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How to Really, Really Step Up to Excellence in Selling.

Warren Wechsler, bestselling author and national sales and motivational speaker, provides many valuable resources free of charge to sales trainers and sales managers. Some restrictions apply to the use and distribution of this information. For more valuable materials, visit Warren's web site www.totalselling.com. All materials and content © Warren Wechsler, 2001 – All rights reserved.
How do we become professional salespeople? How do we enhance the professionalism of our business so that we can sit at the same table with all the other wonderful occupations out there, the doctors, the lawyers, the architects, the engineers, the business owners. Every profession has honor in my view. And as a fulltime salesperson, sales manager, and sales trainer for the last twenty-six years, I am convinced, I am confident, I know that our profession, the profession of selling, deserves a seat at that table of the honorable professions.

I find as I spend time in airplanes, or as I meet with people before and after my programs that there are some gems, there are some key ideas that I distill and present to people on a regular basis. These have become almost the hallmark of what I do.

What I want to do today is share those ideas with you so that you can have the benefit of having the best of the best of the sales ideas that I share with you every week on this show. This show is going to be entitled How to Really, Really Step Up to Excellence in Selling.

I've talked about it before. You know that I'm the author of a book, The Six Steps to Excellence in Selling. My company Total Selling Systems works on helping people improve themselves as salespeople, whether it's individual brand-new salespeople looking for a process, or experienced salespersons looking for those one or two magical ideas that can help them get to the next level in their profession. It might be an owner or a sales manager looking for ideas on how to inspire, lead, motivate, compensate, or otherwise help their sales force attain great heights.

These are the things I talk about every week. Today I'm going to distill all the best of my knowledge and experience and techniques and ideas into one broadcast. That's my goal and I hope you have as much fun listening to this show as I had putting it together.

I get letters and phone calls and emails from people who are picking up these ideas and running with them, people who are imagining that had they known this then instead of now, they would be incredibly more ahead than they are today.

Every time I open a program, whether it's a speech, a forty-five minute inspirational speech, or a one-day program, or a two-and-a-half-day program, I always begin by saying, "Let me ask you a question." This is after I've been introduced. "Warren's a sales trainer. He's been doing this full time since 1987. He's an excellent salesperson. He was a fantastic sales manager. He's been in the business for twenty-six years. He's the author of a best-selling book, The Six Steps to Excellence in Selling. Warren was named the Entrepreneur of the Year in 1997 by the Twin Cities [the tape is not clear, so typist is not sure if the is the name of the chamber] Chamber of Commerce, the largest chamber in Minnesota with over 1700 people. He's the host of a weekly radio show, Total Selling with Warren Wechsler, that's heard all over the country."

They introduce me. I stand up in front of this crowd of anywhere from 50 to 500 people, and I ask the question. I say, "Thank you so much for that kind introduction. Let me ask you a question. Has anybody in the room ever had a negative experience with a salesperson? Can you please raise your hand?" You can imagine how many hands go up. Then I say, "Has anyone ever had more than one negative experience? Can you raise your other hand?" And we get two arms going up. I say, "Has anybody ever had three, four negative experiences? Can you get your legs up in the air? Can you levitate for me? Get all your appendages up there."

After the laughter dies down, I look at them and I say, "You know, it's interesting. In the sales business we have this tremendous opportunity to educate and inspire people about how wonderful our business is. We can help buyers buy. We can help people solve problems."

But when you think about the sales profession, when I think about the sales profession, when the person outside walking down the road right here on Burlington thinks about the word salesman or saleswoman, all these negative stereotypes come back. We think about the time the salesperson lied to us. We think about the time the salesperson was unprepared. We talk about the time when the salesperson said he would do something and he over-promised and under-delivered. All these are standard myths, but still they are negative stereotypes that haunt the sales profession. Is it any wonder that we as sales professionals struggle with the honorable nature of our profession? We too have had those experiences. Even though we are sales professionals, and we're well trained, and we tell the truth, and we under-promise and over-deliver, we are still haunted by these images.

My job is to break those myths and undo those stereotypes. We've all heard the story. Oh, that Warren. As a young man, he was eight or nine years old, he would talk to anybody. He could talk up a storm. He was such a great talker. We knew he was going to be a great salesman. How many people have heard that? It is, folks, the furthest from the truth. While it is true that good salespeople are eloquent in talking about their products and their services and telling people how much they'll benefit from using the products and services, great salespeople are not necessarily great talkers. They are great listeners.

How do they become great listeners? They become great listeners by asking great questions. Great salespeople are almost consultants inside their company, inside their prospects', inside their customers' companies. So great salespeople aren't great talkers. They're great questioners, and they're great listeners.

What's another stereotype that we've heard? Oh, that Warren, that Steve, he's from a family of salespeople. He's a natural. He sold more cookies to send the band to Mason City than anybody in the history of the school. He's a natural born salesman. How many times have we heard that?

Well the fact is, folks, nobody is born into selling. It would be like saying, "Oh, yeah, that Dr. Smith, he's a natural born surgeon." Would you let your natural born surgeon operate on anybody you loved or cared about? Of course not. Great salespeople are not born. Great salespeople are made. They're made by learning their products, learning their company, learning their industry. And after all, the most important thing, they're made by learning their profession, learning what it is to be a professional salesperson.

Maybe your experience was like mine. My experience was I got hired by a great company, a fabulous company, the oldest company in Cleveland, Ohio, established in 1829, one of the most successful companies in Ohio. They were a hardware wholesaler that sold products all over the United States. Ford Motor Company, General Electric, every hardware store you can imagine bought from this company. Plumbing, electrical, hand tools, power tools, lawn and garden, sporting goods, nuts, bolts, fasteners, safety equipment, cutting blades, band saws. You name it; we had it. I was thrilled to work for this company. I was a sales trainee. They said, "Warren, we're going to train you how to be a successful salesperson in our company."

I spent the next year-and-a-half in the "training program", the "sales training" program. I worked in the warehouse. I worked in the various departments of the company like accounting, finance, the catalog department, the marketing department, the store-merchandising department. They sent me for six months to a retail store so I could learn more about the products and understand why someone would want a ¾ to ½ inch copper elbow for their plumbing issues. I understood the products like you wouldn't believe. We had 50,000 products; I knew where every single one was in the catalog, or if I didn't know exactly what page it was on, I knew how to find it.

I was the seventh in line. I was the seventh sales trainee at the time I was hired, the lowest on the totem pole. Then someone got promoted, and I was number six. Then somebody changed territories and I was number five. Then somebody got fired and I was number four. Then somebody decided to move out to California where we didn't have offices, and I was number three. Eventually I got to be the number one sales trainee, meaning that as soon as the next territory came up, it was going to be mine.

The VP of Sales, Bob Davidson, walked into my office and said, "Congratulations, Warren. You're now getting a territory. It is the inner city of Cleveland, Ohio. Right here in our corporate headquarters. The inner city of Cleveland, Ohio."

I, back in the early 70's, knew that the inner city of Cleveland was not the place to build my career. I said, "Bob, Neal, the guy right behind me knows a lot more about this company than I do. He's much more experienced. Why don't you give Neal the inner city of Cleveland? I'll take the next territory."

Bob said, "Nope, that's not the way it works. Here you go. Your territory is right here. You'll have a chance to start fresh in this territory a week from Monday."

And folks, here came my sales training. Bob looked at me and he said, "Go get 'em, Warren. Go get 'em."

How many listeners out there, how many people you know in sales have been trained in the "go-get-'em" model? It's absurd. Let's go back to being the surgeon. Can you imagine if you were a young person put into a medical school because you had a good understanding of the physical science, you tested well, you worked with people well, high level of empathy, blah, blah, blah…You walk into the first day of medical school. The man or woman at the front of the room says, "You've all tested really well. You've all done great in college. You understand biology, chemistry, physiology. Here's what we're going to do. There are a bunch of scalpels on the end of this table in the front of the room. Behind those doors are a lot of sick people who need surgery. Grab a scalpel on the way out the door. Go get 'em."

Would you allow that surgeon to operate on your child, your wife, your husband? Of course not.

How many of us have been trained in the "go get 'em" model, where we just basically are sent out there with a smile and no understanding of our profession. Yes, we understand our products. Yes, we know who the competitors are. But nobody has ever taught us how to be a professional salesperson. Is it any wonder that those stereotypes - "Oh, he's a good talker, so he'll be a good salesperson." "How do you know when a salesperson's lying? His lips move. Ha ha ha." Is it any wonder that those stereotypes follow us?

Well, my story was I took over the 73rd territory out of 75. I'm ranking them now, where one is good and seventy-three is bad. In four months I moved my territory all the way up to number seventy-three. I was going nowhere fast. Instead of getting angry or upset or quitting, I decided I was going to learn this profession of selling. So to make a long story short, I went to seminars, I read books, I listened to audio tapes, I interviewed people who were much more successful than me.

Slowly over time, I got to understand that there were basic fundamental things that you had to do as a salesperson. Figure out who your best prospects are. Develop a call routine for your clients and prospects. Make sure you're talking to the right people, the people who can say yes. Don't be afraid to go out there and get appointments with brand new people you've never met before.

Don't go in there with catalogs and brochures and tell your story. Ask questions. Find out what's on the other person's mind. What are their problems? What are areas you can help them in? Whom are they buying from now? How long have they been buying? What are they buying? How often do they buy? Why do they buy? And then based on what you heard, present ideas on how you can help this company or consumer do a better job in their lives relating to your products. And then finally, learn how to get people to commit to buy from you.

That was the genesis of my business that I started many years later. Understanding those fundamental building blocks on how effective you could be as a salesperson if you understood the activities.

Now certainly there were a lot of great motivational speakers I heard. Maybe you've gone to these motivational speakers. They tell great stories, great anecdotes. You're pumped up. You feel like the tire's going to burst off the rim. And then as soon as the next day arrives you realize you didn't learn a thing. You got pumped up, you got excited, you laughed, you cried. Ethos, pathos, all the other oses. But then you recognize you didn't learn one thing that could help you be a better salesperson.

I went to a lot of those programs, and I found that as soon as I left it was like the speaker took the pump with him or with her. So my tire deflated even lower than it was before I went to the program.

I committed early in my career that if I ever became a manager, I was going to teach people techniques. I was going to teach people things that were actionable, not manipulation, not contrived closes, not canned scripts, but true activities that could help people be successful in their lives. And that's what I became cognizant of, and that's what I began to stand for. And then in 1987 when I started my own company I had the privilege of starting to teach people those ideas. That was how The Six Steps to Excellence in Selling got started.

Let's review them quickly. Step one: find the prospect. Step two: find the decision-maker. Step three: arrange an appointment. Step four: ask questions and listen. Step five: present the solution. Step six: ask for a commitment. Those are the steps that make up The Six Steps to Excellence in Selling, what I call the sales process.

There are two other concepts that I talk about. One is called sales planning, knowing where you're going, and the other is called sales practice, which is the blueprint, the how-do-you-get-there, the knowing what you're suppose to do every day.

Another thing we have to talk about is what we have to unlearn. When you get into sales you really have to unlearn so much of what you learned as a child and as a young adult. Think about the word no, for example. When people say no to you, when you were two, three, four, five years old, and you were going to do something stupid or dumb or unsafe, your parents or brothers or sisters or baby sitter didn't have an intellectual discussion with you. "Oh, let me tell you why it's not a good idea to go out and put your hand in that boiling water on top of the stove." They didn't get into the principles of boiling water and the physiology of the five layers of your skin. They probably yelled out at the top of their lungs, "No-o-o-o-o!" So from a very young age we learned that no means something really bad. If somebody says no, you'd better stop doing that.

Now as adults and as sales professionals, our managers or the owners of the company say, "You're going to get paid to go out and hear no all day long. You're going to get paid to go out and make people say no to you."

It's ludicrous. Is it any wonder that some people think salespeople have a screw loose or there's a bearing missing?

Another thing we learned is don't talk to strangers. How many times did your parents say, "Don't talk to strangers."? Now you're an adult, you're a salesperson, and what does that sales manager say to you when you're building your new territory, or if you're looking to grow your territory. "Go out and talk to a whole bunch of strangers." We have to unlearn what we learned over so much of our life, even before we could cognize that we were learning it.

Now maybe you were older and someone said, "Don't sign anything before you talk to an attorney. Don't sign anything before you think about it." Now as salespeople our job occasionally is to create a sense of urgency and get somebody to do something now. We want them to sign the contract, authorize the paperwork. We have to unlearn all those behaviors that we learned before, which is don't sign, signing's not good. Now we're saying, "Oh, no. Signing is really actually good." It gets people to commit. It helps them to make the decision psychologically. Once they sign the contract, they're out of the shopping mode. They're now an owner or a buyer of your product.

It's a crazy business we're in. It's no wonder why we all like to have a good time and we're so much involved in incentives and fun. If you look at all the things we have to unlearn, all the behaviors that are ingrained in us that we need to unlearn before we can be successful, we all would drive ourselves absolutely batty. So we definitely have to work on unlearning some of those things. And now once we've unlearned that we are open and we can learn all kinds of great ideas and great techniques and great responsibilities that we have as salespeople.

I'm going to tell you now why salespeople fail. I've worked with hundreds of salespeople as a manager. I've worked with thousands of salespeople as a resource to sales management, helping them teach their salespeople what they need to do to be successful. And as a speaker I've worked with tens of thousands of salespeople. What I've found is that people fail for three reasons.

Number one: they fail because they don't have enough people to talk to. They have a good territory with some good clients, but then something happens. There's an acquisition, the company goes out of business, and somebody's brother-in-law goes to work for your best customer. (Not your brother-in-law; their brother-in-law.) And so because we haven't been prospecting enough, because we haven't been filling our funnel with new potential customers our business fails. Or worse yet, you're a brand new salesperson, and you don't prospect enough in the beginning. You don't fill your pipeline sufficiently, and then you never get on track. You never get enough clients; you never get enough revenue. And if you're about to go from a straight salary in a training area to salary plus bonus or straight commission or draw against commission, you fail and either change careers or companies or industries because you can't make a living. The number one reason salespeople fail is because they don't have enough prospects in the funnel. I'll talk in the next segment how we can overcome that problem.

The second reason people fail is they forget that in the sales business they have to graduate to that Step Six that I alluded to earlier. They have to learn, we have to learn how to ask for the commitment. When I was new in sales I was what's called a professional visitor. I was a straight commission professional visitor. How much money do you think I made as a straight commission professional visitor? Not too much. I was good at opening doors, talking to people, finding out what their needs were. But unless they said, "I'll buy that", I walked out the door without the business every single time. I never learned how to become a professional salesperson by asking for commitments. You might say, "Oh, there Warren goes. He's going to talk about these closing techniques. I think those are manipulative." And you know what, folks? You're absolutely right. I'm not talking about closing. I'm talking about asking. And after the break I'm going to tell you exactly what that means.

The third reason that people fail is because they have a crisis in their belief system. One of the strongest things that we bring to the table is that we believe in ourselves. We believe in our company. We believe in what we're selling. And if a customer or a prospect says, "No, I'd rather buy from so-and-so." Or "No, I think your product is just like theirs." Or whatever.

All these things that compromise our belief system. We crumble. If you have a strong belief system, you really in your heart think that if that person buys anywhere else but from you, if they don't buy your product, your service, from you, from your company, they're making a horrible mistake. And armed with that belief, we as salespeople will be able to go through obstacles, delays, resistance, price objections, you name it, to get to the root of why people will or will not buy.

Does that mean that when you become a believer that every single opportunity you open turns out to be business? Of course not. What it means is we're much stronger. We understand empathy and optimism and enthusiasm and belief. And we're going to get our share because it's based in our belief that we have a great company, great product, great service, and that we would be good people for companies to do business with.

Now we're going to talk about those two reasons why salespeople fail, that is, the prospecting step, Step One, and the commitment step, Step Six.

I ask questions in my seminars: who are your best prospects? Actually, nowadays I ask a question before that: what's your job as salespeople? People chuckle and say, "Oh, my job is to make money. I want to sell a lot and make money." And I say, "Yeah. Well, if your purpose in sales is to make money…" Then I walk up to the person who said that, whom I can capture in the audience, and I say, "Hi. I'm Warren Wechsler. I'm a sales trainer and a public speaker. I want to talk to you today about how I can make some money off you."

Usually everybody laughs because they say, "That's ludicrous. I don't want to hear about how you can make money off me." And I say, "You're right."

The purpose of a salesperson is not to make money. The purpose of a salesperson is to go out and find customers who want to buy the products and services that we sell. So our job is really three jobs. Find customers who want to buy; in other words, find out what their needs are. Ask them to buy. And then keep them coming back for more and more. In simple English, find, get, and keep customers. That's our job.

It starts with understanding who your best prospects are. Your best prospects are not perfect strangers. They're not prospects whom you have identified as targets. Your best prospects are your current customers.

The fact is that you could basically reach every goal you've ever set for yourself by taking care of your current customers. This presumes you have current customers. If you're starting a brand new territory, or if you're starting something from scratch, you are going to be forced to go out there and talk to perfect strangers all day long. That's not the case for most salespeople, however. Most of the time, either we inherit a book of business that's built that we have to grow, or we are the entrepreneur or the salesperson in a territory and we've grown that book of business ourselves.

It's nine times harder to have a perfect stranger buy from you than it is to go back to a current customer and have them buy. Why? Because people buy from people they like and trust. And these customers already like you and trust you.

I'm reminded of the "I Love Lucy" episode where Lucy and Ethel are trying to make money. Remember? This is the 1950's when Ricky and Fred, who are Lucy and Ethel's husbands, were the guys who made the money, and Lucy and Ethel had to stay home. They were always looking for ways to scheme and make money. There was one episode where they went to work in a caramel factory. They were wrapping the candies that came down the conveyor belt. They were able to wrap it and put it in the box, wrap it and put it in the box. Pretty soon, the conveyor belt started moving faster, and they couldn't wrap them fast enough. They started eating them, chewing them, stuffing them into their dress, down their pockets, into their bras, or whatever. It was hilarious how the candy factory conveyor belt started moving so fast. It was ridiculous. Pretty soon the candy is flying off the end and all that.

Now I've been told that as a salesperson and a sales trainer I have a warped sense of humor. And I do. When I think about that episode of "I Love Lucy", I think about the sales profession. Too many times we spend our energy going out to get that new business, and we completely ignore our current customers. When someone comes into their business and says I've got an idea for you, they're thinking, "How come my current vendor, how come the incumbent, how come the company I've been loyal to hasn't told me that or asked me that? How come I feel left out, ignored, or under-utilized?" That's what they're thinking.

Your best prospect, folks, is your current customer. Why? For three reasons. You retain the business you have. You grow the business. If you just go back to your current customers and say, "What are the problems you're having? What other services can I provide? Have you ever thought about us for this? Here's a new idea for you." If you just go to your current customers and ask them for more business, you'll be amazed at how much more business you'll get.

And then the third reason to call on your current clients is to seek out referral business. You come to them with a specific list, an industry group, a geography, even a particular person at a particular company, and you ask your satisfied clients for referrals.

Your best prospects are your current clients. Let me give you a statistic. If you call on a hundred perfect strangers out of the yellow pages or the white pages, an unqualified list, and you ask them if you could meet with them because they had a need that you could fill right now, you would hear "no" ninety-seven times out of a hundred. When I ask my audiences this question, they know the number on this because a lot of them have had to do it. How many of you out there, how many salespeople like those odds? The answer is nobody likes those odds.

Let me pose another statistic for you. If you called a hundred people whom you were referred to and introduced yourself, "Hi, this is Warren Wechsler. I have been referred to you by Steve Smith," how many of those people would at least talk to you and tell you about a potential need they have? The answer is you would only hear "no" twenty out of a hundred times.

So you tell me what odds you like. Do you like ninety-seven no's out of a hundred? Or do you like twenty no's out of a hundred? Or put it another way. Do you like three yes's out of a hundred? Or do you like eighty yes's out of a hundred? The answer is so obvious it's painful.

So many people say to me, "Well, Warren, I tried referral prospecting. It didn't work. I went to my best customer and I asked if they know anybody who's looking to advertise on the radio?" And they said, "Nope, can't think of anybody."

And I say to myself, "That's the foolish way to prospect." Why not say to that person, "Here's what we do. We have advertisers in the car dealer business, in the retail business. We have manufacturers who advertise on our station. We have jewelers, restaurants, food stores. There's a large food store in town that I'm not able to call on now because I don't know the right person. Do you know anybody there? Do you shop there? Do you know anybody who works there?" Now there's a way of being specific to get someone to either give you the referral or not.

Now does this mean that every time you're specific, they're going to give you the referral you're looking for? Of course not. But what it does is help plant the seed so that your clients know what you're looking for, and they don't have to say, "Oh, gee whiz, I can't think of anybody." Your best prospects are your current customers.

People fail because they don't have enough prospects in the funnel, and the way to overcome that is to take care of your current customers, try to prospect through referrals, and then the final piece is don't be afraid to occasionally be a pioneer or a trailblazer.

I talk in my seminars about the quadrant theory of products and customers. There are two sides of the product area. There are old products, which are current, and there are new products, which are potential. And there is the same thing on the people or company side. There are old or current customers, and new or potential customers or prospects.

If you cross the lines you come up with four quadrants. The first quadrant, retention, is current product, current client, which is where we ought to spend about half our time. The second quadrant is new products, current clients. Don't be afraid to let your customers know what else you can provide. The third quadrant is offer something you're really good at to a new person, and the best way to do that is through referrals so you don't have to face that maximum rejection. And then the fourth quadrant is the thing that we all hate doing, but we have to do to season our business, to sprinkle the new ideas into our business, and that is go out and talk to somebody brand new about a product that is brand new to them, or something that is an emerging product for you. So if your company decides to expand its offerings and get into a new area, and it means you have to go talk to a new caliber of person, you're in the trailblazing quadrant.

The reason I call it the trailblazing quadrant is, if you think about what happened to the pioneers as they blazed a trail across our great country in the 1700's, what happened to a lot of those pioneers? They got slaughtered. So we have to understand as salespeople that we're going to face maximum rejection in quadrant four, but sometimes we have to spend time there in order to maintain our business or guarantee we're going to be successful in the future.

How do you really rise to the top as a sales professional? It's understanding that third reason salespeople fail. Actually it's the second reason I talked about today. And that is that we as a sales profession aren't willing to ask for commitments. We're like me. We're like me as a new salesperson: a professional visitor. Now why is it that as salespeople we tend to get stuck in what I call Step Five, Present the Solution, talk about the features and benefits of our product? The reason is we think that if we ask somebody to do something, that we're being pushy. The fact is your customers are relying on you to ask them to make a commitment because they need to think in their own mind, "Should I do this, or shouldn't I? What are the benefits? Should I move forward? Should I not move forward?" And we as salespeople do anything to stick in Step Five.

At my seminars I say, "OK, Step Six is ask for a commitment, and there are only two rules. Number one is ask an obligating question. OK audience, somebody give me an example of an obligating question." I am amazed at how many times I stare at the audience, and they stare at me. I can see them shuffling in their seats. They're uncomfortable. Usually it takes ten, twelve, fifteen seconds for someone to say something.

I acknowledge that person; I tell them what a great thing it was that they just asked an obligating question. And then I say to the audience, "You know, look at what just happened. As an industry, we have to know fifty, sixty, eighty, a hundred different ways to ask for commitments. And when I posed the question, we just sit there dumbfounded. That proves that as an industry we're professional visitors, not professional salespeople."

Then I tell the story about all these books that were written about closing. The Secrets of Closing the Sale. Master Closing. The Master Academy of Closing. And you know what I say to that? It's bunk. In order to be a successful salesperson, all we need to do is learn how to ask the right questions. Let me give you some examples. "Are you ready to go forward? Where do we stand? How are we doing so far? Would you like to take delivery on that? Have I earned the right to your business? Who else do we need to speak with? Where do we go from here? Who's going to cut the PO? How do you want to pay for it?" These are all examples of obligating questions. And what we need to teach ourselves as sales professionals is to ask the question.

And then here are the two most important words I ever say during my seminars, and they are the two most important words you're going to hear on the show today. Every time you ask an obligating question, shut up. Now because we're on the radio, I'm not going to do what I usually do in my live seminars. But when I say "shut up", I do shut up. And I stare at the audience and I don't say a word. I count in my head, and depending on my mood, I'll either go five seconds, eight seconds, eleven seconds, twelve seconds, fifteen seconds. After eight seconds the whole audience is uncomfortable. They're thinking, "Did he forget where he is? Are we going to break for lunch now?"

And then I say to the audience, "OK, that was seven, eight, eleven seconds of silence." Why are we so uncomfortable with silence? Two reasons. Number one, as salespeople we're trained to talk. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And the other thing is when we ask an obligating question, the person who is going to decide if they're going to buy or not goes through something that we all go through. It's called temporary insanity. Every buyer goes crazy before they make a decision to buy. Sometimes it takes a second or a minute or whatever. The longest I've ever had to wait is fifty-seven seconds.

Even if you're deciding if you're going to have a bagel or a hamburger for lunch, you go temporarily insane before you make a decision. Sometimes it takes a fraction of a second and you don't even know it. But you are emotionally unstable while you're deciding to buy or not buy. As salespeople all we need to learn is to be comfortable with the silence, and then be neutral as to the outcome of every question. If they say no, that's fine; if they say yes, that's fine; if they say maybe, that's not fine. We need to turn a maybe into a yes or a no. But once we get good at asking obligating questions, we will be amazed at how quickly our sales will go up and our customer base will grow. We will have many more satisfied customers once we take that leap of faith and we become professional salespeople and not professional visitors.

I want to thank all the people who have supported me over the years to create the knowledge in my mind that helped me put together these ideas that I've shared with you today. If you think about it, I've shared a whole lot of ideas on how we can be better at selling. I've talked about how to break the negative stereotypes. I've talked about how to unlearn some of the things we learned as children to help us be better as salespeople. I've talked about belief. I've talked about prospecting. I've talked about asking obligating questions. Those are some of the main points I've made today.

Now imagine, if you were at one of my live seminars, let's say you had a chance to hear me speak for forty-five minutes or an hour, or let's say I did a two hour seminar or a half day workshop or a full day Total Selling Systems workshop, and you created a personal action plan showing yourself how you're going to implement the ideas you learned about the profession of selling. Imagine any of those programs, or imagine that you heard everything I've said today on this show.

That would all be very nice. Listening, paying attention, all those things would be great. But there's one thing that has to happen for your sales to improve. There's one main thing that has to happen, and that is we have to do something about is.

Why do you think the Nike slogan "Just Do It" is so powerful in our awareness? Because we know that we have to do something to make things happen.

William James, the philosopher, said that nature will support you, and you will be able to accomplish anything you set your mind to, but you have to remember that nature doesn't know what you want until you take the first step. And once you take the first step, nature aligns itself behind you and supports you in any endeavor. The Chinese have said the longest journey of ten thousand miles begins with the first step.

I close all my programs with an exercise that encourages people to do something. It's what I call a personal action plan, and what I do is have everybody in the group get a buddy. You say to your buddy, "What did you learn today? What is something you're going to act on?" And if somebody says, "Oh, I'm going to be a better listener," I say, "Nonsense. What specifically are you going to do? What are you going to do that's measurable?" It has to be something that if I call you up and say, "Did you do this?" you can say, "Yes, I did," or "No, I didn't. I didn't like that speaker anyway."

The main point here is that we as sales professional need to take responsibility. We have to be accountable, and we have to be authoritative in our own awareness to do something about what we learned. So let's say you decided that the most impact you got from today's show is that you are going to learn how to ask obligating questions. I'd say, "Great. Write down three obligating questions, and then write down the names of accounts you're going to call where it's appropriate to ask these obligating questions. Then between now and a week from today, call those people up and ask those obligating questions." There's an example of taking something that is in theory and putting it into practice or taking action on it.

I get calls, notes, emails, and letters back from people saying that the most important thing they learned from listening to me was not necessarily the technique of asking the obligating question or understanding the three reasons why your current customers are your best prospects. What they learned is that the best thing they can do is take action. It doesn't matter if you succeed or fail, but it certainly means you have to do something.

That's the way I want to close the show today. I want the listeners, people who are professional salespeople, owners, managers, retailers, anybody who listens to this show and gets benefit from what we talk about every week, I want you to think about one thing that you could do, and then write it down and take action on it. Between now and next Wednesday I want you to do what you said you're going to do. You can be your own buddy. You can hold yourself accountable for that action.

You know what? If you get a benefit out of it, call me up at the station. Let me know, and I'll give you a copy of my book. You take action, you get results, you get a copy of my book. I'm going to give you a $15 gift just because I know how powerful this technique will be for you.
This was a partial transcript from Warren Wechsler's weekly radio show. Warren Wechsler, bestselling author and national sales and motivational speaker, provides many valuable resources free of charge to sales trainers and sales managers. Visit Warren's web site www.totalselling.com Also, listen to Warren's weekly radio broadcast Wednesday's at 4:05 - 5:00 pm Central time, on KMCD-AM 1570AM. Shows are broadcast live on the internet at http://www.warpradio.com/asx/KMCD-AM.asx
Contact Warren Wechsler at (641) 472-7598 warren@totalselling.com
All materials and content © Warren Wechsler, 2001 – All rights reserved.
© Warren Wechsler, 2001 – All Rights Reserved.