Three Keys to Selling like a Superstar
written by john c ashworth
First, I’ll give you the three keys, and then I’ll cover number 1-3 in more detail in three different posts…
- Embrace selling
- Create Killer Scripts
- The final close – so easy to mess this one up; and so easy to correct. And when done right a skill that holds great potential for increasing your income exponentially.
Embrace Selling
This one is important because as I’m sure you’ve heard before, we are all salespeople and we all do some selling each and every day.
“I couldn’t be a salesperson, John. I prefer a steady paycheck.”
That’s OK if you like small paychecks. I prefer BIG ones, and I have the confidence to rely on my own skills, talents and results to get me there. No. It’s not always pretty or perfect, but in my experience, it’s always better in the long run. To get there, however; you have to be willing to take the risk and believe in yourself; and as always, you have to have the right mindset and attitude.
Also, I know we’ve all run into to plenty of bad salespeople so it’s natural that you might cringe a little when you think about the idea of embracing selling. Trust me though, to be successful, you MUST embrace selling. There’s no way around it. And you don’t have to be that greasy salesman guy we’ve all run into on more than one occasion.
Lastly, to fully embrace selling you must embrace your mindset, your fundamentals, and your implementation. Which is to say, you must be willing to risk everything, take a lot of action, fail a lot, learn from that failure, and then get back up again and start over. Over and over again, you MUST do this. That’s why so many people avoid it. This is a lot of failure to accept head-on. It’s just easier to hide behind your fear and mistrust of your own abilities. Do me a favor and stop selling yourself so darn short.
Your mindset can be a tough one too. We all experience the dips in our confidence. Especially when results are lagging as they sometimes do. But instead of letting that failure eat away at your mind like a dirty disease with no cure, these are the times when you need to clear everything away, and get back to the fundamentals, which is the essence of #2 above. The ‘how to’ of selling. The ‘what to say and when to say it stuff.’
You will quickly discover as a salesperson that it is very easy to blame everything external for your failures and lack of results, when in fact, it is almost certain that the opposite is true. And you have to be a big enough person to garner your self-awareness, admit your short-comings and get back to the basics. This, of course, brings you right back to #1 and #3 above.
I’ll finish with one more point about #1 – your mindset – and then I’ll cover the other two in more detail in separate posts. I had more to say than I thought I did when I got started on this post this morning.
I work on my mindset constantly and in many different ways. Here’s a short list of a few of the actions I take regularly to keep my skills and my work as a salesman as sharp as possible and as much of the time as possible.
- I read a lot about sales and marketing. I’ve been a ravenous student of this game for twenty plus years.
- I have a routine I follow each and every day. In fact, I have understood much more fully how important this routine actually is since we all started working from home to prevent the spread of covid-19.* It has taken great discipline to maintain the same habits and environment that I had created in my office at work, and there are certain things like my swim at the gym in the middle of the day that have caused a fair amount of disruption in my flow. I walk, and I do strength training twice per week, but without the pool mixed in for recovery and rejuvenation, it’s just not the same for me. Regardless, I work to follow pretty much the same routine every day to keep my mind on track so that I can still get the best results possible during these trying times.
- I run a diffuser with essential oils pouring into the air just to the right of my keyboard.
- I get up and stretch my back multiple times per day.
- I stretch my hamstrings even more.
- I have a 10 by 10 rule. Ten solid phone calls by 10 AM every single day. Seems simple and trite in this context but amazing in it’s ability to start every one of my workdays extremely productively
- I don’t overeat during the day. It makes me sleepy. In fact, I try and eat as little as possible for lunch. Just enough to get me to the end of the day. This helps prevent that dip in energy we all feel at 2-3 PM when your circadian rhythm goes primal on you.
- I have a really good breakfast.
- I go for a walk when I need to clear my head.
- I write to clear my thinking.
- I have a sales presentation and scripts that I use for every sales presentation and I continue to refine them over time. I’ll get into more about scripts when we talk about #2 in my next post on this subject.
- I follow-up. This goes back to implementation and I still can’t believe the statistics I hear over and over again about how infrequently and ineffectively salespeople follow-up with their prospects.
- There’s so much more, but I’ve gotta run.
Later,
-John