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It Only takes 2 Things, and Neither One is Money, to be Financially Independent |
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Written by Cheryl Clausen
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Owning your own business, or working as a career sales professional, is very alluring for many reasons; but for one reason in particular. If you’ve ever worked at a job no matter how great that job may have been there was always a limit to how much you could earn given the position you held. The fact that there is no ceiling when you are your own boss is highly attractive. The fact that there is no floor either is tremendously scary. Especially if you feel like the floor is opening up and you’re about to fall through.
Among all the things the most successful folks in sales do and don’t do there are two that stand out. These two things have an immediate and dramatic impact on your results. And anyone can implement these two things and experience an exponential improvement in their sales results.
If these two things can be done by anyone, why doesn’t everyone do them? There are two simple reasons you and others don’t do these two things: fear, and inexperience. You’re afraid to do them because you think you’ll offend a prospect, and you’re afraid you’ll have to give up the floor so to speak and allow the prospect to do the talking. You’re afraid you’ll lose control of the sales conversation or lose your place in your “pitch”.
The first thing you can do that will make you financially independent if you’ll just do it is ask questions to uncover the prospects existing and current problems. Inexperienced sales people are great at asking questions about what’s going on with the prospect now, but they choke when it comes to uncovering the prospects real problems. There are two negatives with focusing on what’s happening now questions.
In many cases you’re asking the prospect questions you could already know the answer to if you’d done even a little background homework about the prospect. I know, you’ve been told that people just love to talk about themselves and if you can just get them talking about themselves they’ll start liking you and let their guard down. Bunk!
When you ask stupid questions, yes Jeffro there are stupid questions, you’re demonstrating to the prospect that you’re either too lazy or too stupid to do your homework. They feel you’re wasting their time and because they’re now annoyed with you they want to ditch you ASAP.
I know you’ve experienced this. You got the opening greetings out of the way without any glitches, and now you’re ready to start finding out how things stand. The prospect humors you through about three of these types of questions, but with each question you sense rising hostility from the prospect. Until now you probably had no clue why this was happening and why things went into a negative spiral from that point on ending with the prospect asking you to call back some time.
Lesson learned, do your homework. Then only ask questions that expand on or clarify what anyone could know if they just asked or looked. Then limit these questions to just two or three. You simply don’t need to beat this into the ground.
The second simple thing you can do that will make you financially independent if you’ll just do it is ask about the problems until you get to “the” problem the “real” problem. The whole point of asking problem questions is to help the prospect uncover or discover their own highly motivating reason to buy and to buy now. Unless or until you get to that point you’ll get lots of stalls and objections with few resulting sales. Now, I know this will surprise you at this point but, there are two things you can do to get to this real problem.
First, continue asking about and digging for the problems or challenges the prospect is facing until they tell you they can’t think of anything else. Yes, they must tell you there isn’t anything else you should never stop because you think that must be everything. Don’t be afraid to help them think of other possible problems. You can simply ask, “what happens if…?” to get them to think of things from another perspective. Once everything is on the table you’re ready for the next step.
Second, make sure you’ve got “the” problem before you ever utter a single solitary word about any solution. This is another fatal error made by inexperienced sales professionals. You hear a problem that has anything to do with your solution and you attack it like a dog on a fresh raw t-bone steak. Bad dog no biscuit for you!
If you’ve done your job to this point the prospect has given you a number of problems. However, each problem doesn’t carry the same weight in the prospects mind. And you certainly don’t want to guess which one is the most important so you simply ask, “you’ve told me a number of challenges keeping you from getting (whatever it is they want) of those you’ve mentioned what do you feel/see or what sounds like (depending on the prospects preferred communication style) the three most important?”
You now have the secrets to financial independence because you now have a motivated buyer. The prospect knows exactly what their worst problem is as they’ve articulated it to you and they’ve prioritized it by importance to them. All you have to do is help them discover why they need to remove their problem now, and they’ll be ready to hear your solution. A prospect is never ready to hear your solution “pitch” if you haven’t helped them to get to their highly motivating reason for wanting a solution. So get to “the” problem uncover the magnitude and increase sales by helping eager buyers to buy.
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Cheryl Clausen |
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Are you where you want to be? Cheryl Clausen's experience working with clients has been that many insurance agents and financial advisors aren’t where they want to be.At certain points in your business you just get really stuck, and you don’t know what to do to get you where you want to go.Well, my purpose is to help agents and advisors to get unstuck and get going again.
Would you like to learn more about your sales skills? Sales Skills Analysis
Read a daily article to get yourself or your team going:My Blog
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