One of the keys for more effective selling is going for the ‘no’ early in the sales process. I learned this concept years ago especially when I was vulnerable to ‘think it overs’ (TIO). I would get ‘think it overs’ at several stages in the sales process and maybe you get them as well:

• On the initial phone call when you’re trying to get an appointment – “Let me think it over, give me a call next week.”
• At the end of your initial meeting – “This sounds really good and something I should consider. Let me think it over and I’ll get back to you in the next couple of days.”
• When you finish your presentation and you ask for the sale. “You made a very compelling presentation and we are impressed with your depth of knowledge and your very creative solutions to our problems. Let us meet as a group and go over this one more time and crunch some numbers.  Let’s plan on talking next week.”

Sound familiar?

Of course it does and these ‘think it overs’ are what is keeping you from being more effective in your sales process. That’s nice to know or consider but the question becomes, “What do I do about it?” (click here to listen to a 3-minute audio clip on eliminating TIO)

As I learned early on is to get ‘no’ as soon as you can. What is important to understand about getting ‘think it overs’ is the mindset of your potential buyer. Your potential buyer will tell you that they need to think it over because:

• They really don’t intend on making any changes but you impressed them with some information that they want to take to their current provider and see if they can do what you can do.
• They have a need for approval and instead of telling you they are not interested they want to let you down easy. Telling you they want to think it over gives you hope and get’s them off of the hook until the next time you talk.

To fix the problem, eliminate ‘think it over’ as an option. Let your prospect know that when you finish the next meeting, next conversation, the final presentation, they will have everything they need to make a decision. You can tell them that you will be prepared to answer all of their questions and when you are finished, they will be in a position to make a decision- yes or no. Then simply ask what objections they have to that process.

This one key will help you close more business, more quickly at higher margins.

For more tips on how to uncover a prospects real reason for wanting to 'TIO' watch our Sales Guy Unplugged video on the "Question Behind the Question".

I’m stuck this morning. I’m reading “Building A Story Brand” by Don Miller and I'm looking over my own book “The Best Prospecting Book Ever Written”.  Don points out in chapter 7 that in order to get a prospect to push the ‘buy now’ button they have to trust that everything is going to turn out okay. That means that they have to trust you and everything you’ve said and presented to them. That’s a tall order if you are selling high-ticket items.

In my book, I just read the intro to Chapter 11 where I recount a meeting with Ron Rose at a Cincinnati GAMA meeting. I was a rookie in the Insurance business where Ron, on the other hand, was a 30-year veteran and multi-year MDRT (Million Dollar Roundtable) agent. I asked him what his best method for gaining prospects was and he took me through a series of questions that started with: “If I had your family locked up in a closet with a bomb, that was going to go off in 24 hours if you didn’t make a sale, who would you call on first?” I said, “somebody I already know”.

And that’s how I got stuck. 

Over the last 25 years, I have literally spent thousands of hours learning more and more about how to; build a sales practice, craft a strong sales message, present solutions to get people to say yes and more effectively guide my prospects through their buying process. Having said that, there are very few books, articles or presentations I’ve read that didn’t address prospecting. I’m in the middle of writing a script for our Instructor Lead Training Session on Getting Introductions. In the process of writing the script, I googled ‘Getting Introductions-- Tony Cole’ to see what else I may have written about the subject and that search took me to my book.

And that's where I got stuck.

You see, in Don’s book he points out that in order to help someone with the trust issue you have to provide your prospect with a plan. A plan that helps them arrive at the ‘buy now’ button on their own. Or a plan that helps them feel more confident after they’ve pushed the ‘buy now’ button. He used the analogy of putting down stones for the prospect to cross a creek.

That lead me to think about you and your sales approach. It caused me to stop and ask this question – what is your test drive? How do you help people get comfortable enough with you and your process so that the anxiety of making a mistake is minimized?  Imagine you’re buying a $50,000.00 vehicle without a test drive. Now put the number at $500,000.00.

And that is where I got unstuck.

Imagine how much easier it is for any prospect of yours to make a decision if you made it a habit of getting introduced to the person that is eventually going to ask you to write a check for $500,000.00. Doesn’t getting introduced eliminate some of the anxiety and stress because someone you already trust and have confidence in has taken the test drive?

If you’re are looking for a better, more effective way to maximize your sales growth, register now for the upcoming live broadcast “The 8 Strategies to Reach Your Company’s Sales Growth Opportunity Gap“.

There is a sales production target out there – somewhere. It’s different for every person and every organization but it’s out there. And for every person and every organization there is the actual sales production result that is being achieved today. That is the Sales Opportunity Gap. 

If you’re are looking for a better, more effective way to maximize your sales growth, register now for the upcoming live broadcast

“The 8 Strategies to Reach Your Company’s Sales Growth Opportunity Gap“.

As I have mentioned in recent articles, How Do Extraordinary Financial Planners Close The Sales Opportunity Gap and The Gap Analysis Between Your Best Sales People and the Rest, the Objective Management Group Sales Effectiveness and Improvement Analysis is the guide that makes you the hero to close the sales growth opportunity gap. Those findings clearly lay out the current status of the sales team in these areas:

• Will to Sell and Will to Manage Sales
• Sales DNA, Sales Management DNA
• Sales and Sales Management skills
• Systems and processes that support sales growth
• Alignment of sales, marketing and business strategies between the senior executive and management
• Consistency in value proposition, elevator pitch and brand promise
• Recruiting systems
• Pipeline management and forecasting

These items are critical to understand if you ever hope to strategically and intentionally grow sales in your organization (or for yourself).

But this alone is not enough. Goals and Grind (G2) are also 2 requirements to get you from where you are to where you could be.

I'm reading Bob Rotello’s “How Champions Think in Sports and In Life”. I am in the middle of the chapter: Goals, Plans and Process. Lots of people talk about goals, goals setting and having a plan to achieve said goals. And there is lots of information out there about how important it is to have an accountability system in place to make sure you execute the plan. But the thing that struck me about Bob’s chapter is the discussion about the GRIND.

 from Getty Images

GRIND: The grind isn’t tricky and it’s not talked about enough when it comes to discussing how to achieve a goal. The grind is the day-in and day-out stuff that you have to do to leverage your God given talents. The grind is the hard stuff, the stuff where we have a tendency to procrastinate.

The grind in Sales?

• Making the prospecting effort
  • Email – easy
  • LinkedIn connections – easy
  • Making the call and face the rejection – the grind
• Pre–call strategy sessions
• Post-call debriefing sessions
• Practicing your presentations over and over again
• Improving your product knowledge
• Going to training classes to improve your sales skills
• Practicing your sales skills
• Inputting data in your CRM
• Going to sales meetings
• Having 1-on-1 coaching sessions with your manager

This is the grind. This is the stuff day-in and day-out that when executed properly leads you to your definition of success. This is what leads you to accomplishing your goal. Without the grind your goal is just a dream.

We spend a great deal of time with our clients teaching and coaching them about how to drive sales growth. The process for them is rarely easy. The reason(s) being:

• They have their own set of beliefs about how things should or shouldn’t be done.
• They’ve had ‘some’ success doing things the way they do things.
• If they have a need for approval or believe that the best way to get their salespeople to perform is to get those salespeople to like them then they are not very likely to do things that might cause discomfort.
• In many cases they’ve never been taught how to teach or coach. They’ve been taught to be great bankers, insurance brokers or investment advisors.
• Their strengths lie in the administrative and operational duties of sales management rather in the development of people.

IF you’re are looking for a better, more effective way to maximize your sales growth, register now for the upcoming live broadcast "The 8 Strategies to Reach Your Company's Sales Growth Opportunity Gap".

I was watching this Ted Talk that my friend Bill Eckstrom delivered at the University of Nevada. The title and subject of his talk was “Why Comfort Will Ruin Your Life”. I hadn’t thought about the connection of comfort and coaching until I watched the video just after delivering a full day workshop to a group of bank market and sales managers.

In the session, our topics were:

• Motivation that Works
• Hiring Better Sales People

In our previous sessions, we covered:

• Accountability – Setting Standards and Performance Management
• Coaching for Success (Article)

We’re covering the same content for another bank’s investment advisory group and I'm observing the same reactions and results to what we are teaching/coaching in both groups. And as I think about all of the other companies we’ve worked with over 25 years the reactions and the results are the same. 

1. The group normally gets very uncomfortable about how and what we are teaching and coaching.
2. They get better at what they are doing and as a by product their teams perform better.

I can say without reservation that there is a connection between discomfort and growth. If your organization is in the need of sales growth, or there is a sales growth opportunity that you have to take advantage of or leverage, then those two outcomes won’t happen unless you cause some level of discomfort.

As the Canadian Olympic coach, Peter Jensen suggests, the levels of discomfort, or the passion to pursue the opportunity, have to be extreme. If not, you remain, your people remain in the comfort zone and remaining in the comfort zone means that change/growth will not happen.

What prompted this article was a post from Jeff Ferraris, a program manager for CUSO Financial Services in Austin,Texas. The article – "Leading With Planning: Master Financial Planning With These 6 Steps" – takes investment advisors through a best practices process to have success implementing financial plans for high net worth clients. Aside from the ‘know how’ and the licensing required, what else do your advisors need in order to be successful in their role? 

There are many answers to that question but generally speaking they need to have these sales capabilities:

• Hunting
• Qualifying
• Being a Consultative Seller
• Presenting
• Closing
• Farming or account managing

Need to know how your team measures up against the
best in your industry?
Click here to access Objective Management Group's Stat Finder.

I’m going to focus on the skills required for success when qualifying and selling consultatively. Below are two charts of the competencies necessary to be successful in these two capabilities.

The Qualifier Skill Set

The Consultative Seller Skill Set

As you can see there are multiple skills that make up the competencies for Qualifying and Consultative skill sets. In this scenario, and not unusual in general, of the 55 salespeople evaluated, 22% of the group had enough consultative skills to be effective and only 30% had enough qualifier skills to be effective.

What impact does this lack of skill in these two areas have on investment advisors and the ability to successfully execute a strategy of using financial plans? Broker dealers that are attempting to help clients improve both the quantity and quality of their plans must get to the root cause of the problem.

Here are the 3 BIG weaknesses in the Qualifier Competency:

1. Talking to the decision maker: if your investment advisor fails to meet with the decision maker– UP FRONT– then it will impact the sales cycle duration and the closing ratio.
2. Uncomfortable talking about money: Investment advisors often don't have to worry about discussing money. If you think about the challenges your advisors face when presenting a financial solution, many don’t close opportunities for risk products because they encounter a money objection and aren’t comfortable talking through price.
3. Self–limiting beliefs: If your advisors don’t have a financial plan, if they don’t own individual disability or long-term care insurance, if they are way under insured for life insurance, how committed do you think they will be recommending it to a client?

And here are the 3 BIG weaknesses in the Consultative Seller Competency:

1. Ask enough questions– Executing the financial plan process is more than asking how much. The effective IA must ask a ton of “why” questions.
2. Demonstrates patience– The very nature of most advisors is to close the sale they have in front of them– the transaction for the IRA roll-over. How does that support the 90-day process of financial planning? It doesn’t.
3. Maintain healthy skepticism– If your IA believes everything the client is telling them then they will never ask about other advisors, the other assets, the real decision-making process, etc. So instead of a 6x multiple from doing plans they will pick up the easy money from the next maturing CD.

To find out more about how to effectively identify those advisors ‘wired’ for fee-based sales and financial planning, email alex@anthonycoletraining.com, subject line "tailored fit", to create your own case study by evaluating your top advisors.