When I ask people what their greatest challenge in selling is, the most common response I receive is that they don’t know how to close.  In a way, that’s really encouraging news because one of the fundamental aspects of my training is that 75% of the outcome of any selling opportunity is directly related to manner in which trust and rapport are established in the initial stages of a presentation.  In other words, what happens in the end is determined by the way you begin.  You may have a complex sale with a  long sales cycle or a simple product with a very short sales cycle but in either case you can’t close before you open.

There are three keys to making sure you get your meetings off to a good start so that you establish deep and lasting trust.  These keys will ensure you can properly close when the right time presents itself:

• Make a positve and lasting introduction to every meeting
• Ask good questions before you try to sell anything
• Confirm your understanding of the answers given by the other person

The number 1 rule in communication is that people prefer talking to listening.  That means that you prefer talking to listening and it means that your customers also prefer talking to listening.  Two people are trying to communicate and both want to do the talking; it’s a conflict.

Most salespeople go into meetings on the defensive trying to justify why they are there.  They begin the meetings talking incessantly: they’ve got the best product, or cheapest price, or the most incredible company with the most history etc., etc., etc., but none of this really means anything if you don’t know where the customer is coming from.  Customers need first and foremost to trust you and they can’t trust you if they sense that you don’t understand them.  Asking questions is the key to understanding it’s also the best way to get your prospect talking!

This past weekend I delivered a key note on the three keys to sales success in 2007.  I recorded that message and it’s available here for you.  It’s a 35 MB mp3 file that you can download to your iPod or MP3 player or you may simply visit the Podcast section of our site and play the audio from within its own player.  I hope you enjoy this presentation and find it useful.   

May God bless you abundantly and I wish you an amazing 2007 that exceeds your wildest dreams!

Has all the talk about a “down market” scared you away from investing in real estate? If so, I’d urge you to take a look around. Many, many investors are making a fortune in the current market. If you stop hiding and start investing, you can be one of them too.

Here are four strategies that can make you money – a lot of it -in today’s flat market:

Down Market Strategy #1: Explore overlooked niches. This is a good time to make money by investing in “fixer-uppers,” of course. But it is also a positive climate for investing in small apartment houses, office buildings, undeveloped land and other niche properties. And don’t overlook foreclosed properties and other niche properties that could be available right where you live. To learn more, click here.

Down Market Strategy #2: Remember to look at all the numbers. Don’t get frozen by a high interest rate, slowing property sales or any other stand-alone number. Instead, analyze all the numbers that pertain to individual properties. Positive cash flow from rents, the availability of owner financing and other factors can make a property highly profitable – even one that other investors don’t want. To learn more, click here.

Down Market Strategy #3: Improve what you own. If you invest an extra $10,000 to install granite counter tops in an apartment house you are renovating, you could generate an extra $100,000 in rental income over the next ten years. If you spend $5,000 on touch-up landscaping, you could add $20,000 to the selling price of a house you own. The ability to improve property makes real estate an exceptional investment, even in slow economic times. To learn more, click here.

Down Market Strategy #4: Cash in on regional trends. If you do, you can identify cities and towns that promise far above-average real estate profits today. To learn more, click here. Look for trends like these:

• Improved train service between a town and a city nearby.
• Job growth, spurred by the arrival of a major new employer in a state.
• The discovery of a community by young urban professionals, immigrants from a particular country or members of some other group.
• Improving schools.

You could argue that investing in real estate today is risky. But I challenge you to name a time when investing in real estate involved no risk. The real question is, do you know enough to minimize those risks and maximize your profits? With my program, I bring you the knowledge that I used for success.

1. Reasons for wanting to be rich
 - Don’t Wants – I don’t want to work, I don’t like being an employee
 - Wants – Wants to be free to travel, be free, do stuff while young, I want money to work for me
 *Must have a strong reason, or you want stick to it
2. Make Decisions Daily
 - The Power to choose to be rich, poor, or middle class
 - Most people choose not be rich, your mindset is a reflection of your spending habits
 No money is no excuse to not learn or get educated.
 We all have choices, and you have to make that choice every day
3. Choose friends carefully
 - Does not mean to choose friends based on money
 - choose friends who can teach you something, what to do, what not to do
4. Master a formula and then learn a new one
 - Baker’s learn how to make different kind of breads with the same dough
 - Money is often called dough
 - Work for money is one formula
 - learn new formula’s after mastering one
 - you must master a formula
5. Pay Yourself First
 - Power of Self-Discipline, you need to control yourself
 - no sense to invest, make money, and then blow the money
 - lack of discipline of people who get a raise, then blow it
 - most difficult step to master
 - lack of self-discipline means you should not try to get rich
6. Pay your brokers well
7. Be an Indian Giver (give and get back)
 - Power to get something by nothing
 - Sophisticated investors want a return of investment
8. Assets buy luxuries
 - income from assets are used to buy luxuries
 - borrowing money to get what you want is a bad habit
 - focus on acquiring assets to buy what you want
 - if money is smarter than you, then it will consume you
9. Need for Heros
 - the most powerful way to learn is to have heroes
 - Heroes inspire us
 - They make it look easy
10. Teach and Will Recieve
 - Charitable, to give time, energy, and money
 - most people only give time and energy, never money
 - when he was short of money, you still give
 - when you feel short or in need, just give what you can, and you will receive
 - poor people are more greedy than rich people, rich people are rich because they give something

The Power Of Asking Questions

In the 5/93 Issue of THE NO BS MARKETING LETTER, I quoted a DDB/Neeham research study that revealed the differences between what the ad agency executives thought people thought and did vs. what people really thought and did. For example:

1. “I want to look different from others.”

Ad agency Guess: 89% Public: 62%

2. “There is too much sex on prime time TV.”

Ad agency guess: 50% Public: 78%

3. “There should be a gun in every house.”

Ad agency guess: 9% Public: 32%

4. “TV is my primary form of entertainment.”

Ad Agency guess: 28% Public: 53%

One ad exec admitted: “I have met the customer and he
ain’t me.”

Often, a client will say things to me like “I would never read all that copy” or “I would never respond to something like that.” But you are rarely your customer. It’s easy and dangerous to get in the way of what works based on your own biases and preferences, as well as your assumptions about your customer. Such assumptions can prove very costly. If you don’t KNOW how your customer will react, then you need to go and learn more about the customer – not guess.

Entire books have been written about this, including Ries & Trout’s POSITIONING: THE BATTLE FOR YOUR MIND, which I suggest you read or re-read at least once a year.

My keys to Positioning are:

 Focus
 Congruency
 Consistence
 Advantage
 Fulfillment

By FOCUS, I mean that your position is clear and easily understandable. “Hertz is #1″ is about as clear as you can get. And surveys of business travelers indicate everybody knows the deal; Hertz is usually more expensive than anybody else, but they out-service everybody else by an even bigger margin. (Although my experience in recent years says they’re slipping.) In contrast, most people are not clear at all about their primary position; they are very unfocused about who and what they are and who their market is.

By CONGRUENCY, I mean that you establish positioning you can carry out through everything you do. If, for example, you wanted to put your rental car lots way off airport, to save fortunes on real estate, then you can’t try on Hertz’ positioning of maximum convenience and service. Here in town, we have a Cadillac dealer who drops people off at home or work while their cars are in for service, and that’s good; it’s in keeping with what you’d expect as a Cadillac owner; but they use Buicks to do the dropping off, and that’s stupid because it’s incongruent. This “little” incongruency undoubtedly costs them repeat sales and second car sales – I can envision somebody saying to himself: “If this Buick is good enough for this Cadillac dealer, it’s certainly good enough for our second car, so I’ll save $10,000.00 and get one.”

Recently, a friend of mine stayed at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, was served morning coffee in a styrofoam cup instead of the glass cup he had always gotten on previous visits, and he has yet to get over it. I’ve heard him gripe to at least a dozen people about this. And he’s booked into another hotel on his next visit. Not because he has a bias against styrofoam, but because, for Caesars; in his mind, the “cream” of Las Vegas; it was jarringly incongruent.
By CONSISTENCY, I mean that you are going to stick with your positioning for a long period of time, to build understanding than create confusion)….that you’re prepared to hammer home this core message over and over and over and over again. If you look at the K-Mart vs. Wal-Mart war, one of the things you’ll notice is that K-Mart has floundered around trying inconsistent strategies, like celebrity fashions, Martha Stewart housewares, vastly different ad campaigns, etc. while Wal-Mart has stayed its course over years; in fact it has one TV ad campaign with smile-faces “dropping prices” it keeps rotating year after year. And Wal-Mart is winning.

By ADVANTAGE, I mean that the positioning gives you some competitive or persuasive advantage with your target market.

If you cannot identify an advantage you have vs. competition and an advantage you provide to customers that they do not get from your competition, then I question the validity of your even being in business!

By FULFILLMENT, I mean that you can and will deliver on the promises stated and/or implicit in your positioning. Over-promising and under-delivering is a deadly combination. American Airlines or United dare not deliver a service level equal to Southwest’s, but Southwest has the highest level of passenger satisfaction in the entire industry delivering its level of service; the consumer expectations differ because the positioning is different. Kelleher at Southwest has brilliantly established positioning he can honor; expectations he can meet or exceed all the time. As I’m finishing this, I’m staying in a Ramada Inn in Cleveland, which I’ve settled for purely because of location/convenience, and it is terrible; room service comes without silverware or napkins, maid service is erratic, lamps are missing light bulbs, and so on. If this happened in a Hilton or Marriott, I’d be raising hell every two minutes. But this is a Ramada and I expected exactly this kind of “low rent” experience. So, there’s the issue of expectations linked to fulfillment. The best policy, of course, is to establish the kind of promises and expectations that are very attractive to your prospects, then exceed them in fulfillment.

By the way, I think my clients like Whitehall, Linda Miles, Joe Polish at Piranha Marketing, Michael Kimble, U.S. Mortgage, and, in our JPDK business, Jeff Paul all go to exceptional lengths with customer service and support, and deserve recognition for doing so.

The Power Of “Interest”

The #1 ultimate marketing sin is: being boring, and the marketplace will forgive you for just about anything but this.

In one of the classic sales formulas, ATTENTION is the first step; INTEREST is the second. Developing and holding the interest of people requires timeliness, a sense of “newness”, reasons to want to know more.

As I was writing this, I noticed that Proctor & Gamble was continuing its strategy of making sure there’s a frequent answer to “What’s New?” – and Tide…..now, new TV advertising for “Tide With Bleach” and “Mountain Spring Tide.” P&G makes some kind of change to Tide every few months like clockwork, so as to recapture the interest of the consumer.

The American attention span is declining rapidly. The biggest complaint about Internet Web sites is the slow speed at which they open. With clicker in hand, today’s TV viewer restlessly surfs thirty channels, clicking out of commercials or boring scenes, going from one unconnected place to another – bored and trying not to be. My favorite industry, horse racing, is in trouble because it is too “slow” for the public’s taste, so times between races are shortened, TV monitors are placed on tables in the clubhouse so people can watch TV between races, slot machines are invading the tracks, and so on.

It is the marketer’s job to find new and different ways to be interesting to a jaded, disinterested, detached marketplace.

Above all else, remember that interest and self-interest are closely linked. There’s a Chinese proverb I use in many of my seminars that makes this point:

“Man more interested in boil on own neck
than the drowning of 10,000 in Yangtse.”

The Power Of Giving
Them What They Want

Twenty years or so ago, when I first started flying on business, before political correctness set in, if you flew first class on a major airline, PLAYBOY was one of the magazines offered to you by the stewardesses. But the first airline to stop putting Playboy on board did so not because of gender sensitivity; they explained that they stopped because everybody was stealing that magazine. This should have been their signal to put more copies on each flight – not to eliminate it altogether. It’s amazing how many businesses (and people) do certain things to attract their customers (relationship partners), then as soon as they get ‘em, they stop doing those things. Find out what they want then don’t give it to them.

The trick is to really, really, really understand what your ideal customer wants, give it to him, and then KEEP ON giving it to him.

And when in doubt, ask. About a year ago, I got kind of jazzed up about going “high tech”, and offering a variety of tech services, like back issues of newsletters on a web site with search-by-topic capability, a product like this on a CD-ROM, and so forth. Fortunately, I surveyed my customers to try and determine their level of interest, and how many used the Net, how many used CD-ROMS, and so on. The results of the survey were clear: only 1% of my good customers had any likelihood of buying these products and services. Bad odds. Soon it may be time to take a fresh look at all this. But at the time I could have plowed ahead, motivated by media hype and assumptions, and peed away a considerable amount of money in a hurry.

Here’s another tip: develop products or services with what your customers really want – not what they SHOULD want – in mind. For years, I adhered to the “give a man a fish, feed him only for a day, but teach a man to fish, feed him for life” idea, and insisted on trying to teach marketing….but my income soared when I adjusted my products to feature “tool kits” with ready-to-use tools rather than just instruction.

The Power Of “What’s New?”

“We can invent faster than they can copy.”
- Ray Kroc

The greatest marketer of “fads”, Ken Hakuta, told SUCCESS MAGAZINE “Colgate came out with a toothpaste pump first, and Crest had to follow the leader. But who’s to say that the pump is any better than the tube? The important thing is that it’s different. In my ‘fad marketing strategy’, the pump would be only the first of many changes. A year later I might introduce different flavors; after that, toothpaste dispensed from an aerosol can. A year later; different flavors.” Ken understands that products and businesses must have a frequently changing answer to the question, “What’s new?”

The Power Of Pain

Pain sells best.

People spend an enormous amount of time, money and energy
avoiding pain.

They avoid confrontation with neighbors, bosses and spouses, to avoid emotional pain. They gulp mountains of drugs to suppress physical pain.

When Thoreau said “most men lead lives of quiet desperation” he said a mouthful. This is where the marketer’s greatest opportunity lies: exploiting others’ quiet (suppressed) desperation; their private pain. You see, most people do not like their jobs, their relationships, their lives or even themselves. The savvy marketer understands this and is willing to peel back a scab and rub salt in it to motivate someone to action.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that very few people can clearly describe what they want – which, incidentally, is why they don’t get it – but most people know what they don’t want. Rubbing their noses in what they have that they dislike is much more effective than holding a carrot out in front of them. You must make people feel miserable before you can liberate them. Whether selling a kitchen appliance or an annuity, selling to mom at home or the CEO in the tower, you must create despair to ready the person for your solution.

This is the most reliable approach to selling.