My background is in sales. I started selling as a part time job in College and today I regularly speak at National Sales meetings. Over the years I’ve met many extraordinary sales professionals. I find the best–the sales leaders–never leave anything to chance. They use time proven strategies and tactics to succeed.

Many years ago I worked with a client to develop a four-step system for converting a prospect into a buying customer (or for getting a customer to buy more). Here is that strategy that  you—and everyone on your team—should remember and use for successfully completing the sales process. Whenever you engage a prospect or client:

Meet—establish rapport by being genuinely interested. If you don’t spend time getting to know your prospect (and letting them get to know you), you’re jumping over the first critical step in the sales process.

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Analyze—what does the prospect need and how can you help? Many salespeople move into presenting solutions too quickly. Your value is your ability to meet the specific needs and solve the particular problems that your prospect faces. As the old saying goes, prescription without diagnosis is malpractice.

Present—offer your solutions based on the analysis you’ve done. Demonstrate that you’ve heard and understand the prospect by showing how your products and/or services will meet their needs. Make your presentation interesting and compelling.

Sell—check the prospect’s reaction to your presentation and ask for the order. If you’ve done well in the first three steps the fourth step will enable you to make the sale. If you meet resistance, go back to analysis and find out what you missed.

Selling is rarely easy but that doesn’t mean the process isn’t simple. Use MAPS as a checklist for making more sales.

(Of the books I’ve written, The Encore Effect is the most powerful for sales professionals. It is packed with ideas you can use to become the kind of sales pro that customers want to buy from again and again. Learn how to become irreplaceable by clicking here.)

There is a very nice home in our neighborhood that was bought as a foreclosure and then renovated to flip. My wife Darla and I have seen the inside and it is nicely finished with a huge backyard.

There is also a spray-painted patch on one of the garage doors and a big ding on the other. It would look bad on any home much less one listed at $650,000.

I asked the realtor why it hadn’t been fixed. “Oh, it will be very soon. The seller knows that it detracts.”

That was six weeks ago and nothing has been fixed.

Great house, decent value and off-putting features. One of these is not like the others.

How often do we have garage door dings in our businesses? We have a great product or value proposition but there is a payment policy that customers don’t like or  a service rep who is unpleasant or bad response times to inquiries or… And we know these things are off-putting and plan to fix them right away. But we don’t get around to it. We’re like the investor who renovates the house but only gets it 99.3% right.

Thought for the day: look for the dings and flaws in your value proposition. Find the dent in the garage door and fix it ASAP.

My long time speaker colleagues and friends Tony Alessandra and Jerry Teplitz have written a very interesting new book called Switched On Selling. It goes beyond the traditional sales techniques you might be familiar with to address deeper psychological and physiological challenges and opportunities. In the book they teach some fascinating ideas about improving your brain for better selling success. Here’s how they describe the book:

Have you ever wondered what it is that sets extraordinary salespeople apart from those who are just getting by? Are they simply more talented or more intelligent? Do they have better connections with decision-makers? Or is something else going on? The fact is that super-successful salespeople not only have great personalities and proven, powerful sales methods, they also have an elusive quality that we might call the X-factor. Super-successful salespeople more easily work through challenges and keep focused on their goals. Whether they know it or not, they are successful because they have subconscious beliefs that support success.

This book is based on a seminar Jerry has taught to tens of thousands of salespeople.  In it, anyone can learn to change subconscious beliefs that do not support success.  This is done through a process called a Brain Gym^® Balance, which actually re-educates the brain, allowing you to discover the specific aspects of the selling process that are difficult and then eliminate the internal blockage to that goal. After doing the Balance, your brain will no longer perceive the blockage to that part of selling and, without effort, you will achieve greater selling success.

If you have thoughts like, “Prospects never answer my calls,” then it’s more likely that your calls will go unanswered. If you believe that closing sales is hard, it will be more difficult to attain success. Any limiting beliefs that you hold about success, abundance, effectiveness or other issues relating to the sales process are part of your subconscious programming.

The big question is this: Where does that programming come from? Why do you automatically “default” to the little voice inside that says that prospects don’t respond positively to you? Why doesn’t your little inner voice shout out to you: “I can do this.” “Cold calls are easy.” The problem is that the programming in your subconscious mind is locked in there—like a database of stored programs on a computer.

You can think of a Brain Gym Balance as re-wiring and rebalancing the circuitry of your brain from a fear / survival focus, which is triggered by past negative or stressful experiences, to a present time / choice focus. Through this re-wiring process, you will create new neural pathways that will make it easier to achieve the success you are looking for in your sales career.

In most cases, the goals that you currently find difficult to achieve are triggering an automatic stress response in the part of the brain called the amygdala. This response causes your amygdala to send a signal to the body’s fight-or-flight survival mechanism, which keeps you in the old “It’s difficult to achieve” or “I can’t do that” mental programming. You are caught up in the memory of negative experiences and stuck in your inability to achieve your goal.

The Balance reprograms the brain so the signal will be directed to the cerebrum instead, allowing you to choose a new response related to that situation. By doing the Balances, you will be switching off the amygdala’s stress response while you will be switching on the cerebrum’s ability to choose new responses for the different aspects of the selling process.

Switched-On Selling also includes selling techniques from master sales trainer, Dr. Tony Alessandra.  The combination of the Brain Gym Balances and Dr. Alessandra’s leading-edge sales methods allows anyone to think like super-successful salespeople.  Jack Canfield, co-author of Chicken Soup For the Soul book series, said this book will enable you to reach “superstar status.”

To order Switched-On Selling: Balance Your Brain For Sales Success, you can go to www.Amazon.com or www.Teplitz.com.

Somebody in the White House screwed up, pure and simple. It was announced that the President would be talking to America’s children on school time.

And he did but apparently with less success than hoped for. Schools were given the choice to opt out and some did because of the uproar. “What will you talk about? Why not in the evening when we can all listen together?” Inquiring parents wanted to know.

Why the ruckus?

I learned a long time ago that the best time to deal with objections is in advance. Don’t tell parents “I’m going to be talking with your kids at school.” That’s not enough information. Tell them what you’ll be talking about. Reassure them in advance that you’re not promoting a partisan agenda or touching on uncomfortable issues. Tell them you’ll have a list of talking points on the internet so they can discuss with their kids what you said when they come home.

There seems to be a certain arrogance these days in the White House, whether from the president or his team I’m uncertain.  No idea is so good that it doesn’t need to be sold. There is no personality so big that it escapes the gravity of necessary communication. There is little or no downside to giving people plenty of information. Lacking information, they’ll fill in the blanks with their own ideas, right or wrong.

Education is important and making the most of it is the responsibility of every student. No disagreement there regardless of your political orientation.

Why couldn’t that have been communicated before the ruckus? Maybe more schools would have tuned in.

My trees are out of control. Some are growing into the deck, one is lop-sided and several need trimming.

I called four tree trimmers found online. One never called back. Three returned my call. Two got my address, came by and left a quote.

But one guy wouldn’t do that. “Don’t you want to know who’ll be doing the work on your trees? he  asked.

Ah, well…didn’t seem critically important to me, but he made me pause so consider. I agreed to meet with him.

Mark Mortenson showed up exactly on time (good start). We walked around the property. He explained things to me. He made notes. Great…now all I needed was a quote.

Not so fast.

“Is there a place we can sit and talk?” We located on the patio and he pulled out a three ring binder. He explained that he was an arborist (were the other tree trimmers?) He explained how one got that certification and flipped to the pages in his binder that contained his scores and certification.

Next he showed me the proper licenses needed to operate in my county.

Then it was on to the copious photos of work he’d done (before and after). He also had a bunch of current thank you and testimonial letters.

In the process I got a crash course in trees. It was quite interesting, actually.

At the end he gave me his bid. It tied with another guy for the highest of the three.

He got the business. It is one thing to be good, another to claim to be better than the competition and yet a third to be able to prove you’re better. Mark did just that.

Did I try to negotiate? No. Instead I shared my philosophy: “I could ask you for a better price, but you strike me as an honest person. You might take less but when you come to do the work, I want you to do the best job possible. You’ll know I didn’t nickel and dime you and my hope is that will be an incentive to do an even better job.”

By the way, Mark is a Gypsy Jazz musician. I wasn’t familiar with that type of music until I went online and listened to his band. Its good stuff.