Value Based Selling Part II

I wanted to pick up where I left off in the last article about value based selling.  If you have not yet read that article, I suggest you do so before reading this one.  You can read it HERE.

In this article I would like to focus on 4 very important steps to value based selling.  They are:

1. Give the customer options
2. Continue to build value
3. Focus on the customer’s needs
4. Build a lasting impression

Give the customer options – In the last article I mentioned giving the customer options.   People, by nature, want the ability to choose.  Most people are comfortable choosing between two options.  If you only give them one option (“You need to have this done”), they will usually turn it into two options (1 – Get it done, or 2 – don’t get it done).  They want a choice.   If you give them three or more options, that gives them too many choices and they will often choose to do nothing, or choose to take time to think about it.  That is not usually the desired result.

If given a choice between two viable options, people will often choose one of them.  That is good news for salesmen. An approach that I have often used is to tell the customer: “We have two ways that we can go about this.”  I then explain the benefits of the most expensive one, followed by the benefits (and limitations) of the cheaper alternative.  I then gauge their reactions before giving them the prices for each option.  I always list the most expensive first.  That is called bracketing up for money, which I will explain in another article.

So, if you notice, the customer has two choices – both of which involve having me address their needs.  There is no “wait and think about it” option.  In sales, you are always looking for the immediate commitment.

Continue to build value – Often times, the services that we offer can seem very similar to our competition.  In order to differentiate yourself from your competitors, you need to sell your customer on the one thing your competitors do NOT have: you.  What makes you different (better) than that other company who does the same type of service?  I do not want it to be that you are less expensive.  That is too easy to say, and too hard to accomplish.  It is also not the mark of a true professional salesman.

You need to know what your competition is offering and offer more.  Even things that seem silly to you will often mean a lot to the customer.  Sometimes, your service is very similar, so in order to build value, you need to mention things that the others will likely do, but neglect to mention.  Often it’s that silly little step that you mention that they other guys don’t that will give you the job.  Your customer needs to know that you are thorough and are going to great lengths to give them the service that they need.

Focus on the customer’s needs – I went into this a bit in the last article, but let me expand on the concept a little.  If you have been listening to them, you should have an idea of what’s important to them.  Still, it’s often a good idea to ask questions.  The right questions can accomplish a few things:

• It let’s the customer know that you care about what’s best for them
• It tells the customer that you’ve been paying attention
• It opens the door to explore options
• Helps to set you apart from the competition

An example of this might be: “So, if I understand you correctly, you want…, while…, without having to worry about…, and you want it done ASAP.  Am I on the right track?”  Then you can follow it up with letting him/her know that you have a couple of ways to accomplish those things and go on to tell them what those options are and ask which one he/she feels will work best for him/her.  Believe me when I say that not nearly enough salesmen do this, and it is very powerful.

Build a lasting impression – When I was in the field, the one thing I tried to accomplish more than anything else was having people call the company that I worked for and asking for me.  You want to make more money than anyone else at your company?  The best way to do that is build a list of repeat customers.  There are a lot of ways to do that, but I am focusing here on building a lasting impression.

One thing I see a lot is people getting the okay to perform their service and switching to “let’s get it done and get out”.  That is the worst thing you can do.  During the entire time, you need to keep the customer’s interest.  Interact with them while you are working, do little freebees for them, pet their dog/cat, etc.  By the time you are done with your service and are leaving, they should be asking you to stay for a beer or cookies or something.

After you leave their home or business, your customers will have three ways to remember you:

1. By looking at the work you did (or results of your service)
2. By the new hole in their pocketbook
3. By what they remember of you

Two out of the three of these needs to be good.  It is the difference between calling your company to complain and calling your company to ask for you to do more work for more money.  It is really that simple.

Finally there is one, VERY POWERFUL tool that you can use to accomplish all four objectives.

Be Creative!

Find new and innovative ways to service your customer’s needs.  Most salesmen in the service industry all focus on the same standard way of going about doing things.  If you can approach it from a different angle that can save the customer time, inconvenience or money, it will speak volumes!  Here is an example:

Mrs. Smith had a sewer main back-up.  A plumber came out and cleared her main, but said that it was in bad shape and needs to be replaced.  This kind of scared her, so she decided to get a few estimates.  She calls out 3 plumbers and tells them she is collecting estimates to replace her sewer.  All three plumbers give her an estimate to do just that.  She calls me out for her fourth and final estimate.  My first question is, “What makes you think you need a new sewer line?”  She tells me about the plumber telling her that it needed replacement.  It turns out that nobody has run a camera down her line to find out exactly what is going on. 

My next statement is obvious, right? “Well, I can replace your sewer line if you want, but there’s a really good chance that it’s unnecessary.  The only way to know for sure if you need an entirely new sewer line is to run a camera down the line and see what’s causing your problems.  The camera has a locator on the camera head, so I will know exactly where the problem is and how deep. You may just need a simple spot repair, which is a whole lot less expensive than a replacement.  I have a camera on my truck and can do the survey for you right now.  It’s $250, I can burn it to DVD for you, and if you have me do the repair, I will credit the camera survey back towards to cost of the repair.”

I may still not get the job, of course, but being creative and finding a way to start with a smaller scope of work that may save her a bunch of money has greatly improved my chances.  Is there still a chance that the line needs replacement?  Sure, but by offering to credit back the camera, I now have $250 worth of leverage to use to help me get the entire job.  Most importantly, I have a chance to get started and show off my stuff. :)

Hopefully that wraps up value based selling.  Stay tuned for another sales tips article coming soon!

Thank you for reading.
Steve

Value-Based Selling | Giving the Customer What They Want

Probably the most popular form of selling products and services is “Value-based” selling. When most people are trying to sell something, they will usually start off by telling their potential buyer how wonderful their product or service is. That is the essence of value-based selling.

Like most sales techniques, however, there is a method to it. Since it comes naturally to most people to try to sell something by talking about how great it is, they often overlook the technology behind it. The biggest drawback to value-based selling is that if you do not do it properly, your customers will often spend little time listening to what you are telling them and more time waiting for the “catch”. Fortunately, there is a way to combat that.

Service is a little easier than product sales in that regard, because the potential customer already knows that your service does not come for free. Whether you are a plumber or an electrician making a service call to a residence, or a mechanic who had a car brought to you to diagnose – the prospect knows that if they hire you, there is money involved. The question at that point is how much you are going to charge and for what specific service.

You want the customer to listen to your pitch. You don’t want them to be so far in their head about money that they can’t hear all the good stuff you are going to tell them. I found it very useful to get that part out of the way immediately. The trick is to do it without giving them any kind of price that they could object to. Once they told me about the problem they were having, I simply told them, “Not a problem. Let’s take a look at it and see what it’s going to take to make that right for you. Then we can discuss your options and see what’s going to work for you. Don’t worry, looking is free. I won’t do anything that is going to cost you a penny without your permission, okay?”

First of all, my customer is not worried about the “clock” running or me giving her a bill for looking or anything like that. That person knows that they are not paying anything until THEY decide they want to. That gives them a feeling of control and allows them to relax a little and listen to my suggestions. I also mentioned options. Whenever possible, you should always offer options. I will talk more about that in a later article, but for now, trust me on that one.

Notice also that I ended the statement with a question. More importantly, it was a question to which the only real answer is “yes”. Yes is a very powerful word. You should ask a lot of questions to which the only answer is yes. Even statements should be followed often by questions; do you know what I mean? The prospect should always get used to saying the word “yes” to you. Avoid asking them “no” questions at all costs.

Okay, so you’ve presented yourself to the client, they have informed you of their need (as they understand it) and you have put them a bit at ease. Now they are in a great spot for you to push value. Actually, if you have been doing every thing right, you have already been pushing value. Remember the last article on the Sales Triad? If you followed that principle, you have been showing them respect. They likely noticed that and appreciated it. That begins to build value. Remember that you are clean? More value. The fact that you set their mind at ease, like in the example above, adds more value. You are already beginning to give them the reasons why they should listen to you and follow your advice, before you even began talking about the service.

The goal of value based selling is to get your client to agree to buy before they even know the price. Write that one down and keep it in your wallet. It sounds nearly impossible, and in some cases it is – but not as often as you would think. Whether or not you can get your client to the point where he is willing to sign a contract, without even knowing the cost of doing so, is not as important as you doing everything you can to try to get him/her there. Now, common sense dictates that you do not flat out refuse to give a price until they will sign your contract, but that doesn’t mean that you just give the price when asked, either. The rule of thumb is that if they are asking “how much?” they are not yet ready to hear the answer.

Okay, let me back up a bit and explain how we show value. The first way is by using the “Sales Triad” to build respect and trust. The next thing we do is one of the most important things we can do as sales people – we listen. Let me rephrase that: WE LISTEN! The single greatest contributing factor to successful sales is listening. It is what separates decent salesmen from superb salesmen. You need to know what is important to the customer. You need to pay attention to the clues that you see and in what they say. Let’s look at an example:

I go to Mrs. Smith’s home in response to her requesting service for leaking pipes under her sink. After the introductions and reassuring her that the estimate is free, she leads me to the kitchen where I find that the waste pipes under the sink are leaking all over the place. I also notice that the disposer is old and showing signs of rust. My next step should be to ask general questions and listen closely to the answers. I want to know what’s important to her.

Most plumbers would look at it and tell her, “Well, Mrs. Smith, it looks like all of the pipes under the sink are shot and the disposer is looking like it’s about to leak as well.” Mrs. Smith would let them know that she never uses the disposer, and asks why it would leak if she never uses it. The tech replies that these things just kind of happen. Sorry, but it need to be replaced. That’ll be $650 for all of it. The best case scenario for the tech there is that she says okay (because she doesn’t really know any better) but she feels a bad taste in her mouth. More likely, she will thank him for the estimate and send him away because she needs to “Talk to her husband”.

How would I recommend approaching this situation? Well, first of all, she doesn’t care about the disposer until you say “about to leak”. Then she’ll fix it because she thinks she has no other option. Hopefully, she turned the other guy away and called me afterward, because I will ask enough questions to know details of the encounter. Then I will ask her, “but if you don’t use the disposer, why was he trying to get you to replace it?” She would answer that it needed to be done because it was starting to leak, to which I would respond, “You don’t need to replace it to keep it from leaking. I’ll just remove it for you and put a regular sink drain in its place. That will allow me to replace the drain lines under the sink to make them flow better and be virtually leak proof, as well as open up more space under the sink so your cleaning supplies won’t feel so cramped AND save you $100 in the process.” Is there any way in the world that that customer does not fully belong to me at that point? Don’t worry about the $100 less. I’ll tell you later why that doesn’t matter.

You always want to get as much information from the customer as you can. Everything they tell you and show you will be used against them. If they care about warranty, you stress warranty. If it’s price, you let them know how they will be saving money. Whatever it is that is important to them is what you focus on. That is the part that people most often forget. It is also the part that will make sure that you are successful.

I think I am going to stop this here for now and pick it up with a part 2 in the next few days. There is still quite a bit to cover about value-based selling.

See you then!

The Sales Triad – The First Impression and Beyond

I could not write a “Sales Tips” Blog without mentioning the first impression. Most people know that the first impression sets the tone for the rest of the sales call. A lot of people don’t give that fact the respect it deserves.

A prospective customer can tell so much about you from the first impression, that a bad one can be a deal breaker. There are many reasons for that, but in this article I am going to share with you one reason that has to do with another bit of technology. It is called the relationship triad. This actually has to do with friendship, but is also hugely in effect when it comes to sales. That’s why I renamed it for the title of this article. :)

It is very simple. As with all triads, it has three parts:

Respect
Trust
Friendship

Pay close attention to the order. It all starts with respect. You cannot really trust someone that you do not respect and you cannot really share a friendship with someone whom you do not trust. Most people don’t think about this, but if you take a second and give it some thought, you will know that it is true. So what does that have to do with sales? Am I telling you that you have to be friends with all of your prospects or customers? Of course not. I mean, it would sound all nice and warm and fuzzy to say that, but I am not here to blow smoke. I am a realist and I know that you are not going to be friends with even a small percentage of your customers. I AM saying however, that you need to develop a degree of trust to be an effective sales person. For that, you will need to first to develop… yep, respect!

Okay, so you are on your way to a sales call and you’re wondering, “So how do I build respect?” There are two very easy and effective ways to do that:

1 - Give respect (You need to give respect to get it back)
2 – Show that you respect yourself (no one will respect someone who does not respect themselves)

“Okay, give respect. I can do that. No problem. Show that I respect myself? Hmmmmmm…” Let me give you an example of what I mean. Those of you who have read some of my earlier articles or my bio, know that I am a service plumber. People call me out to their homes to give them a free estimate on fixing things like leaks under their sink, dripping faucets, water heaters that no longer give out hot water, etc (a sales call). It is my job to convince them that I am the one who should fix that problem. It is also my job to find and fix every bit of plumbing that they have in their home that is broken, or about to be broken – even the stuff under their house that they don’t know about (yet). I have three rules:

1 - I never sell a customer something they don’t need (unless I tell them they don’t need it)
2 – I make sure that nobody can ever come after me and say they could have done what I did better.
3 – I will not compromise my integrity.

So anyway, I want you to think “plumber” and tell me the picture you have in your head. Got it? Good, Now I will explain how I go about a service sales call and point out the different areas where I build respect.

First of all, I make sure I arrive on time. If I am going to be late for a sales call for any reason, I call my customer and tell them (respect for their time). Keep in mind that if you have an appointment window for a sales call between 9-10am, at 8:55, your customer is wondering where you are. At 9:01, you are late. Even though you are within your window, your customer is left waiting. Calling them before your window and telling them exactly when you will be there is showing respect for their time.

When I arrive, I do so in a clean truck (respecting myself). I NEVER park in their drive way. I park on the street (respecting their property). I knock on the door (or ring the bell). When they open the door, they will find me standing on their porch, a respectful distance from the door, with my body at roughly a 45 degree angle to their door (this is a passive, yet not disinterested stance that eases their mind a bit, and gives them some breathing room (showing respect)). They will look first at my smiling face (a salesman must always smile!), then to my clean boots (showing respect for myself) as I introduce myself. My standard introduction is usually, “Hi, John? I am Steve from Allstar Plumbing. I am here to fix your plumbing for you.” Polite, courteous and professional. Older people I will often call them by their last name (“Mr. Smith”). The other thing I did here was that by saying, “I am here to fix your plumbing for you”, I took the first step towards getting their mind off “estimate” and toward “fix” and I let them know that I was doing it for them. This is a sales technique that is closely tied to “the power of yes”, which I will write about at another time.

As you can see, I have barely opened the door, and already I am building respect. As I am introducing myself, the prospect is looking me over. My hand is extended in an invitation to shake hands (giving respect). Actually it is extended at about a 45 degree angle, so that they can see the palm. Guess what? Yep, my hands are spotlessly clean. I repeat, I am a plumber and my hands are spotlessly clean! My face is also clean. In fact, my uniform consists of a white uniform shirt, which is also spotless and I smell, ever so slightly, of cologne (I stress slightly). This is all showing a respect for myself that just screams “PROFESSIONAL”.

Remember that picture of the plumber that you had in your head earlier? How am I comparing?

Okay, so I shook hands with the prospective customer. I wait for them to invite me in. I will just stand there, wiping my feet on the porch mat until they invite me in (respect for their home). I will follow them to whatever they want to show me and I will listen. I need to digress for a moment here and stress the importance of listing when it cones to sales. The number one rule of sales is “listen”. It is what separates the pros from the amateurs. Not only does it show respect for the customer, but it gives you ammunition to use for the close. I had a job I went to about a month ago. The family had 4 toilets in their home (including the one in the back house), and none of them flushed correctly. These folks had two other plumbers at their home. Both told them that they needed to replace all of the toilets. I was the third one to show up. I let them take me around and show me all the toilets. They explained their concerns about how they operated and I listened. I spent ½ hour just listening to them talk about the toilets. I would offer answers to their questions and such, but mostly I listened. From listening, I decided on the toilets that I thought would work best for them. They decided to go with 3 of them for now and signed a contract with me, on the spot, for over $1800. Just a few days ago, they called me back to have me replace the fourth. Why did I get the sale? I was likely the most expensive estimate. It was because I listened and was able to, not only make them feel that I cared about addressing their needs, but through listening, I was able to quote different toilets that would better work for them (and helped mask the difference in price).

Another way that you build respect with your sales prospects is by having confidence in your product. They have to believe that you are the one who is the expert at whatever it is they need done. They will respect you a LOT more if they believe that you know what you are doing. You have to be confident. Sales is all about confidence. The thing is that you don’t need to be confident that you know how to fix something or build something or whatever. You just need to have the confidence that you can figure it out. I have often been heard to say that “there is no such thing as plumbing I can’t fix”. It is not because I claim to know everything. It is because when I come across something I don’t know, I am confident that I can figure it out.

So, to get back on track here… The important thing is that once you start building respect, you cannot mess it up. Once I get the contract signed for the first scope of work, I go out to my truck, take off my uniform shirt, so that I am working in my (plain white) t-shirt, put on latex gloves, get my tools and parts, etc., and get to work. I make sure I use drop cloths and whatnot to make sure I do not make a mess, I clean up when I am done and always try to keep the area where I am working clean and tidy. If something frustrates me, I will go outside and have a smoke, but I will not get mad at the plumbing in front of the customer. I will let them know that this is a particularly stubborn xxxx and apologize for the extra time it’s taking, but that builds value, so that is fine. All the time I am there, I do nothing to let the respect slide. When I am done with the job, I go back to my truck and put my uniform shirt back on, after making sure that I am otherwize clean, so that when I aproach the customer with the bill (or the estimate for the other work they should be doing while I am there) I am back in uniform and looking just the way I was when I arrived. I am showing respect for them in that I am taking the time to make sure that I am in a presntable state to discuss business.

Trust will begin to form before you even begin work, but will build fast once the customer sees a product. They see that you did a great job of addressing what they wanted addressed. As long as you do not do something to violate their trust, you have free reign to sell them anything you think they should buy. That's where the oportunity to upsel comes in. Just do not violate their trust or game over. That is sales: it takes a lot of work to get a customer where you want them, but just 1 wrong move to screw it all up.

The company I work for had a customer for years that was absolutely loyal. They would call us and only us for anything she needed. She had a big, old house that she gave us thousands of dollars over the years to fix. Small things like faucets and big things like a sewer main replacement. We had her trust and her loyalty. She would do whatever we recommended. One day, we sent someone out to her home to take a look at a problem she thought she was developing. It turned out to be a non-plumbing related issue, but the tech charged her a $48 diagnostic fee. We lost that customer over $48. We were within our policy to charge her, but we shouldn’t have. It showed no respect for the loyalty she gave us. One of our managers personally returned the check to her, but by that time it was too late. Never violate the customers trust, or you will never get it back.

I hope these are helping you to sell more and for more money. I think I will write my next Sales Tips article on “Value-based” selling. See you soon. Go sell stuff!

Breath Life into Your Sales - The CPR

Sales is all about mindset. The technology of CPR (together with The World Sucks Chart, which we covered in an earlier post) is geared towards getting you in the right mindset to go out and be successful. Combined with the sales techniques that I will be sharing with you in future articles, the use of the CPR can turn you from a decent salesman into a great salesman.

CPR stands for “Context, Purpose, and Results”. Nobody does anything without first doing a CPR, yet most people don’t know they do. As with a lot of the information I will be sharing with you, a CPR only becomes a useful sales tool when you are aware of the fact that you are using it and you can control it.

Everything you do, whether conscious or sub conscious, planned or unplanned has a result. It can be a good result or a bad result, but every action has a result. Your brain sends a signal to your eye – the result is that your eye blinks. The result of your eye blinking is that your eyeball is coated with a fresh layer of tears, the result of which is that your eye is kept in an optimum condition to be able to accurately judge when to slow down before you rear-end the car in front of you. All results.

What about purpose? Well, the purpose is to achieve the results you want. It is the reason you do whatever it is you are doing. If you never do anything without having a result, it stands to reason that you can also do nothing without a purpose. A well thought out purpose will usually be a little deeper though. The purpose usually contains a compelling reason (or reasons) for wanting the result: To retain moisture by the act of blinking so that the eye will have the ability to effectively discern depth perception to a degree that allows the host to accurately decide upon a safe stopping distance behind the car in front of him and with that avoid a collision that would likely cause unwanted damage to one or more vehicles and could cause bodily damage to the host or others as well as increased insurance premiums. Hello Purpose!

Context is whoever you are at any given time. I will explain in just a bit, but for now, suffice it to say that you always have a context. Let’s delve a little deeper into CPR and then I will explain how it can help you with sales. As with all things in life that are well planned, we will begin with the end in mind.

Results:

So, we know that everything we do has a result. A result is simply what you want to achieve from a specific action or scenario. The trick with results is to know whether or not you have achieved them. To make sure that you know when you have achieved your results, there are guidelines that can help. They are called S.M.A.R.T. That handy little acronym stands for:

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Relevant
Time-based

If you have a result that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based, you will have no problem knowing whether or not you have achieved your result. If, however, one of those criteria is missing, there is room for ambiguity. So how do you know if your results are SMART? Simple. You need only ask yourself the following questions:

· Specific – Is the result too broad? If so, narrow it down.
· Measurable – What is the visible sign that this result has been achieved?
· Achievable – Can this result actually be accomplished?
· Relevant – Does this result have anything to do directly with what I am actually doing?
· Time-based – Is there a set time/date by which this result needs to be obtained to be considered achieved?

Each set of results should have a personal result – something that you want to feel from it.

Purpose:
From your results, choose the most important result and ask yourself why that is important. Then ask yourself why the answer to that question is important. Continue that process until you have 5 answers. This is called “drilling down”. Some also call it “peeling the onion”. The answers should go higher and higher up the world sucks chart (be higher and higher in purpose). I always write my purpose in a specific format:

To – what I want to accomplish
By – how I am going to do it
So that – why I am doing it
And with that – the bigger why

Here is an example using product sales. It is the purpose that I am selling what I sell, and the overall purpose that I keep in mind on every sales call. Let’s say that I am selling self help seminars, and that my most important result is that upon following up, my customers expressed that the seminar really helped them and wanted to be updated as to how to attend more. My purpose might look like this:

To continually grow a base of motivated repeat customers, serious about self help, by effectively matching my customers to the seminars that best fit their self help needs, so that each of these customers will use the technologies they learned to better their communities, and with that build a stronger and better society for future generations.

Either that or I can just go out and sell these seminars so that I can pay the rent. Which mindset do you think will contribute most to my success? Does the purpose seem too big? Maybe it is. Maybe I need to bring it down a notch and focus more on “community” rather that going all the way to “society”. It depends where I am in my life and where on the World Sucks Chart I want to operate. I wonder what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s CPR looked like…

Context:

As I stated above, your context is who you are at any given point. For a CPR, you just ask yourself, “Who do I need to be to achieve my purpose and attain my result?” Get a picture in your mind of what it looks like to successfully do whatever it is you are setting out to do and give that picture a name. The name should only be a couple of words (maximum of 3) and should bring that picture instantly to mind. For the instance above, I remember Anthony Robbins in his old infomercials, promoting his seminars. I can see his face, his animation, the way he was so excited about his seminars that you were really compelled to want to see what they were about. It was very effective. I call that picture “Robbins”. When I think of that work, it brings back the picture in my head. I remember how he was and remember that I need to be that man when selling seminars. “Robbins” is my context.

Putting it all together:

Okay, so I have studied myself and my place on the World Sucks Chart. I know where I want to be on the chart and realize that I need to be thinking “higher purpose”. I decide to start doing that by writing a CPR for my job. I keep that CPR with me and refer to it often, so I am always reminded of why I am selling what I sell and the man I need to be to do a good job at it. Keeping in mind that people read your context better that the words you give them, I’m sure you can see how this technology can be a huge benefit towards increasing your sales. More than that, though. I recommend that you do a CPR on all of the areas of your life that are important to you. It not only gives you guidelines on how to go about making positive changes in your life, but gives you a point of reference. Any tough choice you may be faced with can benefit from your CPR. Compare your options against your CPR for that area of your life. Will it help you to attain your purpose/results? Does it fit your context? Using a CPR can make all kinds of tough decisions easier.

Next time, I will gear things more towards customer interaction. Much more “sales” oriented. In the mean time… Go sell stuff!

The World Sucks Chart – How to Go From Salesman to Powerhouse

Before we begin with sales strategies, there are a couple of bits of technology that you really should learn. One of these is the CPR, which will be discussed in the next chapter. The other is The World Sucks Chart. Kind of a funny name, but very powerful sales technology. I learned these technologies from some very powerful men who taught a class called “Leadership Training”. When I say that they are powerful men, I do not mean that they are high ranking politicians or men with a big influence on national or international policies or huge connections in all the “right” circles or anything like that. These are simply men who possess a huge amount of personal power. People who know them respect them. People who meet them find themselves wanting to know them better. These are the type of men who would speak and you would naturally find yourself wanting to listen.

Using the World Sucks Chart along with the CPR is so powerful that it will not only increase your sales, but it could very well change your life. If fact, you could know twice the sales technology that I do and be gifted enough to know when to use the right technology for every situation. I will use only my knowledge of the service I sell together with CPR and the World Sucks Chart, and I will outsell you. If I use those technologies and you do not, I will have a higher closing rate than you do and higher average sales, no matter how much other tech you use. It is really that powerful

The World Sucks Chart looks like this:

You see that the chart looks like a funnel. The label “Purpose” is used to describe the height of the funnel and “Context” is used to describe the width. The lines inside the funnel are like platforms, and each is labeled (self, family, team, etc.). First we should make sure that we all understand the words “purpose” and “context”.

Purpose is the easiest to define: It is the reason we do something. As you will see in the next chapter on CPR, a purpose is usually to attain a result (or results). More than that, a purpose usually contains a compelling reason to want to achieve that result (or those results). I will give some examples of that as we progress.

Context is an interesting word. I have heard more people explain context in more ways than I would ever care to remember. I have a definition that I like that seems to cover them all – That which surrounds and defines. Simple, yes? If you claim that someone took a quote “out of context”, it means that they gave that quote without the other elements that surrounded that quote which gave it the meaning that was intended when the quote was originally spoken. When I speak of context in respect to sales, I mean it to mean that which surrounds and defines you. In simpler terms – the person your are being. If that is confusing, it won’t be in a few minutes.

I have had the most success teaching about the world sucks chart by offering a sample scenario, so I will do the same here.

Let’s say for instance that I am a young single male (early 20s) who is working as a service plumber for a decent sized plumbing company (sorry. I am a plumber, so this is easiest for me). Every day I wake up, shower, go to work, come home, eat dinner, watch TV and go to bed. I have a small apartment that suits my needs. I pay the rent on time, pay my bills, go shopping for groceries and what-not, fix my own meals and do my own laundry. I do enjoy my work, but the enjoyment I get from selling plumbing repairs and fixing plumbing is not really my purpose for going to work. My purpose for going to work every day is so that I can pay my rent, my bills, etc. so that I have a roof over my head, food to eat, clean laundry... I know I need those things to basically survive. My purpose is all about self. The person I need to be to achieve what I need to every day is just who I am – Hard worker, salesman, responsible enough to pay bills on time and a decent enough employee to keep my boss happy. It doesn’t sound too bad, but it is what is known as a shallow existence. Take a look at the chart above and you will see that the “self” area requires a very narrow context, as it is at the very bottom of the chart.

So I am living my life, working hard at my job, and doing a decent job of being successful at the “self” level. All of a sudden I meet some girl that I fall madly in love with. I marry her and have a kid. At this point (or even before this point) I figure out that I need to be much more than just the hard-working guy that works hard, pays his bills, makes his boss happy, etc. I have a family now. If I want to keep this family, they had better find a way into my purpose. Now my every day activities need to be geared more towards taking care of my family. That means that my purpose raises to “family” on the World Sucks Chart. If you look at the chart you will notice that the “family” level is a bit wider than the “self” level. That means that in order to be successful at the “family” level my context needs to be bigger. Now I am “the rock” for my family. I am the “bread winner”. I am a loving husband, the caring father, the shoulder for my wife, the teacher to my child, and a whole range of other “people”.

I have a lot more responsibility now, but an interesting thing happens – a lot of the things that I needed to concern myself with when I was working on the “self” level get handled for me. I notice that when I come home from working a long day, dinner is already made for me. Somehow my laundry is always clean. I spend less time doing chores around the house, yet the house is always clean. It is called the Rule of Reciprocity – the more that you do for somebody, the more inclined they are to help you with the things that would otherwise keep you from doing things for them. Okay, so that is not EXACTLY how it would be defined, but you get my meaning…

So here I am, happily doing my best to be successful at the family level when I happen to notice that I sometimes have the tendency to slip back down into “self” mode. That is usually followed by nights spent sleeping on the couch, a lack of warm meals, and dirty laundry. That is what’s known as the “Sucking” action of the World Sucks Chart. Somewhere there is a law written that wherever you are on the World Sucks Chart, the world will inevitably suck you down a level. The only way to be successful at one level is to attempt to be successful at the next higher level. Knowing this little bit of information is what makes The World Sucks Chart such a powerful tool. Knowing that in order to be successful at family I need to be working towards team, I decide to raise my purpose to “team”. Of course as “team” requires a wider context, I will need to closely study the man that I need to be in order to be successful at the “team” level. I decide that I have things that I can teach the other members of my team. I can learn from my team. I can be there for my team to help them close a job, act as a supervisor, or just be a helping hand. Now in addition to all of the people I need to be in order to be successful with my family I also have to be a supervisor/helper/ teacher/listener for my team. Do you kind of see where I am going with this?

While in the process of working with my team I find the Rule of Reciprocity coming back into play. While I am helping my team to succeed, they are helping me as well. Another interesting thing starts to happen. Take another look at the chart above. Do you see the little platforms inside of the funnel? Those platforms represent the support that you get from other people, keeping you from being sucked down into the funnel. The higher you go the more support you get.

Of course at some point I will discover that no matter how hard I try to survive on the “team” level, I still keep getting sucked down to “family”. That is not a terrible thing, per-se (if you remember I was working on the “team” level so I could be successful at family), except that the rest of my team will be less compelled to help me if I am not working on the same level as they are. In order to truly support my team to be successful I will need to move up a level. Hello “community”!

So what does any of this have to do with sales? Have you ever heard that people read your “body language” more strongly than the words you speak? Body language is the language of context. Context is the way that you say what you say. It is the look in your eye, the shuffle in your step, the way that you move, they way that you don’t move… it is everything readable about you. People will read your context like a book, and from it get a pretty good idea of your purpose. Let’s say that you called a plumber to your home to fix a plumbing problem. I come out to your home and I am operating on the “self” level of The World Sucks Chart. In essence I am coming into your home and telling you, “Hi, I am here to fix your plumbing so that I can afford to pay my rent”. That is what you, the customer read from my context. Other than the obvious fact that you need your plumbing fixed by somebody, how motivated are you to have me be the one to fix it? Even if you do allow me to fix your initial problem, how receptive are you going to be towards my upsell attempts? Not very, I would think. What if I were to come to your home while operating on the “community” level? With purpose in mind and in full control of my context, I am saying, “Hi, I am here to change the way that you think of service plumbers by impeccably and professionally taking care of every plumbing problem you have, so that you’ll be so thrilled with the service that you will be compelled to tell all your friends about your experience and recommend that they call me next time they have a plumbing concern”. A bit more compelling, don’t you think? If that is the impression that you, the customer, is getting from me, why would you possibly not want to use me?

That is the World Sucks Chart in a nutshell. It’s a great tool to use to gauge where you are in your life and to get you to start to see what it looks like to think “higher purpose”. Although it is pretty straight forward, you will likely find yourself wondering, “Okay, great, but what do I do with it?” That is where the CPR comes into place – and that will be the topic of the next article.

By the way, remember those powerful men that I spoke of in the beginning of this article? They all work very high on the World Sucks Chart. If you want to be powerful, either in sales, or in life, you need to operate with a high purpose.

The Birth of a Salesman (how I got started)

Hi, my name is Steve and I’m here to teach you a little about sales – specifically sales as it relates to the service industry. This is my first attempt at blogging, but I have taught sales for a number of years at the company that I work for and have trained some very successful salesman. Hopefully this experience will teach us all something.

First a little about me: I am a service plumber. It is my job to go into people’s homes and businesses and fix broken plumbing. Since I am a plumber, I will use plumbing a lot as an example, but these articles are meant for anyone who provides a service to a customer. In fact, anyone who talks to people with any regularity can learn some pretty useful information from these articles.

It doesn’t seem that there would be much sales involved with being a service plumber, right? Many of you reading this know differently. Let me be a little more specific for the rest of you…

When a prospective customer has a plumbing problem, they call a plumbing company (or two or three…) for help. Most often when they call, they are thinking first about how much money it is going to cost them to get their problem fixed. Usually they try to gain that information from talking to the dispatcher over the phone. Some companies give the prospect an idea of what it may cost by quoting them an hourly rate or by a “usually” or an “as little as” (“We can usually clear your drain for as little as $85.00.”). When a prospect calls the company I work for, they get no information over the phone other than, “I can have a qualified plumbing technician to your home within 60 minutes to take a look at your problem and give you a free, no obligation estimate”. If the person taking the call can get the prospect to agree to those terms, it is all up to the plumber (salesman) from there. When you consider that most people will gather at least two to three estimates for all but the most urgent of jobs, you can see where being at least a decent salesman has its advantages. This is, of course, only the beginning of how being a salesman can help you. You are not going to buy a house clearing drains for $85 a pop, and even if you work for the type of company that quotes prices over the phone, there is still hope. You need only read on...

So, back to me. I am a service plumber. I work on commission. I have been a service plumber working on a straight commission for just under 15 years. I have been at the company for which I currently work for 11 of those years. Before being a service plumber I did a few other things, like medical supply delivery, a few years in the restaurant industry and new construction/remodel plumbing when I was younger.

When I was in my teens, I used to work for a general contractor, doing remodels and new construction. I was pretty good at it, but didn’t really like framing and sheetrock work. I actually wanted to be a bartender. Bartending seemed like a glorious and fun occupation, so I went to Bartending School. I gave it my very best effort and finished in the top of my class. I was ready to be a bartender! Off I went, looking for a bartending job. Turns out that finding a job as a bartender at a nightclub where I could flirt with the ladies while juggling bottles and making tons of tips was a little harder than I expected. My standards for the places where I would apply for work got lower and lower, until I accepted a job as a waiter in a San Francisco coffee shop with an attached bar in the hopes that if a bar tending position opened up, I would be in a good position to nab it. Well, none opened up. I worked as a waiter in a couple other places for a short time until I finally found a position as a bartender. I went from that job to a few others before I finally realized that being a bartender just wasn’t for me. I left bartending to go to work in construction for about 6 months. One day, I saw a help wanted ad for service plumbers. I heard somewhere that plumbers make good money and I enjoyed the plumbing I did as part of the construction experience when I was younger, so I applied for a position. I was hired, and I haven’t stopped since.

Now, I kind of got lucky. My family comes from a background in the restaurant industry. My grandfather would take me to restaurants a lot and he would point out to me all of the things the servers did correctly and incorrectly. He would actually quiz me on how our current waiter/waitress was performing and how I should tip the server according to their score. This got me to relate how service people get paid directly to how they made their customers feel. When I was working as a waiter and a bartender, I used this knowledge to help make sure that I was able to extract the maximum tip from each customer. What I did not like about the restaurant business was that when the place got busy, my service to each customer had to be compromised to be able to facilitate the increased number of customers. I kept up with the number of customers, and rarely left a customer waiting for a meal or a drink or (god forbid) their check. I could not, however, give each customer the full attention I needed to in order to get the larger tips I would usually get when the restaurant was less busy. If you think that high volume wins over maximum extraction per ticket, keep reading. You may be surprised.

My main concern when going to plumbing was not that I did not feel I knew enough about plumbing (they offered free training). It was that the pay was commission only. There was no base salary, or guaranteed hourly wage, or anything like that. It was 100% commission. I swallowed my fear (after all, I did okay working basically for tips before, right?) and took the job. It turns out the training was laughable. When they sent me out on my first service call, I knew little more than I did when they hired me. I did, however, see the similarities between this job and what I did as a waiter and bartender. I applied what I had learned in the restaurant business and it worked! I was actually earning pretty good money as a service plumber. I earned $52,000 my first year and boy was I excited!

So, I was learning how to be a service plumber and making a living doing it. I decided that I wanted to make a career out of this, so I had better learn all I can about plumbing and about sales. The truth of it is that if you don’t know plumbing, you cannot effectively sell plumbing. If you cannot sell plumbing, you don’t get the chance to do plumbing.

Now let me stop here and say this: If you do not want to learn everything you can about your profession, STOP what you are doing and find a new line of work! You are in the wrong profession! This goes for any profession you are in.

Learning plumbing was not that hard. I knew a lot of it from my earlier construction job. The Universal Plumbing Code Book is chock full of information and other plumbers LOVE to show off their knowledge. Sales was a little different. It turns out that people are not as willing to share their sales techniques with others as they are their plumbing knowledge. They will brag about their big wins, but when you ask them how they closed the deal, they will usually give you some story that does not even somewhat resemble the truth. I took three very specific actions when I decided that I wanted to learn to be a better salesman. I recommend everybody do these same three things: They are:

1. Find what works for others and adapt those strategies to your style.
2. Learn techniques from books, seminars, etc.
3. Practice.

I will discuss each of these again at some point in these articles, but those are the three essential actions that I recommend everyone use. I did run into a bit of a problem in my research. It seems that all of the sales “gurus” are either in car sales or real estate. Now, don’t get me wrong, I learned a lot from Tommy Hopkins, Brian Tracy, Joe Girard and others, but they sell tangible goods. How do you apply those techniques when you are selling a Service? Well, in a lot of ways, it is the exact same. In other ways, it is completely different – in some ways easier, and in others more difficult. I was lucky in that I had help. I was surrounded by people that also knew how important the art of sales was to our industry. I learned from them, bounced ideas off them, taught them, learned some more from them, bounced more ideas, etc. To this day, I am still learning and being reminded of the things I learned and forgot. It is a wonderful thing. It is my hope that you will learn techniques, strategies and methodologies that will make you a wildly successful salesman (plumber, electrician, contractor, waiter, bell hop…) and share your knowledge with others, so that they can become wildly successful salesmen (auto-mechanics, painters, bartenders, customer service reps…). Why would I want that? Simple, the more true salesmen we have in the service industry, the higher the bar gets raised for everyone. That means that the best get far more appreciation and with that comes more money. Besides, wouldn’t it be great if after having a nice meal out, waiting for the check was the exception, rather than the norm? That is what happens when the bar gets raised. Can these articles do all of that? Probably not, but it never hurts to try.

Are you ready? Let’s go!

Sales Tips for Sevice Professionals

Welcome to Sales Tips for Service Professionals. Most of the articles here will be focused on sales techniques and methodologies for those of us in the service industry: Contractors, electricians, plumbers, handymen, waiters... anyone who sells a service. Don't get me wrong, if you sell a product (other than service), you will find a ton of information that will help you to increase your sales (and consequently, your income), but my focus is on service professionals.

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