G.A.’s Top $500 Sales tips

If you’ve read Silver Bullet Selling, you know $500 Sales Tips are sprinkled generously throughout. I wanted to share some of the best ones with you here. As you read through this short list, think of the time-tested axioms that have guided you through your selling career and share them with me in this post.

1. Don’t judge the Bullet Selling process, or any process for that matter, until you have used it in the field for 30 days.
2. Sales success comes from two things: telling a great story, and telling it to enough people.
3. You don’t close a sale, you open a relationship.
4. People hate being sold, but they love to buy.
5. Sales is a full contact communication sport.
6. We’ve run more than 10,000 sales meetings and have found that the best predictor of the outcome of the meeting is the pre-call planning that happens before the meeting.
7. If a pre-flight checklist is good enough for a commercial pilot, then a pre-call checklist is good enough for me.
8. Defining what success looks like is one of the most important fundamentals of running effective meetings. We need to understand before the meeting what we are trying to accomplish and then set the agenda with items that will help us efficiently accomplish it. And don’t get too ambitious here. Each meeting should try to accomplish only 1-3 objectives
9. The most obvious symptom indicating a need for better planning is the feeling that we are simply too busy to spend time planning
10. One of the secrets to building credibility and integrity is to under-promise and over-deliver.
11. Don’t memorize the words. Memorize the process.
12. Every buyer thinks their situation is unique and different, but they want to also know you have done this before.
13. During discovery, avoid the temptation to launch into a discussion of what you can do for your buyer. Save all that good advice for the Tailored Solution Step.
14. When conducting discovery, use active listening skills by nodding your head and using verbal prompts like “uh-huh” and “tell me more.” If you have to, pretend you are hearing this for the very first time. Just listen. Do not judge!
15. Sometimes the buying gap is not evident to the buyer. That’s your job, to bring it to their attention.
16. One of the strongest of all human motivations is the desire to be understood. Use this to your advantage during discovery by taking the time and effort to truly understand your buyer’s situation.
17. Think of discovery as the ladder that will get you over the wall of resistance and take you to the promised land of success.
18. Customers don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
19. It is critical for the discovery summary to be pinpoint accurate. Taking good notes will prepare you to deliver a discovery summary with a powerful punch.
20. You can download (for a fee) your own Mind Mapping software at mindjet.com
21. When I take notes on my mind map, I put a star next to the key points I want to include in my Discovery Summary. That way I can quickly glance down at my Mind Map and move through my Summary.
22. Warm prospects cool off quickly. A quickly scheduled follow-up meeting or solution presentation is a great way to keep your prospect’s attention focused on you.
23. Another secret to building credibility and integrity is to always tell your buyers what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.
24. You can not make big sales without big proposals
25. The more people talk about their objections, the less emotionally charged they will feel about it.
26. The one asking the questions controls the conversation
27. You’ll never regret the times you asked and were told no. But you will regret when you didn’t ask for the order because you were afraid.
28. To make sweeping changes in an organization, you have to have a small cadre of people who are wholly committed to making the change.
29. Be honest because it’s just the best way to be. And, by the way, it instills trust and respect like nothing else.
30. Winging it is an inexact science.
31. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
32. You never have a second chance to make a good first impression.
33. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.
34. You have to be on fire yourself to get someone else smoking.
35. The solution to all the world’s problems is to increase sales.
36. You have a choice. You can wake up at 9 and be well rested, or you can wake up at 7 and be a sales manager, or you can wake up at 5 and be a salesman.
37. Your pipeline is your lifeline.
38. Spray and pray prospecting won’t answer your prayers.
39. The way to predict the future is to create it.
40. We hold people to high standards and much of the time they will not achieve those high standards. We must understand that failure is part of the process to building success. We need to expect a certain amount of failure.
41. Give them something to respond to.
42. We take people out of their comfort zone. This is where the learning zone is.
43. Most companies focus on the metrics. We focus on the behaviors. It is those behaviors that determine the outcome of the metrics.
44. Beating on people only generates pain. And, no pain…no pain.
45. If you tell people what not to do, then they don’t know what to do.
46. The secret to rapport is getting to know the people you are coaching. They need to be convinced that you have their best interest at heart.
47. Somehow someway, I want to touch some body everyday.