What Makes Great Salespeople Great

What makes great salespeople great? Presented by one of the greatest people of all, me. So, at any rate, as we take a look at this, there are some things about the highway toward being a great salesperson. They understand that self-motivation is a necessity. Have you ever seen someone that says, “You know, I’m going to hear one of those motivational speakers?” I have a very simple philosophy about that: there’s nothing worse than energizing incompetence. So, if you came here today looking for somebody to motivate you, it ain’t going to happen.

This interesting book that was first written in 198—the book was rewritten again in 1928; it was rewritten again from ’28 until 1938—and this is one of the original books; it’s called *Think and Grow Rich*. Has anyone ever heard of the book *Think and Grow Rich*? Napoleon Hill wrote this book. Napoleon Hill grew up in Wise County, Virginia. Is anybody familiar with Wise County, Virginia? Does anyone know what’s up there? Nothing. My wife lives in the next county from there, originally from Tazewell County. In fact, her daddy got picked up the other day for speeding; a state trooper pulled him over and said, “Do you have any ID?” He said, “About what?” Last Christmas we had a fire in the bathroom room. Fortunately, it never spread to the house, and everything was fine. But Napoleon Hill grew up in Wise County, Virginia, and and he had an interesting career. He he went to Tazewell Business College, and then he worked in the mines, and then he started to become a writer. And in 194—1905—he he met a gentleman by the name of Andrew Carnegie. And Andrew Carnegie said, “I wanted you to do something for me, kid. I want you to go out, and I want you to do the first study of the science of success.” And he did that, and the first book that came out was a 32-series set of books called *The Laws of Success*. Then he rewrote it in 1928 after the Depression started to really, really crater everything he had. It came out again in the late 30s. A gentleman carried on board the USS Arizona; he was one of the few who survived; he jumped off, swam ashore, carried the book. This book is worth its weight in gold; it’s called *Think and Grow Rich*.

Listen to these words: 198. Remember the philosophy presented in this book makes every one of these alibis obsolete: “If I had enough pull… if I had enough money… if I had a better education… if I could get a better job… if I had better health… if I only had time… if times were better… if other people understood me… if conditions around me were only different… if I could live my life over again… if I did not fear what they would say… if I had been given a chance… if I had a better chance… if I… if people didn’t know that that that that I don’t have the opportunities everybody else has… if people would say, ‘Oh, they have a better territory, they have better customers, they have a better product, they have a better price point.’” The truth of the matter is, really great salespeople know that the motivation comes from totally themselves.

And Napoleon Hill did some interesting research of these 568 very successful people. He concluded that these people that he studied, people entrepreneurially successful like W.T. Grant, Rock Bel, Van Rockefeller, Vanderbilt—all of those people—had two common traits. I urge you to write these down if they make sense. The first trait: definiteness of purpose; a true definiteness of purpose about what they were doing and why they were doing it. People say to me, “Why do you do what you’ve been doing?” And I’ve been doing this for 26 years, sometimes speaking 200 times a year around the country and around the world. And people say to me, “Why do you do that?” And I say, “I do it because I must do it. I do it because I get a kick out of seeing people’s lights go on and say, ‘You know, I’m better now than I was before. You empowered me and helped me to do some things that I didn’t think I could do.’” You know, I don’t know anybody who went ashore at D-Day for the combat pay. My father-in-law, a true American hero, 25 combat missions in a B-25; he didn’t do the 25 missions for the air combat pay; he did it because he had to do it, and he had an inner drive that said, “I must do this.” It’s definiteness of purpose. The second thing is a burning desire to make it happen; not a flickering desire, but a what—burning desire. I love to sell. I would rather sell than do most anything in the world world. And I know lots of salespeople who are hesitant, reluctant. I see them someplace, and someone says, “And what do you do?” And they look with a blank stare and say, “I’m a I’m a peddler. I’m a professional salesperson.” In fact, people look at me someplace; they say, “What do you do?” My answer is very simple. About what I call a secretary on the phone; she says, “Who is this?” I said, “This is Bill Brooks.” She says, “Who are you with?” I said, “I’m all alone; there’s no one with me. It’s W.R. La—” See, the truth is that self-motivation is an inside job, and it’s definiteness of purpose and a burning desire, and without that, fulfillment is never there.

The other thing that they know is that self-management is an obligation. You know what self-management is? It’s the capacity to bring closure, the capacity to bring completion, the capacity to be accountable, the capacity to deliver results, the capacity to manage time. You see this watch? This is a marvelous watch; it’s guaranteed for life. If it breaks, a mainspring comes out and slashes my wrist. I’m just glad I didn’t get a pocket [Laughter] watch. Thank you for catching up. How many of you know some people who are always late, disorganized, organized, unstructured? And the argument is, “You don’t understand; I’m creative.” No, you’re sloppy. It’s self-management; it’s self-motivation.

The other thing is they understand that sales success is driven by three things. Now, let me tell you, I have been in cars with 500 salespeople, traveled with them. I’ve personally trained over half a million salespeople in 26 years, worked in over 2,000 different companies, 450 different industries. Someone once said that I was a consultant, and that’s a very bad thing to tell someone. A consultant is a person who knows 256 ways to make love, knows no member of the opposite sex. So, in my little company, The Brooks Group, I have the highest sales quota, even though we have a phenomenal sales team. I serve as the sales manager for my company, so I sell, and I’m the sales manager; I’m the CEO, because I’m not going to talk to you about things that I don’t do. And I know very well that sales is driven by three things, and three things only, and these three things are pretty simple and easy to understand. Let me show you what they are. The first of these is job skills. Job skills is a real interesting concept. How many of you have—we have any sales managers in the room? Raise your hands. If we have some sales managers, I know we have some of you out there. Someone said, “If we took every sales manager in America, lay them end to end, that’d be more comfortable.” See, most people—the sales managers—don’t know what to do; say they run a contest, you know, and do that. See, job skills are things like product knowledge, things like industry knowledge, things like knowing how to run the software, how to run the computer, something about SIC codes. Those are things that relate to the hard part of the job. Lots of our clients over the years have been held hostage by job skills, and lots of people think when they do sales training that they give people that information, and it’s sales training.

The second part of this is what we call sales skills. Now, when I talk later about this, we’re going to be talking about this in some detail. I am going to tell you that the state of sales in this world is very weak. For example, someone told you when you were a young child, “You have the gift of gab; you ought to go into sales.” No one ever said, “You had the gift of asking the right questions and then buttoning your lip and showing the right solution.” How many of us in this large group of people have seen people sell something and buy it back? Prospecting skills, positioning skills, pre-call planning skills, value-added selling skills, questioning skills, feedback question skills, social proof skills, trial closing skills—all of those skills are part of it. But let me tell you the secret; the secret is the third part: the personal skills. The personal skills are things like listening and goal setting and goal direction and results orientation and the capacity to be a self-starter, the capacity to handle rejection—all of those things. And I’m going to tell you the real secret here, and the real secret is not that hard to understand. They understand what we call the sales success formula, and the sales success formula looks like this: Job skills plus sales skills times personal skills equals the sales success quotient. And the way it works is it kind of looks like this: You may want to write this down and think about this mentally or write your own skill numbers down. Give you an example: On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being fantastic, one being really abysmally bad, like really bad, five being in the middle, everybody with me? I would like you to rate your job skills, your product knowledge, your industry experience, your knowledge of the stuff. Gary, you’re out there; give yourself a 10 plus because I know you’ve been hanging around that industry for how many years? 30 years. You look every day of it, brother. Gary’s very much like me, a very young man with badly aging hair. Second part of this: your sales skills, and I want you to be really honest about this. I’m not talking about 20th-century selling skills; I’m talking about 21st-century selling skills, where you understand that needs-based selling, for example, is dead because people don’t buy what they need; they buy what they want. There’s more beer sold than Bibles. Don’t you tell people—going to help them get what they want, and what they want varies from customer to customer, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that later. And then your personal skills: your self-management, your motivation, your goal direction, your results orientation, your empathy—all the things that go with it. So let’s take Bob Jones. Bob Jones gave himself a 10 and a 10 and a 5. 10 + 10 is 20; that’s right; that’s right, 20. Thank you. Times 5 is 100. Now, the next guy gave himself a 5 and a 5 but a 10. Who scores better? Listen to me: Personal skills are the multiplier of performance, because the example I gave—I played with you—but it doesn’t make any difference what it is; the multiplier is what—the personal skills. So, as a good friend of mine says, “The secrets to work very hard on yourself; don’t work in your job.” Can I say that again? Work hard on yourself; don’t work in your job.

Now, another interesting part about this, as you look at what great salespeople—they understand the 93% solution. The 93% solution is very simply this, my friends: I wrote a book in 1995 with a gentleman by the name of Tom Travisano; it was called *You’re Working Too Hard to Make the Sale*. Please go to the bookstores and buy the book. None of the royalties come to me; they go to the poor children who used to live at 548 Century Oaks Drive here in Greensboro. One of them is our camera person, Will, who’s a college graduate. Let’s hear it for Will! Uh, he graduated from Hampden-Sydney College; uh, he graduated in in four and a half years; he had a double major: beer and wine. No, we’re very proud of him; very, very proud of him. And our other young fellow who is in Washington and Lee University. But seriously, here’s what we discovered in that research: We looked at 12,000, 12,000 face-to-face sales interviews, and here’s what we discovered: When a salesperson had a lengthened sequential process that they followed, a selling system as it were, and they followed it meticulously, they had a 93% chance of closing the sale. Without it, it dropped to less than 42%. So I’m going to make a challenge here, and I will submit to you that we’ve got some people in this audience who wing it. You go in for surgery; we all had some surgery recently. We talked to the surgeon; what would Nancy and I have said if the surgeon looked at us and said, “Well, I’m just going to go in there and wing it; I have a knack for this.” But you understand I’m a sales professional. Yeah, you have job skills. So I’m going to show you what I’m talking about by asking Laura. Laura, would you come out and join me here? Uh, and Laura’s going to ask me a question. Okay, are you ready for the question? I am ready for the question. And then I’m going to answer Laura, and then I’m going to give her an opportunity to ask me another question. Okay. Okay. All right, Laura, what’s your first question? Bill, what do you do to prepare before you go to meet with a prospect? I complete my 23-point pre-call checklist; I complete my absolute understanding of the formal informal structure; identify the buyer, the user, the check writer, the internal advocate; the style of the buyer; the competitive factors; look at the unique differential that I’ve got; I call for the appointment; confirm the appointment; get there ahead of time and mentally prepare. And then what do you do? I issue a statement of intention. What do you do then? Primary bonding statement. What what happens after that? Permission to ask questions. What happens then? Problem question. Tell me more. Agitation question. What happen? Solution question. And what? Benef question. Then what do you do next? Question. What do you do then? Summary statement. And what happens? Statement of findings. And then? Targeted presentation. Yes. What about it? Feedback. Yeah. What after that? Social proof. Then what? Revert to probe. Yeah. Isolate objection. Uh-huh. After that? Reapply. Well, what about next? More feedback. Uh-huh. And tell me what do you do after that? Bill, assumptive close. Uh-huh. Tell me what happens then? Vertically integrate the account. M and uh what do you do after that? Justify the margin. Uh-huh. Tell me more. Take them to the advocate level and seek them as a referral. Tell me what what do you do after that? Thank the Lord. Let’s hear it for Laura! Okay, thank you, Laura. I appreciate that. So you say, “Do you do this every time?” My answer is yes, every time; whether it’s a seven-figure sale, a small sale, a big sale, a little sale. And listen to me: I talk less now. In my entire life, I’ve never talked less in selling and sell more. So I want—should have—listen to me: Shut up. Do we have anyone in this audience who would consider himself or herself to be an oral hemophiliac? It’s the process; it’s the system.

Another thing that makes them great is they understand what product knowledge is and isn’t. If this makes sense, write this down: Product knowledge is not how much you know about your product; it’s how good you are at accessing what you know and putting it in terms that are meaningful and relevant to that prospect based upon what they’re trying to accomplish with that product or service. In fact, I will submit to you that there’s a great chance that the more you know about your product, the more trouble you’re in. What do you think? I know people who are having a romantic interlude with their product, and it’s an X94 742K 815R, and I don’t have to tell you what that means, do I? The prospect looks back and doesn’t want to be embarrassed, so he or she says no. Write this down: A confused buyer buys nothing. In the research that we did, we discovered that the average sales presentation consists of six to eight features or benefits. 24 hours later, the average prospect remembers one. In 39% of the cases, they remember that one incorrectly, and in 49% of the cases, they remember something that wasn’t brought up at all. But we think, “Oh, we have to give them all of this information so that they can make an intelligent decision.” All you’re doing is raising more room for objection. So let me say this, and here’s the point: Don’t ever say anything that does not bring value to the relationship or the communication. Keep it simple; keep it basic, and answer only the basic questions.

Now, they understand that sales has changed forever, forever and ever. It will never be the same. I have never seen anything change more than sales in the last decade. My dad sold for 40—43 years—for 43 years; he was the number one salesperson in his company. Listen to this: Every week for 43 consecutive years. My dad graduated from high school barely; he did not know his parents; he grew up in orphanages and foster homes. But one of the things that I know is if I brought my dad back to this earth today and I said, “Dad, I want to plop you down in your territory, and I want you to sell,” he wouldn’t have a clue about what to do. Unless you are working on it and not just in it, as the popular book says, the cheese has moved, and to make it worse, you can’t find it. So let me share a couple of ideas with you about how sales has changed. First way that is changed sales, my friends, is all about about positioning; it’s all about tactical marketing; it’s all about how you, as a sales professional, are positioned in your marketplace, in opposition to, in comparison with everyone else that sells the same products or service to you. Bottom line: You must be first, foremost in the mind of your prospect. And Richard’s going to be talking about that at great length. The second thing, and please remember this one—the secret to selling, and I’ll talk about this later—is never in the selling; it’s always in the prospecting. If someone were to say to me, “If you’ve looked at these salespeople over the years, and you’ve observed them, you’ve watched them, you’ve seen who’s successful and who’s not successful, what’s the greatest cause of failure in sales?” I’ll tell you what it is: Not having enough qualified prospects. The name of the game is how do you position yourself. The second part of this, the corollary to this, is that listen to me: Cold calling is stupid. We don’t understand; that’s how we do it. I’m going to suggest to you that if you’re going to have someone buy what it is that you sell, they have to have five common traits. Now, let me give you the five common traits. Number one: They must have a need for your product and be aware of it. And you say, “That’s okay; I’m going to go create that awareness.” Has anybody here ever done that? It’s like trying to spit in the wind. All things being equal, when I come back in my next life, I want to own the blood franchise in an emergency room. They’ve been—need for it, and they—what—look at this: Electric power; the second that’s consumed, it has to be used again. Second characteristic: They have the authority and the ability to pay for it. So let me ask you a straightforward question: Raise your hand if you’ve been in front of someone who had all the authority and no ability. You’re lying to me. How about all the authority and no ability? How about no authority and no ability? Why were you there? Because everybody’s got to be someplace, and you go back to your sales manager and say, “Boy, we had a great meeting; they really like this.” You know what I say to my salespeople? “What step of the sale are you in, and what’s next?” And it’s regimented. Third characteristic: They have a sense of urgency about the decision. You know what? I know; I know that you or I or anybody in this room is never going to create any urgency for someone that’s not there, because it’s a buyer’s market; that’s what’s changed. You see, the truth of the matter is they’re going to go down the street, so they better have that heartfelt sense of urgency. Next characteristic: There’s a certain amount of trust between the two of you. You see, people don’t buy from people they like; they buy from people they trust. And if you’re someone who gets people to like you, I’ll tell you what: The way you sell is you sell with low price, which means no margin; you’re an approval seeker, and approval seekers have one thing in common: They have skinny kids. Fifth characteristic: They’re willing to listen to you. You see, old-school selling said, “As long as you can get in front of enough people who are willing to listen to you, somebody will buy.” But you know what else? Great salespeople understand; they understand this: That the basics of selling have never changed; they never have, and they never will. You see, if you can’t get someone to take action, then you’re a professional host or visitor. Your job is to solve people’s problems and get them to make decisions that perhaps they’re hesitant to make, because most people need some help to do that. Some of the universal selling truths that we’ve discovered over the years are some of these: Like people buy things when it’s their idea. That when is your idea? People are more likely to buy something when they’re talking than when you’re talking. We know that people understand that you should never begin selling, telling, or demonstrating anything about your product or service until they verbalize what they want to perceive, gain, or achieve with that product or service. One of the ones that I’m going to talk about later is this principle: Never quote price to an unsold buyer. And the biggest issue that some of you have is what’s called a premature price question, and you have to know how to deal with a premature price question. And as the economy continues to bumble and maybe take off a little bit, you’re going to get more and more of these premature price questions. And in sales, my friends, you have two types of people: The quick and the dead. You either know what to say and know what to do, or you don’t. Yeah. The basics have never changed; that’s what makes great salespeople great. [Music]