Money.

It’s said to be what makes the world go round’.

In business, earning money is literally the main premise of what a business does and is supposed to do. The same is true in Network Marketing, no matter if you run a small side project or a global empire with a large team. But, How do you actually make money in network marketing?

The Network Marketing industry is quite interesting when you look at it. In some ways, it’s very similar to running any other businesses, but in other ways, it’s completely unique.

These unique things lead to greal but also sometimes bad things. And one of bad things I’m referring to, is how some people have almost all their focus on recruiting.

What is the definition of a business that focuses on recruiting over everything else(even customers)?

I’m warning you though, it’s a bit of a dirty word.

—-

—-

A pyramid scheme.

This is a word that’s circling around the industry like a hungry wolf.

You know what the most effective strategy for convincing people that you are not in a pyramid shceme is? Running a normal-ass business with the right priorities and focus. IF you want to convince someone otherwise, then why would you essentially mirror the main premise of wrong with what you’re trying to distance yourself from?

A normal business depends on cash flowing in and expenses flowing out, keeping a balance where the cash coming in should be higher(otherwise the business can’t survive.) Despite it’s unique features and quirks, network marketing is the same as any other business.

Retail sales leads to revenue right now, but it also builds up a solid customer base. Recruiting is a long-term bet where the probability of success lies on someone else. If we were investing money in what would succeed, sales is a much better bet since recruiting has too many variables affecting it. Remember, you’re responsible for your own success, don’t just rely on other people to get you where you want to go.

I’m not saying not to recruit, just that you should be smart about it and treat your business, like, well, a business.

Be honest with yourself –How many retail customers do you actually have (Not counting your mother and relatives)?

Advertisement

THIS is how you really succeed in network marketing.

1. Build a solid customer base of loyal,recurring customers (Money coming in consistently)
2. Recruit 1 or 2 people that are qualified. You can likely find a few good candidates among your customer base, since they are already part of the industry
3. Ideally divide different geographic areas between you so that you’re not focusing on the same people.
4. Lead by example and focus on sales. Your team will follow what you do, not what you say. Did you know that a recruit that quickly earns money/makes sales is far more likely to stay on in the business?
5. Help them build solid customer bases – aim for at least 10 different customers per month.
6. Put systems in place that allows you to get new distributors up and running on the right things quicker. Give these to your top leaders so that they also can start recruiting effective people.
7. Scale.

So no matter the business or compensation plan, your focus should always be to build a stable base of customers first. Then you take this knowledge and find just a couple of qualified people that you can teach and really help one-on-one. These two things ensure that you hit the ground running, this is more important than any fast start bonuses your company may offer(though you will likely get them if you sell a lot).

Focus on money coming in before you start building your organization. You wouldn’t hire a bunch of employees if a “normal” company wasn’t earning any money, why would it be any different in network marketing.

The business isn’t won by “many people doing their small part”, this doesn’t lead to your success, just the company you’re apart of. You need to do your big part in order for you to succeed, otherwise you’ll always be stuck, not going anywhere.

Art Jonak said something very insightful in his Facebook group recently (if you’re not a member yet, you should definitely become one).

If you’re in Network Marketing, you are in a sales business. Network Marketing is based on the process of selling. Even if you wanna call it sharing, marketing, helping etc. it all comes down to one thing. Products being exchanged for money, which is the goal of sales and the definition of commerce.

Here’s something that might be going though a few people’s heads right now:

But I’m not a salesperson….

What do you think of when you hear the word sales?

• A con-man in a suit
• A pushy person that only thinks about getting you to buy?

Imagine this: Amy is a single mom working full-time to support herself and her son Jonathan

One day she’s in her car home from work as usual. It has been a really long day so a friend has been watching him. When she gets home, it’s almost past Jonathan’s bed time but he’s still playing with his toys. Her friends apologizes and says that he doesn’t wanna go to bed whatever she says.

—–

Amy: Jonathan, please put your toys away, it’s time for bed.

Jonathan: Why? I wanna stay up and play with them

Amy: I understand that you wanna stay up, playing with your toys is so much fun. Do you remeber that we talked about getting ice cream tomorrow after school?

Jonathan: I do, I’m really looking forward to it.

Amy: Me too! But you know what? If we don’t get our sleep, we will be tired tomorrow which means we won’t have enough energy to go get that ice cream. You do wanna get ice cream tomorrow, don’t you?

Jonathan: Of course, can I get a double scoop of chocolate with sprinkles on top?

Amy: Sure you can, just help me clean up these toys, go to bed and before you know it we’ll be on our way to the ice cream shop.

—–

This just seems like normal parenting stuff, right?

It is, but it’s also sales. She had to convince Jonathan to put away the toys and go to bed. We’re all constantly selling, ourselves, our product, our hobby. Selling isn’t bad, it’s natural.

You know what, I’m gonna teach you how sales works, step-by-step. It honestly isn’t that difficult once you get the hang of it.

Sales can essentially be broken down to a process. No salesperson is better than their process and how well they perform each part.

1) Figure out who and what type of people you’re able to help and therefore are going to sell to.

2) Create a list of potential customers(leads) by using different techniques (we will go through a few such techniques further down.)

3) Find ways that you can use to reach your leads (which you will eventually use to come in contact with the people on your list.)

4) Figure out what you’re going to say and create a general outline that you center the conversation around.

5) Contacting the people on your list

5.1) Tick the three boxes

5.2) Touching on their needs and problems

–> If their needs/problems match what you can help with, keep going <–

5.3) Tease what you sell and build interest in it

5.4) Book a meeting using the 2-time method

5.5) Prospecting and qualifying review

6) In the meeting

6.1) Build trust and figure out what kind of person you’re dealing with

6.2) Finding the person’s needs and problems by asking the right questions

6.3) Build interest in your products by helping them solve the problems you found

6.4) Answer their objections and help them work through them

6.5) Look for buying signals

6.6) Close the deal when you notice a buying signal

(7) Making them into fans and loyal customers.

Do you want the step-by-step instructions to implement this process in your business? Cool 🙂

Let’s jump right into the good stuff. This is for three kinds of entrepreneurs ..

1. For people who run Network Marketing businesses
2. For Marketers who already focus on selling products but want to improve.
3. For Network Marketers who want to focus on selling their products but don’t really know where to start.

Is that you? Good. Because you’re in the right place, my friend ..

1) Figure out who and what type of people you’re going to sell to

You wouldn’t sell meat to a vegetarian, would you?

Ok.

Maybe you could try..

But it would be very difficult.

Why bother spending your energy trying to sell a product to someone who isn’t interested

or has the need?

Wouldn’t you rather sell to those who could benefit from your product that might even already be interested.

—-

—-

Of course you would!

So, how do we go about finding these “interested customers”?

Easy.

We simply start with defining who they might be and what they might look like.

The people you target should be based on your product, your company and what “category” they are in.

Start by answering the following:

What category is your product?(health/fitness, beauty, financial etc.)

Who are the people typically interested in this category?

—-

What problem does your product solve?

Who has that problem?

Imagine that you run a cleaning business. Your company’s main product is a subscription for a recurring cleaning of people’s home.

So… Why do People buy a cleaning subscription?

To figure that out we have to backtrack a lil bit.

What does cleaning accomplish?

Well, you get a clean home which is both good for your health as well as making you feel better in general(it’s been proven that a clean home greatly improves your mood).

What is the main issue with cleaning?

It can take a lot of time and therefore sometimes gets neglected because of not “having the time” (some people also find it boring).

How can a cleaning service help with that?

It allows a person to take all the hassle and time out of the equation by exchanging a bit of money.

You also get to come home to a sparkling clean home which will make you feel great.

It essentially comes down to saving time(and energy).

Who has a lot of issues with not having enough time?

A lot of people do, but if we think a bit more narrow we might land on entrepreneurs and/or managers. These people tend to work a lot which in turn might lead to their home being slightly neglected because of the. not having enough time. I’m not saying that most entrepreneurs’ homes are unclean, probably the opposite for some of them(they know the benefit of a clean home when they come home after a long day) but they all have one thing in common. They value their time and always need more of it. Therefore, they are very willing to spend money and do things that save them time.

Sounds logical doesn’t it?

I think so too. It’s called it Value based Selling. Which essentially boils down to: If you provide more value than you take, you have a successful business.

Always lead and start from the angle of: “what’s in it for them”. Put yourself in their shoes.

Don’t just think of them as customers, think of them like living, breathing people that have their own struggles, needs and desires. People, they are who you sell to. And you can’t sell to them if you don’t know them.

We’d probably want to narrow down even further from entrepreneurs in general but it’s a good start.

Using this information we could go ahead and compile a list of all entrepreneurs in our service-area. We’d then use this list and start contacting, leading with saving them time instead of you selling a cleaning subscription. This might still seem like regular sales, and it is, mostly, the main difference is that we start from the angle of the person we want to reach.

Not everyone will buy from you but a large majority of these people will recognize their pain point in not having enough time, which shows them, that you put what they value, over simply trying to sell a service.

2) Create a list of potential customers(leads)

When we know what type of people we’re targeting, we need a way to find them and put them in a list we can use for contacting.

These people are called leads. But what are leads actually?

A lead is the name(and contact info) of a company or a person that could be interested in doing business with you.

To find out if a lead is a good fit for your product, you simply evaluate their characteristics with your customer profile and see if they match. This is called pre-qualifying and works wonders for further reaching only those who are interested.

There are loads of ways to generate leads, the most straightforward way being:

Googling – The very basic but many times the most useful tool for finding

leads. Simply google related things in your area and make a list of people and/or businesses. Eg. Dentists in “zipcode”

Since there are almost an infinite number of ways to generate leads, it isn’t so much about what method you use but rather about you being able to find your target market through it.

A few other examples:

• Go where your customers are and become a part of that community
  • Facebook groups & pages – Find facebook pages and groups related to your category and make a list of the people who like them/are members. You do this by either clicking “likes” on a page or “members” in a group.
  • Local clubs around your category – the members in these are all in some way interested in or involved in your category

For now we wanna give you an example for what the process might look like if you generate leads by using this method:

People who already use competitors products – People who buy from competitors can be perfect for selling to. They have already shown that they are interested(and thereby a good fit) so the main thing that you need to do is to convince them to switch to your company.

To find them you might need to get a little bit creative but they are perfect leads when you do find them.

Example step by step – Competing products

What competitors?

Start by writing down as many competitors to your company and it’s products that you can think of. A tip is to google: “your company name” competitors or “your product category” companies.

Put all of these in a list, ideally a spreadsheet, but pen and paper works just fine.

• Now go through each and every one and answer the following questions:
• Is this company’s products equal to or worse than the ones I offer?
• Does this company have a lot of complaints and bad reviews?(a good idea can be to google “company” reviews / “company” complaints)
• What price class are the company’s products in? – lower than mine, equal to mine, slightly higher than mine, a lot higher than mine

The reason that we are going for worse products is because we need a solid reason for them to make the switch, if we were to try and convince someone that might use a better product we don’t really have anything to go on.

The companies you eventually target should ideally be in the same price class as yours or quite close. We’re skipping the ones that are a lot more expensive for now(unless your product is a luxury one) since they usually have different customers than those of more “mainstream” brands. We’re also skipping cheaper since people who buy cheaper brands usually do so for a reason(and therefore don’t want to pay more).

Make a new tab/page in your document titled something like: comparable competitors.

Put all competitors that fit the following in it:

• The quality of their products is lower than yours or there are a lot of complaints and bad reviews.
• They are the same price class as you or slightly higher
• or their quality is the same as yours but they charge slightly more.

Advertisement

Essentially, we’re looking for companies that charge the same for their products but yours are a better quality. We’re also looking for companies that overcharge for products that are equal to yours since we can use a price argument on them.

Go ahead and also create a separate tab/page for each company that you put in the comparable tab. We’ll use these for filling in our leads for each one.

How to find these people

For this we’ll be using the same document as above and filling it up with some more information.

Look up if the company has any social media pages. Write the links for each down in the document on the regular company page.

See who likes/follows them and make a list of all these people under the respective company tab.

Even better, look at who interacting with their posts, liking, commenting, sharing etc. and put a mark next to their name.

advanced: send targeted ads towards people who like their social media pages.

Does the company run a blog?

Look who is commenting and/or sharing their posts.

advanced: Set up an ad on google for their company name. In the ad you can offer up yourself as an alternative or go for the longer play by offering value(a better option)

Google and find bloggers who write about using the competitors products.

Try to find a list of the people who read the blog and/or comment on the posts.

Advanced version: Contact them and offer them to try your products for free. If they like them they can write about it to their audience, mentioning you and maybe even how your products compare to what they usually use. To go even further on this one, you can pay these bloggers and require them to include a discount code if their readers shop with you.

Figure out how you can convince them

Selling to people who use competing products is a little bit different in that you need to convince them to switch rather than just convincing them of their need. This section is really about finding these people, not convincing them but here are some ideas anyway:

• Find out what issues/complaints there are with their products and use these as entry points.
• Write a list of things that your products do better, put yours head to head with theirs and write down pros and cons for each.
• Offer a discount / free trial, if I can’t get you to switch to x in 10 days I will personally refund you the whole sale.
• Try to find things you can help them with outside of your direct products.
  • Maybe they take too long to put on makeup in the morning. Offer to take a look at their process and see if there is anything they could do to make it faster/more effective and thereby save time. People will love you if you help them with things like this.

3) Find ways that you can use to reach your leads

Once we know who we need to reach, we need a method to get in contact with them.

Our goal is booking a meeting, not to sell a product at this point. The real selling happens at the meeting itself.

It’s been proven that if you get someone to say yes to you, they are also more likely to say yes in the future.

Agreeing to a meeting = A Yes

Contact info

When you have written down a good chunk of people it’s time to expand them with things like contact info and any details you can find about the person. The people on your list aren’t considered leads before you have a way to contact them. Find their phone number, email address and other ways you can reach them.

This info is later what you will use to contact the people on this list.

You can still sell things through other channels such as ecommerce, but they aren’t the topic of this program. It’s can also be quite difficult to sell a product over the phone directly since most people today have very good built in shield towards telemarketers.

So, what are some ways that you could get in touch with your leads?

• Putting together events
• Email
• Sms
• Door to door
• Advertising
• And our focus in this program: using your phone to call

There are loads of ways of getting in contact with your leads but we’re going to focus on using your phone.

The easiest way to find phone numbers is to either look at their profiles(facebook for example sometimes have their phone number listed on the about page) or using an online phone book where you can search for a specific person in an area. You need to do some detective work but it’s all worth it in the end.

Therefore, we recommend you to sort your spreadsheet by whether or not you have a phone number to the person since these are the ones you’re going to be contacting. Don’t deleted the ones where you don’t have a phone number though, these are still great leads that you can use.

Booking by Phone

Not too many people are known to love cold calling or using the phone for booking meetings.

The opposite really, they hate it more than almost anything else and are scared to death of it.

But, unless you have someone else that books appointments for you, you will eventually have to do it and when you do, you should aim to do it really well.

The fact is, If you don’t book any appointments you will not meet any customers.

Even though we live in the digital age, the phone is still the absolute best tool for booking meetings that you have. Nothing really beats it.

And you know what, the phone really isn’t that scary, you’re just thinking about it wrong. Instead of thinking about how you’re bothering the other person, flip it around and remember that you’re actually offering something that helps them and solves a problem.

You’re simply trying to help them.

The crux is that people only want help from people they trust.

And to build trust you need a process that helps you break down their defences and paint you as the trustworthy person you are.

4) Figuring out what to say

Start with what you want out of the call and work your way backwards.

In this case we want to get them to agree to have a meeting with us.

To do that we need to make them trust us and gauge if there is a need and interest in our products.

To make them trust us, we need to work our way through their built in defense towards telemarketers.

Something that many people struggle with is getting sales to feel natural for them. They feel that they are too pushy and that they “shove their product down people’s throat”. This isn’t how sales should be done, though it’s completely natural to feel this way. To convince someone(the essence of sales) is always a bit tricky and doesn’t really feel “right” until you’ve gotten the hang of it.

There are things you can do to make sales feel a lot more natural though. The reason why people feel that selling feels out of place is because they are mostly selling unsolicited, meaning that the person you’re talking to isn’t in a situation where selling a product to them feels natural.

It’s all about context.

The three boxes

This might be THE most important important part while calling someone this way.

The Three Boxes

Imagine this, every single person you call has these three boxes in their head. And they all need to be checked off before they will allow you to pass. Whether it’s a receptionist, a business owner or your every-day mom they will try to quickly end your call if you fail to tick these three boxes.

They are as follows:

1. Your name. You don’t need to give your company name but it’s best to try it and compare on a few different calls, it always a work in progress after all. It can be a bad thing if you give your company name. It doesn’t add credibility – It just tells them that they don’t know you or have heard of your company. Only giving your first name is almost always fine
2. How you found them. This tells them if you have something in common or not. If you found them in the Chamber of Commerce, for example, this tells them that you’re local and immediately differentiates you from a random cold call. Look to leverage anything you can to show that you are “like them.” If you can somehow connect on any level, you get a check on this box, because you seem human.
3. Why you’re calling (and it better not be to sell something!). This is where you can really be different from your competition. If you tell someone that your are looking to sell them x in any way, they’ll get rid of you as quickly as possible. “Ugh, not another sales call…” You need to give them a different, but still valid, reason for calling. If you’re calling a business that reason might be because you saw “a potential fit between our businesses, and was calling to talk to [insert name here] about it.”

You should of course still tell them what you’re selling afterward, but once you address the third box in this way something magical will happen. People will listen to you. You are no longer selling snake oil to make money, but you’re rather coming off from a human point of view that’s mutually beneficial as well. Many times, the answer will still be no, but you will have an answer! And guess what? Sometimes the answer will be yes and you’ll make a sale!

Value

Sales is built around value.

If someone doesn’t see the value of what I’m selling and what it can do for them then I won’t sell a thing.

If we instead that a call would include a bit of value it might look like this:

I’ve heard that you employ a lot of sales people, is that correct?

The person talks about their sales people for a little bit

I have an interesting idea on how you could get them to both perform and feel better at the same time. Is that something that sounds interesting to you as a business?

How do you currently work with increasing the output of your salespeople?

….

….

….

Would you be interested in booking a quick meeting where I can show you? It will only take about 20 minutes.

Perfect, what works best for you, tuesday at 3 or thursday at 2?

This is of course not a complete sales pitch but it illustrates an important point about giving and offering value. In this scenario we’ve looked at the person’s company from their angle. They employ a lot of sales people and by knowing that we can presume that they want them to perform at their best. Therefore teasing/offering a solution directed towards this gets them interested. You should always have this with you in all your conversations but don’t make the mistake of immediately pitching your “value solution” right out of the gate, you have to work your way there.

Should I use a script?

Both yes and no, you shouldn’t just copy a script from someone and read straight off of that.

A sales script shouldn’t be a word for word thing that you always repeat but rather a general outline and game plan for your conversations. What points do you want to touch on? What needs have you identified that you want to find out if the person has?

5) Contacting your leads

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

H – Process:

1. Have the needed information on the person easily accessible
2. Having a prepared short and sweet pitch that gets them interested
3. Call the person
4. Tick the “three boxes”
5. Find out if there is a need for your product
6. Build interest/tease what you do
7. Book a meeting by using the 2 time method

H – You need:

• A list of people to call with their contact information listed next to their name.
• A script that gets them interested.
• Prepared times to meet – 2 different times to suggest to each person. Try to dedicate days to meetings so that you manage to fit several into the same day.
• A phone that you feel comfortable speaking into. Choose what feels best, be that using headphones etc.

5.1) The Three Boxes

Start out by ticking the three boxes so that you start off on the right foot with the customer. Here’s a short reminder what they are:

• Your name
• How you found them
• Why you’re calling

Always do these before moving forward, otherwise you will face more resistance than necessary.

When you’ve managed to tick the 3 boxes it’s time to try and qualify the person you’re taking to, in order to see if they are a good fit

We’ll start off with presenting you a way that you can start the conversation in order to create a positive and clear atmosphere.

The customer wants to know why you’re calling and why they should spend time listening to you.

5.2) Touching on their needs and problems

When you’ve managed to tick the 3 boxes it’s time to try and qualify the person you’re taking to, in order to see if they are a good fit.

We’ll start off with presenting you a way that you can start the conversation in order to create a positive and clear atmosphere.

The customer wants to know why you’re calling and why they should spend time listening to you.

Remember the three boxes

You: Hi, my name is Peter Anderson and I’m calling from Nick Madsson.

Customer: Hi, what’s this about?

You: I got your name and number from our mutual friend x.

Right now I’m contacting local businesses and offering our digital sales education for an introductory price throughout the month.

You: I just visited your website and saw that you’re opening a new office in New York. How does that feel?

Customer: Yeah, it’s good.. (the customer talks about the new office for a while)

You: In these times of expansion, how are you working with skills development?

Customer: Honestly, it’s been slightly neglected.

You started this example by clearly presenting yourself and why you’re calling.

You then quickly made the call all about the customer.

This approach makes the customer perceive you as honest and direct, whilst the customer simultaneously “forgets” that this is a sales call.

While making the customer trust you, you have managed to ask a leading question that makes the customer identify a need in skills development.

This gives you insight in that the customer might be a good fit since they know and admit that it’s something that’s been neglected.

5.2) Building interest

By talking about how it can solve their problems that you found during the prospecting.

In the previous example you most likely also piqued the person’s interest since asking about something automatically makes them think about it.

I see,

How do you feel about that?

Do you have any plan moving forward, after you’ve settled down in your new office or in the coming weeks?

I know you’re a busy person so I have a few ideas for how you could make this process a lot easier so that you don’t have to spend as much of your time and energy on it. Would you be interested in discussing these further?

5.3) Booking a meeting using the “Two-time method”

Getting the customer to agree to a meeting can at times be difficult. But don’t worry, you have a trick up your sleeve. The two time method.

Instead of asking if a certain time works for someone, it gives them 2 alternatives to choose from.

So instead of: Does thursday at 4 work for you?

We ask: What works better for you, thursday at 4 or friday at 2?

By using this method you actually have math in your favor as well.

Think about it like this, in a normal situation the customer has two choices, either saying yes to the time or saying no. With the two time method there are three alternatives, two of which are yes, so instead of 50/50 you now have 2/3.

This method is best used in the following way in order to land on a good time for the potential customer.

What works better for you, mornings or afternoons?

They answer: afternoons

What works best for you, tuesday at 4 or wednesday at 4?

By doing this you find out what the customer prefers, which they will appreciate.

6) In the meeting

6.1) Build trust and figure out what kind of person you’re dealing with

Sales is about building trust.

Trust in the products/your offering.

Trust in that their need can be fulfilled.

But most importantly,

Trust in you.

If making a sale is about building trust we could imagine that there is a sort of “trust meter” inside of a customer.

Imagine it like a giant thermometer, tracking not temperature, but the level of the trust you’ve achieved in the person.

For every box that you tick, it fills up a bit more.

Before it’s sufficiently filled, you can’t move forward towards closing the deal.

If you do, you won’t get very far and might even lose the deal because of it.

Always build trust before you try to go for the close.

Everybody has these boxes that need to be checked for them to trust someone. They might differ depending on the context, but they’re always there.

Try to always have this meter in the back of your head when selling, gauging where on it you currently are.

Get them talkin

Here’s a fact that you will most likely agree with.

People love themselves the most.

This means that the customers definitely love themselves more than you.

If people love themselves the most, one could assume that they also love hearing their own voice.

That’s why the best salespeople are also the best at making the customers speak.

You should spend most of your time observing the customer, acknowledging them and making them talk about their interests.

If you are in the customer’s home or office, look around at what kind of personal belongings there are.

It can be everything from a baseball to a special book shelf. Take it all in.

It’s in the link between the personality and their belongings where you will find out what kind of interests the customer has.

Doing this successfully while also adapting your communication will soon enough lead to you having a satisfied customer in front of you.

6.2) Finding the person’s needs and problems by asking the right questions

When you have found and established a good contact with the customer based on his interests, it’s time to steer the conversation towards the needs analysis.

The needs analysis is used to find what specific needs the person in front of you has.

As a salesperson, this is where we make two major mistakes.

We believe that the customer knows exactly what’s best for him and we believe that we ourselves know what the customer wants.

The truth is somewhere in between and it’s through the conversation with the customer that we find the real needs.

We find needs by asking the right questions

Asking good questions is an art and like any other art it takes lots of practice.

Questions are what drive a conversation and sales conversations are no different. They allow you to get the customer open up, find their needs, move the conversation towards your products.

Asking the right questions and creating a good needs analysis will make your experience a lot smoother and get you closer to closing the deal.

It’s important that you put your mind to it when you write down your questions and then follow the plan that you have with your call.

Avoid the mistake that a lot of people do when they just keep babbling on.

It’s far too common for salespeople to just keep dumping questions on you so that you feel like you’re being interrogated.

Ask the customer a question.

Then be quiet and wait for the response.

To master the silence requires practice, but silence is your best weapon to use in order to get the customer to talk.

6.3) Solve their problems with your products

You can use questions to smoothly switch the conversations towards your products.

Start by defining the benefits of your product.

Then ask questions that highlight these benefits.

If you for example are selling an effective vacuum cleaner, the conversation can go something like this:

You: How do you perceive vacuuming at home?
Customer: It takes a long time / It’s stressful.
You: I can understand that. How would you feel if we could offer you a way to lessen the stress?
Customer: That would be good.

6.4) Answer their objections and help them work through them

Objections

It’s almost impossible to have a sales meeting without receiving any objections.

An example of an objection could be when the customer says that they’ll think over the offer and ask to get back to you.

An objection is often a tactic that the customer uses to stall the process.

You should start by investigating what basis there is in the objection.

Is the customer genuinely not interested in buying from you or are they trying to stall the process?

You figure this out by first affirming what the customer has said and then asking a follow-up question which gives you the reason for the objection.

If the customer asks to get back to you, you simply ask the follow-up question

“How come you want to wait?”

You should then be quiet and wait for the customer’s answer.

If you are daring enough to wait, the customer will tell you the reason behind it.

Confirm and Face

As we mentioned earlier, you need to start off with affirming the customer’s objection.

You confirm the objection by giving a positive answer that shows that you have heard what the person said.

After you have affirmed it, you can either probe for the base objection or face it.

When the customer has told you the reasoning behind the objection, you can face it with a solution.

Example

Customer: (Objection) I’ll have to think about this and get back to you.

You: (affirm & Probe) I understand, how come you want to wait?

Customer: (Basic objection) The service seems great but we simply don’t have time to update.

You: (affirming) I understand, These computers can be trouble sometimes.

You: (Facing) How would you feel if we could fix these updates for you?

Customer: Well, of course, that would be something different…

You: Close the deal!

6.5) Look for buying signals

Buying signals are just what they sound like, signals that a person is close to buying. They’re subconscious but are usually the same across people.

If you miss one of these signals you might miss the whole order.

If you notice a buying signal, don’t hesitate to go for the close!

Two examples:

How much does it cost?

What’s the quality like?

—–

A tip is to write down common buying signals that you notice in your work. Then you will be ready next time you notice them.

6.6) Close the deal when you notice a buying signal

Closing the deal is what might seem like the most daunting task of sales. Up til now, you’ve mostly had a pleasant conversation but now, the only outcomes are either a yes or a no. Rejection stings but going and being rejected is almost always better than

The way you close is dependent on how your meeting has played out until now and what kind of person you have in front of you.

Your techniques for reaching a close are related to your pitch that you have used to build up towards this point.

There are thick books with hundreds of different techniques for reaching a close, but here are a couple to get you started:

Give alternatives

Give the customer alternatives,

“Do you want a red(pill) or a blue(pill) one?”

(The Matrix is a really great movie)

Give the alternatives in a confident but humble way.

Always keep an ace up your sleeve, that you can throw in as another attractive offer if the customer hesitates over the alternatives you have given.

Take Control

You are sitting down together with an insecure person.

You have noticed that through your analysis of the personality.

To take control in this case means to argue with agreement.

You should make this kind of customer agreement with your statements all the way to the end.

You simply use follow-up questions to check with the customer:

Does this seem good?

When you finally propose your offer, the customer is already with you.

To think about

No matter what method for reaching a close you choose, you should always expect questions or objections.

This is where it’s important to be well prepared.

As we wrote earlier, you should always affirm the objection of the customer and go on to face or respond and offer a solution.

Repeat this method, eventually you will be making business!

Some last words

If you practice the principles in this article, you will increase both your activity and your quality.

Your results will thereby improve.

You’ve gotten keys on how to think when you’re planning, doing and closing your deals.

For you to be a successful salesperson you just have to dare.

You have to dare to walk your own path and believe in yourself.

Remember, there’s always someone who’s the best because they do what no one else is doing .

Congratulations! You are now ready to sell (or die)

I wish you the best of luck!