What Is Your 'Secret Ingredient' In Sales?

What is the single most difficult part of selling? Finding prospects? Closing the sale? Overcoming objections? Is it marketing, time management, or learning how to handle rejection?

No, it isn’t any of those. And, at the same time, it is all of those.
The single most difficult part of selling is figuring out how you can align your sales business with your personal strengths and minimize your weaknesses.

Sounds simple, right?

Hardly.

85% of all salespeople either fail and are flushed out of sales or never progress beyond simply being average or a little above average because they’ve never learned how to make their sales process with whom they are. Instead, they try to be who the sales trainers and their managers tell them to be—“use this marketing method and you’ll be successful”; “use this sales process and you’ll be successful”; “prospect this way and you’ll be successful.”

Guess what? That doesn’t work.

Every salesperson, professional and business owner is unique, with a unique set of personal behavioral traits, a unique personality, and with their own set of learned skills.

Although you can lean new skills, your behavior and personality are difficult if not impossible to change. In order to become a top producer, you MUST align your sales business with your personal strengths and you MUST minimize your personal weaknesses.

Trying to be someone else, working the way they work, doing what they do, using the same techniques and strategies they use won’t get you where you want to be.

That’s the “secret” the top producers have discovered. They’ve learned what works for them.

Ideas vs. Opportunities

Ideas are a dime a dozen.Opportunities are much more important.An opportunity is an idea that's passed the test of planning. It has potential. You can implement it.

An opportunity has some of the following elements:

• Industry and market potential: look at market structure, industry structure, growth rate, margins, costs, etc.
  Economics: capital requirements, fixed costs, cash flow, return on investment, risk.
  
• Competitive advantage: degree of control, barriers to entry, availability of sufficient resources.


• Management team: people who know the industry, the market, the operations, the logistics, the road to market.

The business planning process is about filtering the opportunities -- a precious few, requiring focus, and planning -- from the ideas.

Whether you're working on a new start-up business or growing an existing business, you need to encourage lots of ideas and then use your planning to filter them down into the real opportunities.

Remember displacement ... recognize that you can't do everything. You want your plan to help you focus in on the best opportunities among your longer list of ideas.

There is no external meter of good and bad opportunities. What you're looking for is the right mix between business potential and your ability to reach that potential, given your position, core competence, strengths, weaknesses, and resources

The Power Of NEED

When Your ambiance in the Store is comfortable, the food is consistent, but your profit margins and bottom line are weak. What do you do?

The answer is simple-
sell more, acquire a taste for creativity, and bring your service standards up a notch and your profit will follow.
The Meal Assembly experience is just that, and customers often need a guide to help them through this adventure.

They do not know what they need.

Become the expert, & create the “Power of Need’

Food for Thought for this December:

67% of guest does not know what they need when they walk Thur your door.
87% of guest want someone to make this buying decision (dinners) for them.
99% of guest will purchase on average 3x more if someone creates the ‘Power Of Need’ to them

"But...I Could Never Sell!!!"

Several weeks ago, as I took my seat in the crowded airplane, the woman in the next seat over smiled. "Headed home?" she asked.
I nodded. "Seattle, Washington."

"My, you're a long way from home!" she exclaimed. We were on the tarmac in Orlando, Florida. "What brought you to Orlando?

"I told her I had been at the MOPS (mothers of preschoolers) Convention as a vendor for Dream Dinners education Moms the value of sitting around the dinner table. She wrinkled her nose. "Oh," she pronounced, "I could never talk about something all weekend let alone sell it"

This wasn't the first time I'd heard this. In fact, most people not actually in sales seem to feel this way. I asked her, if she didn't mind, how would she define "selling"? I was curious as to what it was she felt she could never do.

She frowned in thought. "I don't know," she said after a moment. "I guess, maybe, 'pushing things on other people.'

"Ah. Well in that case, I wouldn't be very good at it either," I replied. "I don't really like it when people do that to me. Do you?"

"Not at all," she answered promptly.

"Do you buy from those people?"

"No way!" she said.

"Me neither." We both smiled. After a moment, I went on. "But what if," I paused and thought for a moment, "what if we defined selling as 'Helping someone get something they want or need?' What if we defined it as adding value to someone's life? Did you know that the original Old English word selling means to give?"

She shook her head.

"I didn't either, but I looked it up. Amazing, isn't it?

"She nodded.

"What if we saw selling that way, as giving - as sharing the benefits of a product that we ourselves love, and helping others get those same benefits? If we saw it that way, do you think you'd feel it was something you might be able to do?"

"If I really believed in it myself?" she said. "Well ... definitely!"

"So, maybe it isn't that you could never sell," I suggested, "just that you'd really need to feel you were helping someone, adding value to their life, giving value and sharing the benefits of something that you yourself truly believed in."

"Yes" she replied excitedly. "That, I could definitely do."

"Me too!" I replied. "I think just about everyone could.

At the end of the flight I introduced her to one of the women from the Mops Convention that happened to be on the flight. As I rushed to my next gate, I left the two of them in animated conversation about the possibilities in store for this young woman future....

It's a shame. There are still people who see selling as a negitive. Personally, I think selling is the most positive aspect of business.

We all have products and services that enrich our lives, that we need, want and even love. The fact is, we love to buy and we love to own - and it often takes a sales person to educate us and help us connect our needs and desires with the benefits that those products and services provide our lives. This not only benefits us personally, it also provides the basis for a vibrant and growing free market economy.

Selling is giving - giving time, education, advice, counsel, value - and the more you give, the more you receive. Knowing that, how could anyone not sell ... and not be proud to do so?