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Geoff Woods is the Vice President of The ONE Thing and the host of The ONE Thing podcast which is in the top 5% of all podcasts in the world.

On this episode of The Salesman Podcast Geoff explains how we can become extraordinarily productive and so achieve extraordinary results in our sales roles.

Resources:

* Geoff on Linkedin* The ONE Thing podcast* Book: The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

Oh, so you finally got around to reading this post…

Are you a procrastinator?

That’s not good news because procrastinating on your sales activities can be really painful.

I know I’ve procrastinated on calling back an annoyed customer only to have them get even more frustrated, angry and then call my sales manager to complain.

Even worse, this happened during a national sales meeting and so I didn’t just have my boss to contend with, my national sales manager got involved too.

All that hassle and stress because of a little procrastination.

I’m not in the minority with my procrastination either. Studies show that around 20% of all people procrastinate on important things every single day.

So how I did I break through my constant procrastination in my sales job?

Well I tried all of the obvious ways to avoid procrastination and nothing worked until I learned the science behind why we procrastinate and how scientists suggest we stop it

So in this post I’m going to share the science behind why we procrastinate and how you can eliminate sales procrastination forever.

WHY WE PROCRASTINATE

The crazy truth about procrastination is that your brain is wired to do it.

That’s right, there’s nothing wrong with you if you procrastinate, you’re not useless, you’re not unproductive, it’s not your fault. Your brain was designed to procrastinate.

The science explains procrastination as a fight between two parts of the brain. We know this as these two parts of the brain light up when we are faced with a task that we don’t want to do.

These two parts of the brain are the –

* Limbic system – The ancient, reactive, unconscious part of the brain.* Prefrontal cortex – The more recently evolved part of the brain that helps you plan out your future.

The limbic system is designed to keep you pain free right now, in the moment. 

It doesn’t realise that if you avoid doing something today, you’ll still have to do it tomorrow. It also doesn’t understand the consequences of not doing important things right away.

On the other hand, your prefrontal cortex does understand the issues with procrastinating. It can see into the future and it understands that suffering a small amount of pain right now can avoid a lot of pain later on.

So when you have a job to do, these two parts of the brain battle it out and if the limbic system wins, you procrastinate.

So you can stop blaming yourself for procrastinating and start blaming your limbic system.

WHO WINS THE BATTLE?

Now you might be asking, why does the limbic system so often beat the prefrontal cortex and force me to procrastinate?

The reason many people procrastinate is because the limbic system is a much older and a much more dominant system in the brain.

The limbic brain is an automatic system. It’s the part of your brain that pulls your hand away when you accidently touch something hot. It evolved to perform basic survival instincts like dodging attacks from people wearing loin cloths, trying to kill you with clubs.

So the limbic system is always on, always ready to respond.

The problem is that the prefrontal cortex is not automatic like the limbic brain. To use your prefrontal cortex, you have to kick it into gear.

Have you ever been told that you’re a natural born salesperson?

Or maybe the opposite. Maybe you work in sales but you fell into the role and you don’t think it comes naturally to you at all.

Well most people get their opinions about salespeople from films, the media and out of date stereotypes.

If you think all a natural born salesperson needs to be able to do is influence and bully a person into buying, then you’ve got it all wrong.

So in this video I’m going to share what the true traits of a natural born salesperson are, based on our research from over 100,000 salespeople.

THE TRAITS…

Now the 12 traits of natural born salespeople are specific to salespeople selling services to businesses.

There are a different set of traits for salespeople who sell to consumers or even for customer service people who do their own kind of selling.

So lets get into it. I’m going to split the 12 traits into three separate groups –

* Sales specific skills – Skills required specific for selling* External traits – Personality traits obvious to other people* Internal traits – Personality traits that are more difficult for others to see

SALES SPECIFIC SKILLS

* Being comfortable with money – Clearly you need to be able to discuss money with your buyers.* Being assertive – You must be able to both give and take value when appropriate.* Strong goal setting – If you don’t set goals, you won’t know where you’re going.* Having a systematic selling process – If you do not have a systematic way of getting to your goal, you’ll never reach it.

EXTERNAL TRAITS

* Extroverted (most of the time)- To win in sales you need to be able to present, influence and communicate. This takes a certain level of extrovertedness to achieve.* Strong sales hustle – Sales hustle is the ability to push through tough times and keep going for the long term.* Optimistic – You need to be an optimist because if you don’t think you’re going to win the business, it will become a self-fulfilling prophesy and you won’t win anything.* High levels of personal accountability – If you’re not accountable for yourself, other people won’t be accountable to you either.

INTERNAL TRAITS

* Not a people pleaser – You need to be able to exchange value, not suck up so much that some day, maybe, it’ll come back to you.* High emotional intelligence – People won’t buy if they’re feeling down emotionally. You need to be able to regulate the emotions in yourself and others.* Strong self esteem – Common failure symptoms like rejection disappear when you solve the underlying issue of a lack of self esteem.* Success mindset – A seller with a success mindset believes that pretty much anything is possible because they can always learn, improve and adapt to overcome obstacles that are put in front of them.

So there we have the 12 traits that natural born, business to business salespeople all have.

This is tried and tested now with data from over 100,000 salespeople.

So let me ask you, how many of these natural born salesperson traits do you have?

Leave a one liner with your answer in the comments below.

Lance Tyson is the President and CEO of Tyson Group. Lance facilitates, trains, and conducts over one hundred workshops annually in areas such as performance management, leadership, sales, sales management, customer service, and team building.

On this episode of The Salesman Podcast, Lance explains what “spider-webbing” is and how you can leverage it to drastically improve your sales prospecting.

Resources:

* Lance on Linkedin* Tysongroup.com* Book: Selling Is An Away Game: Close Business And Compete In A Complex World

Have you ever had a buyer who was extremely qualified, they had the budget to purchase and they came through your entire sales funnel…

Turn around as you closed them and say “I need to think about it?”

I’ve been there. It sucks. You’ve invested so much into this deal and it’s feel apart right at the last second.

Well, why do you think this happened?

Do you think that the buyer really needed to spend a week thinking about their purchasing decision or was there something else holding them back?

I guarantee you that most of the time when a buyer says “I need to think about it” they are lying right to your face.

So do you want to learn how to deal with this objection? Then stay tuned because in this video I’m going to explain both how to respond when a buyer says “I need to think about it” and how to prevent this sales objection happening in the first place.

Sound good? OK lets jump in.

The Big Lie

When a buyer says “I need to think about it” they are lying to you.

But don’t take it personally. What the buyer is really saying one of four things –

* “I don’t have budget”* “I don’t have authority to make a purchase”* “I don’t understand the value in your offer”* “There’s no reason to buy this right now”

All of these real objections are telling you that the buyer doesn’t feel certain in their purchasing decision.

For any purchase to happen there needs to be certainty.

If it’s a small sale, the certainty doesn’t need to be very high. If it’s a big, sale then the levels of certainty need to be much higher and probably need to be spread across multiple people (draw people).

Your job as a sales professional is to increase the certainty of the conversation you’re having with your buyers. So my rebuttal to the “I need to think about it question” is always –

“Out of curiosity, what about deal are you uncertain about?”

If you ask this question in an empathetic way the buyer will respond in kind and coach you on what they’re not sure about and how to fix the issue.

If however you want to defeat this objection before it even arises you need to take a slightly different approach.

Eliminate The Option

To eliminate the option of the “I need to think about it” objection coming up at the end of a sales meeting, you can preframe your sales conversations by saying – 

“If everything goes smoothly today, does it make sense that you will be able to make a decision on this call?”

When you ask this question, if the buyer isn’t qualified to do business with you, they’re going to let you know at the beginning of the meeting rather than at the end of it. Now you can spend more of the sales meeting uncovering what it holding them back and progressing the sale forward.  

Otherwise if they agree to the rule we set out, they’re going to feel socially uncomfortable saying that they need to “think about it” at the end of the sales meeting as they agreed to make a decision within it.

Scott Stiefvater is a executive speaking and presentation coach. He has been coaching industry leaders to speak with confidence, power, and authenticity for almost a decade.

On this episode of The Salesman Podcast Scott shares what the “presentation trap” is and how to avoid falling into it.

Resources:

* Scott on Linkedin* @SStiefvater* ScottStiefvater.com* Sales School presentation structure

The other day I was in our salesman.org community trying to help a sales professional who sells a consulting product.

His issue was that when prospecting, his potential buyers would always say that the service he offers is a “nice to have” rather than a “necessity”.

So I started to engage with this individual in the community and it turns out he wasn’t doing a very good job of uncovering the real pain points that his buyers had.

He could get the point of uncovering the surface level pain (something is wrong), but he wasn’t asking the right questions to get to the bottom of what was really causing the issue (must solve problem).

I showed him the 5 pain point questions that I’m going to share with you in this video and is response in the community was epic. He said that these 5 pain finding questions had transformed his sales conversations.

So lets get into them.

When you engage with your buyers you’ll hear lots of potential pain points. When a buyer gives you their pain, it’s usually a “surface level pain” and not the real issue they need to solve.

SURFACE LEVEL PAINS

When asked about their business pain points, buyers will only give you surface level pain points because they don’t have the expertise to really get to the bottom of the issues.

That’s good news for us sales people because if buyers had the knowledge, products or expertise to dive deeper into their pains they could solve them without your help.

So this leaves a gap between a buyer knowing they have a problem and not knowing how to fix it and that’s where we come in.

Before we get into pain questions there are four main categories that surface-level buyer pains fall into. Once you understand each of the categories, you’ll be able to quickly diagnose your buyer pain points on discovery calls with buyers.

Here are the four categories of surface level buyer pain and a few examples of how your buyers might describe them:

A: Financial pain

* “Revenue is up, but profits are down”* “I don’t have enough visibility of the numbers to make sound financial decisions”* “We’re only profitable enough to keep the doors open”

B: People pain

* “Our team’s morale is low”* “Our managers don’t drive innovation”* “Our best employees keep leaving to our competitors”

C: Productivity pain

* “We keep missing our client deadlines”* “We have quality issues that are leading to higher refunds”* “We spend too much time in meetings”

D: Process pain

* “Our hiring process is a mess“* “We have no system in place to monitor our sales pipeline”* “The customer service department is inundated and can’t keep up”

Do me a favour and leave a comment below sharing which category of pain your product solves. I’m interested to know what pain points you are experiencing and I can then focus some new content in that direction.

So now you know the categories of your buyers surface level pain points and you’ve heard some examples of how your buyers might share these pain points with you, lets look at some questions we can ask to dig deeper into the buyers pain.

We want to dig deeper into the buyers pain so that we can align the service we sell that solves the pain to the deepest pain we can.

When we align our service to a really deep pain, our service becomes a “must have” rather than “something to consider next quarter”.

Have you ever been in a situation where you know that a potential customer is a great fit for your product. You know that you can deliver them an incredible return on their investment.

You know the you’re doing the right thing by selling this individual…

So excitedly you call them up on the phone and…

They reject you over and over again?

Here it’s clear that the buyer is trying to put up roadblocks to stop you getting the deal done.

Perhaps the buyer says “just email me some information”, they say “call me back next quarter” or even “I’m already working with your competitor”.

Well a low performing sales professional with take the bait here.

They would agree to send over some information over email. A poor performing salesperson would back down as soon as a competitor is mentioned.

But you know that if you take any of these requests seriously it could and months or even years to your sales cycle.

You know that the buyer is giving you what we call “sales objections”.

So how do you deal with these sales objections and keep the sale moving forward?

I’m going to give you the solution in this post.

GOOD NEWS

Think dealing with sales objections is tough?

Well think again!

Every single objection falls into one of four buckets. It doesn’t matter what service you sell, who your customers are or what industry you’re selling into.

The four buckets of objections are –

* Lack of budget* Lack of need* Lack of urgency* Lack of trust

So when you know how to do deal with each of these four buckets of objections, you can answer any sales objection with ease.

Pretty cool right?

Let’s look at each of the four buckets of objections in more detail.

BUCKET #1: lack of budget

A perceived lack of budget from the buyer manifests itself as an objection like –

“It’s too expensive” or “I don’t have the cash right now”

A lack of budget is the most common sale objection that you will face.

The best wat to deal with the budget objection is to align the cost of the buyers pain with the price of your product.

To align price and pain, you need to ask questions to uncover how much financial pain your buyer is in that you can relieve. You can do this by asking questions like –

“OK I understand that you might not have budget right now but how much is this problem costing you each month?”.

Once you know their financial pain, when they next give you a budget objection you can say –

“You said this issue is costing you $100,000 a month, yet our service costs just $20,000 a month. Is it fair to say that your budget will be created by the cost savings?”

When you frame your pricing against the cost of the pain of the buyer currently it becomes a no brainer for the buyer to continue the selling conversation.

The second way to deal with the budget objection is to prevent it from happening in the first place. You can pre-emptively stop the budget objection by discussing your services price in ranges rather than giving specific pricing.

Your buyer is much less likely to bring up a budget objection if you explain –

“Our price is within the $20,

How are your sales doing right now?

Because secretly a lot of sales professionals who sell services are concerned that their sales are slowing down.

Now don’t get me wrong, we’re in the middle of a global pandemic… but there are other reasons that your sales might be slowing down too.

So in this post I’m going to show you why a sales slump might not be anything to worry about and what do to when you feel like you’re sales are slowing down.

WHY IS BUSINESS SLOW?

There’s nothing like a global pandemic to change your sales success rates. But if your sales have slowed down over the past few months then there might be other factors in play as well.

The first thing to do when sales slow down is to troubleshoot what the REAL problem is.

There are three variables that you should consider when trying to work out why sales are slow. They are –

* Inbound interest – Has the level of interest for the service you sell dried-up? For example, your service might be seasonal. If you’re selling accounting services, the end of the tax year is going to be busier than in the middle of it.* Sales pipeline – If the level of inbound interest for your product has not changed, then the next variable to examine is your sales pipeline. You need to determine if you are you able to capture the interest the market has in your service. If you’re unable to capture attention and drive it through your sales pipeline over time your sales will slow.* Closing percentage – Finally, if the market is interested in your service, you’re able to capture this interest and drive it through a sales pipeline, yet your sales are still slowing down, the closing end of your sales process must be the issue.

So before you start blaming the pandemic for your selling slow down, ask yourself if any of these variables have changed over the past 12 months.

There are lots of issues that can affect inbound interest, sales pipelines and closing percentages. Here are a few examples –

* Disruptive innovations from your competitors* Your service being commoditized and cheaper versions brought to market* Regular economic upturns and downturns* Legal or legislative changes* Changes in customer facing members of staff

Your mission should you choose to accept it, is to uncover where the issues are. Once you uncover what the real issue is that is causing your sales slow down, you can try one of the following 6 ways to eliminate it.

#1 Better lead generation

No matter what the issue is that is slowing down your sales, 9 times out of 10, if you put in a few extra hours a day on lead generation, these issues disappear. At least in the short term anyway.

Also ask yourself if you’re doing less lead generation now than you were 12 months ago. I know when the pandemic first hit I personally went quiet with Salesman.org as I struggled to figure out what to do next and that lack of activity at the beginning of the year effected my sales pipeline for months afterwards.

#2 Robust sales planning

If your sales have ground to a complete halt, it’s time to stop, take a couple of days away from your usual daily selling activities and create new a plan of action.

Albert Einstein once said –

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

So if things are slowing right down you might need to take a different approach to your selling.

Did you close the deal?

Why should I hire you over someone else?

Do you love me?

Why should you get a bonus?

Questions… they can be simple to answer or they can get our adrenaline pumping and our palms sweating.

To have success in a sales role you need to learn how to answer difficult questions by thinking on your feet.

Because buyers don’t just ask questions to obtain information. Buyers ask questions for other reasons as well.

They might be trying to put you under pressure to see how you deal with stressful situations, they might be trying to understand your attitude on a subject without directly asking about it or they might be trying to test whether you are telling the truth in your sales pitch.

So lets jump into it and learn how to answer difficult questions…

STEP-BY-STEP

When selling there are unlimited questions as a potential buyer could ask you. Therefore it is impossible to plan responses to each question ahead of time. So we need a system to answer tough questions and think on our feet.

Answering tough questions has two steps –

* Creating enough time to process the question* Generating an answer that serves everyone in the conversation

Pretty simple right?

So let’s look at the first step to dealing with difficult questions which is to buy yourself more time.

#1 BUY YOURSELF TIME

Have you ever experienced this? A buyer throws a tough question in your direction and for some reason words start spilling out of your mouth uncontrollably?

One thing leads to another, to another and you’re suddenly wondering what the heck you’re talking about.

I’ve been there too.

This happens because most salespeople fear there being any silence on their side of a conversation.

Salespeople fear this silence because they assume the buyer will think that they lack knowledge on their product or their market and so will then reject them.

This isn’t very effective though. It would be like jumping in front of a train, expecting it to stop.

Unfortunately, when you blurt out a response to a tricky question without thinking it over, often this impulsive response is not going to be the best rebuttal you could have come up with.

So the most important thing you can do to improve your responses to difficult questions is to buy yourself a little bit more time for your brain to think.

How do buy this extra time?

Look at your buyer, pause in silence, making sure not to fill the silence with lots of “umm” and “errrr” and give yourself room to think.

Easy right?

A small pause like this will often indicate to a buyer that you’re not just a sleezy salesperson trying to flog whatever is the deal of the day and that you are truly trying to give them the best possible advice too.

If you need to buy yourself even more time to mentally process the difficult question, you can do what politicians do and repeat back the question to the buyer.

For example, if a buyer asks you –

“Are there are opportunities for discounts if we classify you as a preferred account?”

Well you can pause, then say –

“hmmm, are there opportunities for discounts if you classify us as a p...