Do Not Be Afraid to  Be Persuasive

Many salespeople underestimate the difficulty of developing a salessuccess
mindset. They confuse a mindset with the simplistic positive thinking
movement (“Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”).
Perhaps most ominously, they do not understand all the forces that conspire
every day to destroy a positive attitude toward selling. “Sales” has
become a four-letter word in many business environments today.
In many companies, no one wants to be perceived as a salesperson. We
are handed thousands of business cards each year by salespeople who attend
our seminars and workshops. Over the years, we have seen a flight
away from business cards that contain the words “sales” or “sales representative”
or “sales executive.” Look at the business cards you receive or
that are beamed into your Palm Pilot. You will see sales representatives
using titles such as “customer service representative,” “account executive,”
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“customer satisfaction representative,” “solutions specialist,” “customer
counselor,” or any one of dozens of other vague, misleading, fuzzy, or disingenuous
titles.
Recently, we asked a “client services coordinator” why her card did
not identify her as a sales professional. She tried to explain that it is now
“politically incorrect” to be a salesperson and that “no one wants to be a
salesperson.” Yet, her company wants her to sell. All she was hired to do
was sell! Her business card says nothing about selling, her mindset is that
“no one wants to be a salesperson,” and she is expected to sell! Is it any
wonder that the company that employs her is struggling, that its sales are
down by more than 37 percent and that its stock has lost half of its value?
The sales success mindset is based first upon honesty.
Your business card does not have to identify you as a sales professional
or a sales executive, but you must be honest with yourself that you are a
sales professional. We have found that all sales millionaires know that
they are sales professionals. This may seem like an obvious fact, but it is
not so obvious today when millions of salespeople are walking around
with business cards saying they are something else. Is it any wonder why
so many salespeople are confused and suffer from low self-esteem?
The names, titles, and descriptions we give ourselves (and that we allow
others to give us) are vitally important. To become a medical doctor, a
person has to complete 12 years of schooling with outstanding grades, then
apply to a top undergraduate university, work hard for four more years,
get the best grades possible, and hope to get into medical school. At medical
school, the student has to work harder than ever, compromise her social
life, and give up all hope of holding down a job. Once she graduates, she
may have to spend several more years doing internships and residencies.
After completing this exhausting and arduous path, she will work long hours
as a medical doctor to extend lives, improve the quality of her patients’
lives, and to save lives.
For all of this studying, hard work, and dedication, many medical doctors
used to earn several hundred thousand dollars per year. Nowadays,
many doctors earn far less than $100,000 a year. Many well-known factors
(HMOs, insurance companies, etc.) have contributed to this precipitous
decline in the incomes earned by physicians. One factor that is seldom even
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mentioned is that, at many health maintenance organizations, medical
doctors are no longer called “medical doctors” or “physicians.” Instead,
they are given titles such as “medical services provider.” How can a mere
medical services provider deserve an income of $350,000? If you are a
mere “account services representative,” how much could your services
be worth—and how easily could you be replaced? Wouldn’t you rather be
a vice president of sales?
With pride comes power. In their quest to avoid “being a salesperson”
at any cost, many people in sales have let their powers of persuasion
atrophy. Others are not even developing skills in this area. After all, if
you aren’t a “salesperson” why do you need to be persuasive?
These salespeople are forgoing hundreds of thousands or millions of
dollars in potential income due to their lack of persuasion skills. Many
companies no longer even offer seminars on salesmanship or persuasion at
their conventions or workshops. Executives at these firms wonder why their
business has declined to the extent that it has. We have three words to
share with them: cause and effect.
Recently we received a call from a financial consultant at one of the
largest brokerage houses in the U.S. The caller was well-educated, intelligent,
and offered his clients and prospects a wide range of outstanding
financial products and services. However, he only had $3 million in assets
under management. Charging the standard 1-percent fee on assets under
management, this financial advisor was only earning $30,000 a year! When
he told us this, we were appalled. His senior partner, his mentor and advisor,
who has been in the business many years, has less than $7 million in assets
under management and earns only $70,000 a year! How is this possible?
Why are these intelligent, well-educated financial advisors earning so little
when the public has such a great need for financial planning?
To put their level of success in perspective, many of the financial planners
with whom we work earn $250,000 to more than $1 million a year. A
number of them report that it is easy to earn several hundred thousand
dollars a year if you know how to sell and market your services.
We asked the financial consultant to tell us how he describes his services
to prospective clients. The cause for his lack of success was instantly apparent:
he was bland and boring. We are talking plain vanilla. Milquetoast.
TEAMFLY
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Beige. We asked him if he had ever heard a tape recording of the presentation
he gave clients and he admitted he hadn’t. He also admitted he seldom
worked on improving his sales presentation to clients. He had two
rationalizations for not working on his presentation: he was too busy “researching
the market” and he didn’t want to “come off as a salesman”
(there’s that old bugaboo again).