales revenue increase within a month! While a sales increase of 100% is not usually the norm, our sales can certainly improve by leaps and bounds as we learn to adapt to our prospect’s buying style.
For instance, one of the things I usually coach my clients to do is to engineer their sales pitch in a way that appeals to their prospects’ lead representation systems and lead them to be more open and receptive to their sales proposal. While there are generally 3 ways how people think and process information in their mind, everyone has a preference.
1. Visual Preference
There are individuals who are more visually-oriented and tend to respond better to certain words or phrases like “see,” “look,” “picture this,” and more illustrative words. They are people who will respond very well to visuals and thus you should never miss out the visuals in your sales pitch.
Again, I used to have a client who often struggled to sell her ideas to her boss because she tend to dwell a lot into the details. While my client was a highly detail-oriented person, her way of presenting to her boss was not working since her boss who was more visual-inclined tends to prefer my client to draw out the big picture instead of touching on the details.
2. Auditory Preference
Then again, there are others who may resonate better with you based on what you say and how you say it. These people are known as the auditory people and often prefer you to engage them using words such as “listen,” “hear,” “sounds like,” and even phrases like, “Can you hear what I’m saying?” They are generally good listeners and tend to focus a lot of what was being mentioned during a negotiation.
3. Kinesthetic Preference
The third kind of prospects are more kinesthetic-inclined and prefer you to speak to them using words and phrases that connect with their emotions. Several years ago, I had an interesting revelation when a very close friend of mine gave me honest feedback and told me how I rarely use the phrase “I feel” during our conversations. He did not feel connected to me whenever I used the phrase “I think”!
Realize how the habitual words we use in our daily communication can affect the way how people perceive us and respond to us. Thus identifying the preferred representation system and preferred language of your customers can actually work wonders in your ability to connect with them.
You are selling based on logic, not the emotionsFinally, here’s the reason why you could be missing a lot more deals you could have possibly closed: You haven’t been able to sell at the emotional level.
While most of us are aware how powerful emotional selling is, few of us have truly mastered it. So how could you truly sell at the emotional level and overcome your prospects’ natural buying resistance (Nobody loves to be sold).Once I was in Turkey for a holiday when I learned a great lesson on the process of emotional selling. It happened when I visited a site with a replica of the Trojan Horse.
According to Greek mythology, there once lived a group of people known as the Trojans. They lived in the city of Troy, where it was surrounded by huge tall walls and heavily guarded by capable soldiers.For a long time, the Trojans’ greatest enemies (the Greeks) have been trying to conquer the city but to no avail. Eventually the Greeks came up with a brilliant plan to take down the city of Troy. Pretending that they had been defeated, they left a huge wooden horse outside the city gates, and retreated to the nearby mountains.
Believing that they had emerged victorious, the Trojans eventually opened the gates and brought the huge wooden horse into the city. Unknown to the Trojans, the Greeks had actually planted some of their most capable soldiers in the wooden horse.When everyone was sound asleep during late night, the Greek soldiers came out of the wooden horse and opened the city gates, allowing the rest of the soldiers to flood into the city of Troy.
Now you might ask: Jacky, what has this story got to do with improving my ability to sell?Just like the huge tall walls in the story that have prevented the Greeks from entering the city, our prospects tend to resist buying from us because of the presence of part of mind known as the Critical Faculty. Unless you are able to find a way to bypass the Critical Faculty and sell to the unconscious mind (which is the emotional part of our mind), you will constantly find yourself hitting the wall when attempting to ask for the sale.
Thus the key to convert (the final step to mastering the 3C Instant Close™) your prospects into customers lies in your ability to communicate to them in what I would term as “Trojan Horse language” or convert influence. And while there are many ways to achieve the Trojan Horse Influence™ effect, one example will be through the use of stories. Stories are great tools we can use when selling since they allow us to convey our message to our prospects at the emotional level. No wonder the use of testimonies is one of the most powerful methods people use today in marketing and selling their products and services. Essentially facts tell but stories sell.