Right now you might be forced to sell from home with the current emergency measures that governments around the world are enacting.

There’s no need to panic. I’ve been selling from home the past 6 years and it’s been a game changer for me in the most positive of ways.

In this solo podcast episode I’m going to share my top tips for selling from home and how you can make the most of the situation you might find yourself in.

Right now you might be forced to sell from home with the current emergency measures that governments around the world are enacting.

There’s no need to panic. I’ve been selling from home the past 6 years and it’s been a game changer for me in the most positive of ways.

In this solo podcast episode I’m going to share my top tips for selling from home and how you can make the most of the situation you might find yourself in.

In this episode we are talking about voicemail and how you can get attention even when your potential customer has not picked up the phone.

Because there’s

nothing more frustrating than knowing that you can really help a prospect and

solve one of their business problems and not being able to communicate that

with that with them.

And leaving an

effective voicemail is far less likely to get you in trouble with the law than

sneaking into your prospects house and leaving your message on their bedroom

walls in lipstick… that gets attention but doesn’t usually get the deal done.

So if you’re ready to start leaving

voicemails that have prospects pounding on their iPhones, calling you back,

then hit that thumbs up button and let’s get into it…

Voicemail template #1

So in this video I’m going to give you

three effective voicemail templates. But don’t worry, you don’t have to write

all this down as we go through the video, there is a link in the description

below that has goes to a page where all these templates are available for free.

You don’t even have to give your email address to get access to them.

So the basic template that the other

voicemail templates are built on top of goes like this –

Hello this is [your name] from, [company name].I’m calling because, [reason for calling]. This benefits you for, [benefits].I will follow up with an email right now and I look forward to speaking with you shortly.Have a great day. Goodbye.

Real world example

So as a real world example, selling our

Salesman.org training product to VPs of sales I’d say –

Hello this is Will Barron, calling from Salesman.org. I’m calling because we’ve just improved your competitors revenue by 24% with 4 weeks of training and we can do the same for you. I will follow up with an email right now and I look forward to speaking with you shortly.

So let’s break down this template and that

will help us understand what were really trying to do when we leave a voicemail

message.

First off, you can see that I’m not doing anything

weird or manipulative. The old school way of selling would be to share that

“I’m calling as I  have something

incredibly exciting to share and I need you to call back right now before you

lose access to it…” or I’ve even heard old-school sales trainers tell

salespeople to start sharing the benefit that they can give and then

purposefully hang up halfway through the sentence so it sounds like you’ve been

cut off.

Both of these tactics are gross, obvious

and imagine doing damage to a surgeon, which is who I used to sell to when I

worked in medical device sales. They’d think you were an idiot at worse and at

best it would severely devalue you as an industry expert in their eyes

Why it’s effective

So as you can see from our template of –

Hello this is [your name] from, [company name].I’m calling because, [reason for calling]. This benefits you for, [benefits].I will follow up with an email right now and I look forward to speaking with you shortly.Have a great day. Goodbye.

The main thing that we are trying to

communicate is that we are an expert, calling upon someone that we can help,

getting them used to our voice, and preempting the fact that we are going to

continuously follow up with them until they give us a response.

In this episode, you’re going to learn the 5 traits of the worlds top, performing sales professionals. I’m also going to share how you can test if you have some of these sales traits, completely free at the end.

If you’re a fan of

the Salesman.org Youtube channel, you’ll know we create sales success training

content based around specific traits of sales success.  But today in this video I’m going to give you

a high level overview of 5 of the traits that all high level sales

professionals possess so that you can start to implement them into your sales

game too.

#1 No people pleasing

The first trait of

high performing sales professionals is to avoid being a “people pleaser”. I

define a people pleaser as –

“Someone who will please others at the expense of their own needs”.

Whilst the act of

“people pleasing” might on the surface seem like a positive trait to have for a

sales professional, it isn’t. B2B selling is all about –

Giving AND taking value.

People pleasers

tend to give in abundance and expect the prospect to respond in kind. When they

don’t, the people pleaser become passive aggressive towards them rather than

being assertive in making their asks.

Think of it this

way, when a extremely high level deal maker like Warren Buffet walks into the

room, do you think he exhibits people pleasing behaviour of –

* Constantly agreeing with people* Feeling personally responsible for how other people feel* Having an inability to say “no”* Feeling uncomfortable is someone is angry* Changing your behaviour to make others comfortable

Of course he

doesn’t. He walks into the room, is himself and gets the deal done. So if you

exhibit any of the people pleasing behaviours I just outlined, you need to

knock this negative trait out of yourself.

#2 Aggressively qualifying

Next, high

performing sales professionals aggressively qualify and disqualify their

prospects.

Successful people

lack time. They’re busy and so they won’t allow themselves to waste time on

unqualified prospects.

When talking to

your potential customers, ask questions that judge whether they’re a good fit

for you.

A simple

qualification process follows the acronym BANT –

* Budget: Is the prospect capable of buying?* Authority: Does your contact have adequate authority to sign off on a purchase?* Need: Does the prospect have a business pain you can solve?* Timeline: When is the prospect planning to buy?

When you uncover if

a prospect is qualified by asking the following questions, you immediately

reduce the risk of wasting time with prospects who like talking but will never

spend cash with you –

* Budget: Is this an important enough priority to allocate funds toward?* Authority: Who else will be involved in the purchasing decision?* Need: What do you think could solve this problem? Why?* Timeline: How quickly do you need to solve your problem?

Qualify quick and

aggressivity at the top of the sales process as that’s what the worlds top

sales professionals do.

#3 Plan ahead

Thirdly, the sales

elite plan ahead

Rarely can a

salesperson just stroll into a sales pitch, make it up as they go along and

have success.

The pricing question often makes sales

professional uneasy and weird. We’ll cover why talking about money makes sales

people uncomfortable in tip number 1.

Control your emotions

So when a prospect asks for the price,

the most important thing to do is stay in control of your emotions.

* Most people are taught at a young age that * “money is the  root of all evil”* “Rich people are bad”* “Discussing money is rude”

In fact, the ability to discuss money

without all this emotional baggage being a part of the conversation is one of

the key sales success traits we measure with our SalesCode assessment.

You can take a free version of the assessment

at SalesCodeAssessment.com. There’s a link in the description of this video.

So the first step to answering your

prospects pricing question is to make sure that you have your emotions in

check.

To do this –

* Stop* Take a breath* Calmly share the

price

Don’t say “well the price is $X/month…

BUT I can ask my sales manager for a discount…”.

Think of it like this, if you owned a

sweet shop and a child asked you how much a mars bar was. You wouldn’t get emotional;

you wouldn’t start talking faster or immediately offering concessions to lower

the price, would you?

Nope. You’d say, that’s $1 please

sonny boy. Then you’d hold out your hand and wait for them to pay you. You’d

ask then shut up.

This is the emotional state that you

need to be in when discussing pricing with potential customers and this leads

me to point number two…

Shut the hell up

I alluded to this point in the first

tip. If step one is calmly sharing your pricing, the second step is to shut the

hell up and wait for the prospect to respond.

Sure, there is likely a little internal

turmoil going on in your brain at this point. You’re going to be reminded of

being 12 and asking the hot girl out. That moment of both hope and fear before

she tells you to get lost and then runs off to play pogs or Pokémon cards with

the other popular kids…

But until the prospect responds to the

pricing you’ve shared, you’ve no idea if they’re going to say “wow, that’s

incredible, you’re my hero” or “Will, we need to do something on the numbers

here”.

So as hard as this can be in the real

world, just shut up wait for the prospects response.

Have a BATNA

Next, are you going into your sales

conversations with a *silly voice* BATNA?

Now, yes, I’m spending a lot of time

in the studio putting together this content for you #SalesNation… but I haven’t

gone completely mad. A *silly voice *BATNA is a real thing…

It stands for –

* Best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

The idea was first put forward by

William Ury who I interviewed on the Salesman Podcast a few years ago.

In a nutshell, William shared that you

should always go into a negotiation with a back up plan, or as he calls it a –

best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

For sales professionals this only

enters a conversation after the last two points have been concluded. So you’ve

–

* Shared the

Do your sales cycles seem to drag on and on

and on? Do you attempt to close the sale but you get  knocked back with “maybes” and “I’ll have to

think about it?”

Well creating urgency in B2B sales is

incredibly important and it’s the answer to your issues. If your potential

customers don’t feel in a rush to purchase from you, then they are

communicating that they don’t feel like you’re really solving any problem worth

rushing for.

So in this video I’m going to share 4 tips that will help you create more urgency in sales so you can reduce the number of maybes you get, without being manipulative or weird. So stay tuned.

Not being able to create a level of urgency

with a potential customer is the number one reason why deals “stall”.

One of the key differences between high

performing sales professionals that crush targets and those that don’t, is the

number of “stalled” potential deals in their sales pipelines.

A potential customer is classed as stalled,

you’ve tried to close them and they haven’t said “yes” or “no”.

Stalled deals will kill your chances of

hitting your sales target and the 4 tips I’m about to share with you will help

you give them some mometum through increasing the level of urgency.

Many low performing sales professionals

waste time telling to sell these stalled individuals and the fact is, that once

the momentum of the initial discovery calls and solution presentations has

waned, every week that goes by, it becomes increasingly unlikely that the

potential customer will ever buy from you.

So how does you pipeline look? Do you have

a bunch of stalled accounts in there? If so then this video is going to help.

In this solo episode, Will Barron explains the five different levels of value in B2B sales and how to position yourself so that your prospects HAVE to buy from you.

David Pirt is a Challenger Sale expert, behavioural science enthusiast and former solider.

On this episode of The Salesman Podcast David shares a step by step guide to what the Challenger Sale is and how we can implement it’s success principles into our B2B sales game.

Resources:

* David on Linkedin*  ChallengerInc.com* Book: The Challenger Sale: How To Take Control of the Customer Conversation

Anthony Iannarino is an international speaker, an author, and a sales leader.

On this episode of the show Anthony is sharing how we can take business from our competitors and essentially “eat their lunch”.

Resources:

* Book: Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition* TheSalesBlog.com* @Iannarino

Go to http://Salesman.org/Cyber to get 50% off your Salesman.org membership for a limited time only.