If you have a nervous or stilted manner when trying to establish rapport with clients, instead of relaxing them, you’ll put them on edge. If you’re nervous, they’ll get nervous and start raising their walls of sales resistance. They’ll question your reasons for wanting to talk with them. They’ll become suspect of your every move.

In selling situations, many of your clients will respond to your demeanor in kind. What that means is that if you come across friendly and non-threatening, they’ll feel friendly and not threatened by you. In other words, you get what you give. That’s why it’s so important to be well-prepared before meeting with your clients. (more…)

Step #7 in the Rapport Setting process is to give a sincere compliment to your potential clients. This doesn’t have to be a grand gesture. Something simple is fine as long as it’s sincere. That means it must be honest. You would never compliment someone on their “lovely home” if it was a disaster. Likewise, you wouldn’t say you like anything that you don’t honestly like.

Rule of thumb: If you don’t like something, say nothing about it. Instead, look for something else that you do like or can honestly compliment them about (more…)

While it’s always a good idea to be dressed professionally, being overdressed can make your potential clients feel inferior. This raises their defenses about wanting to buy anything from you. On the other hand, showing up drastically under-dressed for your potential client’s environment may cause them to dismiss you as not being serious about your career.

Champion salespeople are flexible. They keep clothing alternatives close at hand — either in their cars or in their offices. They not only consider the type of client they’ll be approaching but that client’s environment.

My best advice with regard to attire is to dress like the people your potential clients go to for advice. After all, that’s the role you want to portray with them–that of a professional advisor. (more…)

In the rapport setting stage of selling, your #1 goal, as stated in other blog posts on this site, is to help people to like you, trust you and want to listen to you. If you think about selling situations you’ve been in yourself, you’ll have to admit you have the same preference. The sale just seems to flow more smoothly when you learn that you have something in common with the salesperson. So, part of your job in this stage of the sale is to learn something about your buyers that you have in common and talk about it briefly to demonstrate that commonality.

Here are some areas to consider in consumer sales (B-to-C):

• Are they married?
• Do they have kids? If so, how many? What ages? Are the kids involved in sports, music or other activities?
• Are these people sports fans? What sports? What teams? (Take note if they’re wearing a local team’s jacket, shirt or baseball cap.)
• What part of town do they live in?
• Have they always lived in this city? If not, what area of the country did they move from? If you moved to the area from elsewhere you can briefly talk about first impressions of the area or what they enjoy most about living there. (more…)

I’m proud to announce that my latest book, Selling in Tough Times, has won the 2011 National Trophy for Business Books in the category of Tools & Methods in France.

Here’s a brief except of the book that I hope you find useful:

Steeling Yourself for Survival by Tom
Hopkins from Selling in Tough Times

In order to survive any challenge that negatively impacts your selling career, you need to follow the Boy Scout motto of “being prepared.” So, how do you prepare yourself for some unknown event that may pop up on the horizon?

You begin with a commitment to personal growth. Personal growth is a process of increasing your knowledge and effectiveness so you can serve more, earn more and contribute more to the betterment of yourself, your family and all of humankind. It demands an investment of time, effort and money. Keep in mind that if you’re not moving ahead, you’re falling behind.

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There are all sorts of sayings about eye contact such as:

• If you won’t look me in the eye, I can’t trust you.
• The eyes are the mirror of the soul.
• The eyes have a language of their own.

These few sayings alone demonstrate the power of eye contact. They tell you that you must use your eyes to build trust, demonstrate sincerity and speak honestly.

I teach nine steps to building rapport at my 3-day, high-intensity Boot Camp Sales Mastery program. The fourth step, making good eye contact, is one of the most challenging for some people who are new to sales. It’s also a challenge for some veterans who aren’t closing as many sales as they would like. They just don’t realize it.     (more…)

The selling process can be broken into very specific pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. Our goal as professionals is to put each piece in its place in order to earn a new client. Here’s an overview of ideas to maximize your efforts in each area.

The first piece in the selling cycle is prospecting. There are many ways to prospect. One of the most common is via the phone. Try this phraseology when you call a company where you’re trying to get in to meet the decision-maker: “Hello, my name is Tom Hopkins. I’m in business in the community.” Don’t give the name of your company when you’re making this type of call. “I’m calling regarding your (state what your product or service does) needs. Who in your company is responsible for that?” (Before they can answer, continue) “By the way, who am I speaking with please?”  When the receptionist gives his or her name, use it, “Ann, thank you for your help.” Many receptionists don’t get a lot of recognition. Always try to gain an ally by giving them some.

The second piece in the puzzle is called original contact. When you meet a person you must radiate the goal of helping them like you, trust you, and want to listen to you. You do this through the steps of building rapport, letting them know that they’re important to you and that you’re there to serve. Show you care in your eye contact, with your smile, and with the questions you ask about them and their needs.

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You truly are a wondrous person with much to offer. You’re a champion, after all. Now all you have to do is let your potential clients discover that for themselves. And how do people learn? They’re taught, that’s how. Part of your task as a professional salesperson is to act as an instructor and a lot of this instructing takes place in the presentation phase of selling.

The presentation phase for financial services addresses four basic, yet critical subjects. These are:

• Who we are
• What we’ve done
• What we’ll do for you
• The amount of investment required to accomplish your financial goals (more…)

Ever feel like your sales conversations don’t go as well as you would have liked? Perhaps there was something nagging at you that made you think, “I could be doing something better. Something to win more and bigger sales, but I’m not sure what.”

No matter what you’re selling, at some point you have conversations with buyers. Much selling success is determined here. Over the years I’ve seen too many sales people, leaders, and professionals struggle to create sales conversations, kick them off well, uncover needs, create enthusiasm with the prospect, and win business. Without realizing it they make the same mistakes over and over again that end up losing sales.

That’s why I’m so excited that my friends over at RAIN Group (publishers of RainToday) have just released a new book, Rainmaking Conversations, which teaches you everything you need to know about leading masterful sales conversations.

Written by Mike Schultz and John Doerr, Founders of RainToday and Co-Presidents of RAIN Group, this book gives you a practical step by step process to go from the first “hello” to “send me an invoice…let’s go.” Full of compelling stories, examples, and winning techniques, the book covers how to:

·         Build rapport and trust early on in the relationship

·         Uncover the full set of prospect needs

·         Develop winning value propositions that get potential clients excited to own

·         Apply the 16 principles of influence in sales

·         Overcome all types of objections  (including price pressure) and move towards the close

·         Craft compelling solutions and close the transaction

·         Avoid the most common mistakes that kill sales

Chapter 14, handling objections, alone is worth well more than the investment you’ll make in the book. If you implement even half of the strategies in this chapter, you’ll start to see better results immediately.

The book walks you through RAIN Selling, an acronym that stands for Rapport, Aspirations and Afflictions, Impact, and New Reality. It provides a guide for the most important part of sales – the conversations you have with prospects and clients.

Rainmaking Conversations is hot off the presses, and it’s a great sales book. A classic in the making. To kick off the book launch, the authors have put together an amazing bonus package for if you invest in a copy on May 19, 2011.

Special Offer: Pick up a copy and you’ll get tons of bonuses including a special bonus from me! So get your copy at Amazon.com. Then stop by: www.RainGroup.com/Book/Bonuses to pick up all the bonuses.

I highly recommend it!

The average human being has the ability to achieve almost anything.  Lack of basic capability is rarely the problem–we all have great reserves of untapped power. The problem is almost always in finding out what we want.  Before we go any further, let me define how I’m using the word “want” here.  I’m not talking about mere wishes. I’m talking about wants that gnaw at you.

Maybe you think you don’t have any gnawing wants.  If you think that, you’re wrong. You have the wants. But, they’re bottled up where you can’t get at them. They’ll stay there, too, coming out as blind resistance to change, refusal to put out extra effort or the insistence that all your problems are the cause of others.

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