Sometimes salespeople fail to recognize how damaging small integrity lapses can be.  You rarely allow these small integrity lapses because you’re mean spirited or evil, but they do happen because of your desire to be a people pleaser.  In your eagerness to please you actually cause yourself ,and your prospects and clients a great deal of displeasure.

When you give your word you have the potential to keep your word.  By giving your word I simply mean doing what you say you’ll do.  The potential to keep your word gives you the power to succeed in what you do.

When you don’t keep your word what do you do?  Well, one of the things you do is you blame someone for preventing you from being able to keep your word.  What you don’t realize is that when you place blame on someone else you’re positioning yourself as a victim.  Do you think your prospects and clients want to place their trust with a victim?

Another thing you do is you make excuses.  Excuses communicate to the other person that something else was more important to you so you chose not to do what you said you’d do.  It also demonstrates your lack of commitment to follow through on your word.

Power stems from ownership.  When you say you’ll do something that’s a commitment.  When you take ownership for your commitments you assume the responsibility and power for making those commitments a reality, and that’s exactly what your prospects and clients expect you to do or they wouldn’t need you.

When you don’t do what you say you’ll do it leads to distrust.  While it may be cute, funny, or tolerable for someone you care about personally to behave this way it isn’t on a professional level.  Once a prospect or client distrusts you it’s like climbing Mount Everest to regain that trust if you ever can.

Distrust leads to doubt.  When the prospect or client realizes they can’t count on you for the little things they begin to have doubts about the big things too.  That means they’re going to check up on you and shop around to make sure they can verify you’re doing the right thing for them.  It also means they’ll tolerate you until they find someone they can trust, and once they find the person they can trust they’ll drop you like a hot potato.

Doubt leads to low value relationships.  Low value relationships are a death knell for service businesses.  Low value relationships mean that you’ll find it hard to please your prospects and clients because they’re annoyed by and irritated with you for not doing what you say you will.

Low value relationships lead to high client attrition.  And the frustrating thing for you is that you’re working so hard to please people but you can’t please them because you keep dropping the ball.  So…stop making promises you can’t keep, learn to say “no”, take full responsibility for doing what you say you’ll do and start forming relationships that lead to lasting business and referrals.

Are you relying on a presentation to help you to connect with your prospects?  Big mistake.  A presentation actually causes you to disconnect with your prospect.

When you use a presentation it triggers negative responses in your prospect.  They feel like they’re being sold/pitched, so they disengage from both you and what you’re saying.  I’m sure you’ve observed this: they may fold their arms and lean back away from you, their eyes glaze over and they have little if any response, and they raise objections and stall.  Basically they just want to get away from you and they want you to go away!

The concept that if you just have a perfect presentation you’ll close tons of business is nothing more than a myth.  What a presentation actually does is it prevents you from having a sales conversation with the prospect.  When you have a sales conversation:

• you’ll understand exactly what the prospect wants
• the prospect will be fully engaged and animated throughout the conversation
• you’ll help the prospect to clarify their motivation for acting and acting now
• you’ll earn the respect and trust of the prospect and they’ll feel your on their side
• when you present a solution the prospect will realize it’s the best solution because you really understand them and what they want

A solid sales process isn’t based on a presentation it’s based on a solid sales conversation.  You may have charts, graphs,  calculations,  etc. that you  share with the prospect during the sales conversation; but you will only use those tools when they make sense in the conversation and when the prospect wants to see them.  Stop selling and pitching.  Start understanding and helping your prospects to buy.  You’ll find the experience is a delight for your prospects and highly productive for you.

Most salespeople, especially women, don’t know how to handle objections.  And that means you’re letting lots of business that should be yours slip away.  Instead of fearing objections rejoice in them because objections are actually a buying indicator.

Top producers prepare for all phases of the sales conversation.  You know you’re likely to get objections, so get prepared.  Make a list of all the objections you get or you know you can get.

Prioritize your list of objections.  Identify the top three objections that you know you have to deal with in order to earn a clients business.  Instead of hoping they won’t come up take them on proactively versus reactively.

Prepare short and powerful stories that overcome those objections.  In other words, as you have your sales conversation be ready to openly address highly potential objections before they come up.  As you relate your story make sure you do it in a way that removes the objection and demonstrates the behavior you want them to have.

People have objections because they don’t know or they don’t understand important pieces of information that they need to make a buying decision.  That means you haven’t done your job.  But you can’t correct your mistake until or unless you know what your potential clients real objection is.

Never get into argument with a client about objections.  This happens when a client states an objection and you immediately respond to counter the objection.  Allow the client to air all of their objections before you respond in any way.

Realize that if you haven’t helped the client to discover a highly motivating reason for buying you wouldn’t have objections.  So objections just mean the buyer wants to buy, but they can’t because they don’t know or don’t understand something they have to know to say “yes”.  Once they’ve shared all their objections it’s time to work through them.

As they share their objections actually list them on a sheet of paper.  Divide the paper in half with half of the page representing what they have to risk and the other half representing what they have to gain (pros/cons).  Now work with the client helping them to think through  what they have to gain, what they have to lose, and what they need to know more about.

Instead of being your clients foe now you’re acting as their advocate helping them discover the best solution for them.  No big surprise, in almost every case your potential client will decide to act now because they fully understand the advantage to them.  When they don’t it’s because you both discovered your solution isn’t the best for them.  And in either case you’re earning their respect and trust as a trusted advisor, and that means more business and more referrals for you.

Yes, attitude is important in sales.  But perhaps not in the way you think.  Attitude is about:

• expecting business every where
• confidence in yourself and others
• being pleasant to all people in all situations

Yet, many people confuse attitude with motivation.  Motivation is important too, but not in the rah-rah sense.  Motivation is about:

• holding yourself accountable
• taking right actions
• working toward specific and measurable objectives

The best way to check your attitude is to check your thinking.  Pay attention to that conversation that’s going on in your head.  Do you wake up expecting to run in to business today?  Or do you wake up thinking you shouldn’t even get out of bed because you have a day of frustration ahead of you.  Do you tell yourself that you can do whatever you need to do, or are you always saying “I can’t” to yourself?

If your internal conversation isn’t supporting the right attitudes take control.  There are lots of things you can’t control in life and will never be able to control, but your own thoughts aren’t among those things.  You won’t be able to control every thought 24/7, but when you catch yourself thinking negative thoughts immediately change those thoughts into a more positive thought.  For example, when you think “I can’t” stop and ask yourself “how can I”.

Little changes in your thinking can lead to big changes in your sales results.  

Women it’s time to drop the nice little girl crap and grow up.  You’ve been told:

• Nice girls don’t toot their own horn
• Nice girls don’t talk too much
• Nice girls aren’t loud and boisterous
• Nice girls should be seen and not heard
• Nice girls shouldn’t talk to strangers

A fine bunch of rules for proper little ladies, but not necessarily for women in sales.  Let’s put each of these under scrutiny, and get you selling like a pro rather than a nice girl.  In sales nice girls finish last.

Nice girls don’t toot their own horn.  Every time you hold a sales conversation you’re in essence interviewing for a job.  If you went to a job interview and you weren’t prepared to answer the standard interview questions: what was your greatest achievement, what was your biggest failure, and why are you the best choice for this job you wouldn’t get the job.  The same is true in every sales conversation.

Be prepared to share stories that make your point without causing you to feel like you’re boasting.  Stories are one of the most universally powerful forms of communication.  Keep your stories succinct; but make sure you tell them in such a way that you’re removing objections, answering questions they’ll need answered, demonstrating what they need to believe, discounting the other options, and demonstrating the behaviors you want them to demonstrate.

Nice girls don’t talk too much.  This one is actually to your advantage.  Your job isn’t to talk them into a sale.  Your job is to ask revealing questions and to listen to their response.  The better you are at listening the better you’ll be at sales.  And that’s why women are naturally wound to be better in sales than most men.

Nice girls aren’t loud and boisterous, and you shouldn’t be either.  Many people have the misguided notion that the best sales people are extroverts, the back slapping joke popping center of attention.  That is completely false.  The best sales people are introverts.  You may wonder why and the answer is both logical and simple.  Introverts are naturally better listeners, buyers perceive them as more trustworthy, and buyers feel more comfortable sharing the information you need to know to do business together with an introvert.

Nice girls should be seen and not heard.  This is a bunch of excess baggage you’ve carried from childhood that you need to dump because it’s terrible advice for anyone in sales.  You bring tremendous value to every situation don’t discount yourself.  Allow yourself to be confident in the fact that when you speak you have something important to say that others need to hear.

Nice girls don’t talk to strangers.  More terrible advice for anyone in sales that you’ve had drilled in your head from childhood.  Get over this childhood fear by making it your goal to make every stranger a new friend.  And you know you can do that.

At a NAIFA convention one of the speakers gave a great definition for self-confidence.  He said that self-confidence was arrogance under control.  You have just as much, if not more, going for you as any of your male counterparts.  List all the things that make you great and then review them before each sales conversation, so you can enter the conversation with the reserved self-confidence that conveys you’re a Top Producer and they should be honored to work with you.