Chapter 13

Everything You Need to Know about Creating Revenue, a.k.a. Selling (in about an Hour)

MARKETING WITHOUT SALES IS LIKE MOTHERHOOD WITHOUT SEX

Ask any businessperson whether marketing is important, and they’ll say yes, marketing is critical; a business needs marketing!

But why?

Because marketing is about bringing your products outside your own walls and into the world where customers live so you can offer them for sale. No sales, no revenue. No revenue, no business and no employees dressed in black in the marketing department.

So your business doesn’t need marketing per se; what it needs is revenue, the monetary result of sales. We believe that nothing is more vital to your success as an entrepreneur than your ability to sell. And since this book is about the essence of entrepreneurial power, this chapter’s going directly to the most important thing they don’t teach at the elite business schools: selling. If you understand how it works, you’ll get your marketing to do the work it’s supposed to: make it easier for sales to produce the revenue you need.

As a great mentor put it simply, “Everything is selling.” Beyond business, success in just about anything, from academia (winning those grants) to politics (attracting votes) or parenting (convincing your kids to do things your way) depends on it. When we pitch a new idea to our team, we are selling. When we try to persuade our children to do the right thing, we are selling. When we run for public office and speak to voters, we are selling. When we talk our friends into seeing the rerun of Dirty Harry and not the latest Dark Knight flick, we are selling. It is the number one active ingredient in capitalism. Nothing is more important to you as an entrepreneur or a valued team member than a practical understanding of the basic anatomy of sales.

Selling is simply this: persuading another person to take a voluntary action.

That means any action—from agreeing to invest in a business idea to going out with you on a date. Any feat of persuasion is a form of selling, whether you’re a physician convincing a reluctant patient to have an operation, a politician seeking voter support for a new tax plan, or a car dealer moving a buyer into the driver’s seat of a Subaru instead of the Toyota across the street. And it’s the same whether you are talking to one person at a time or presenting to a group. Every time you persuade with a purpose, you are affirming the classic saying: “Everything in business comes down to selling.”

As small children, we all start out as natural salespeople—just watch a four-year-old trying to talk his mother into buying him an ice cream cone. It’s time to recapture that natural selling instinct. When you master the five sequential steps described below (along with the sixth emotional one), you will be more successful at everything in your life—starting with entrepreneuring.

Selling is nearly always required to make things happen because human beings don’t like to change, period, even when it’s in their best interests. They don’t like to move from the safe spot they’re in, make a decision, take a risk, or fix what isn’t broken. Instinctively, we all default to “no” before “yes” because of that most ancient of all heuristics: “The one I know is the one that’s safe.”

So unless human beings are in active, acute pain—in which case they’ll grab anything you give them to make it stop—they do not automatically want a better mousetrap or a better software solution for collaborative file sharing. They have other things to worry about. They think your new mousetrap is a pain in the butt.

Yet the lifeblood of your new business depends on getting people to volunteer to change—to try and to accept your new product. Only then will they hand you revenue and give you the chance to be a going business, one where revenue exceeds costs.

This requires sales. Those who disdain sales as crass and unpleasant, disdain success. They also don’t understand it.

But the good news is that this attitude is easily fixed. Sales is the most teachable of all business skills. Anyone who pays attention to the simple, timeless steps we’ll outline below can become good at it.

THE “SELLING IS EVIL” MYTH

The first step to proficiency in something is to debunk the false myths and negative perceptions that stand in our way. Nowhere is this more important than with selling. Ask any consumer the words that pop into his or her mind when they think about salespeople. You’ll get words like pushy, manipulative, obnoxious, untrustworthy, loud, phony, talkative . . . and worse.

The traditional brand image of salespeople (made infamous by the brilliant David Mamet in his play Glengarry Glen Ross) is bad, to say the least. As a result, the average person is repelled by the idea of having to sell as part of their job because they think successful selling requires them to act that way.

Now here’s what’s fascinating. Ask that same consumer to describe the best sales experience and salesperson they ever had. They’ll say, “She listened. She really cared about my needs. She gave me time to ask all my questions. She knew everything about the product and explained the pros and the cons. She really understood my problem. I felt comfortable.”

Then ask whether they bought anything from that person. The answer is almost always, “Yes, of course, and I recommended her to my friends, too.”

And then ask, “If you wanted to be a successful salesperson, which kind would you be?” It’s a no-brainer. They’d be the listening, caring, trustworthy, helpful, and no-pressure kind. And so should you.

Contrary to popular myth, the most successful salespeople are never the backslapping fast talkers. They are the best listeners and the best at finding out the customer’s real pain and concerns. For these reasons, they build trust with customers who come back to them over and over again, because they perform a critical service: they help their customers get off the fence of uncertainty, make decisions, and take action that’s in their best interest.

Remember, people have that natural inertia, that natural tendency to avoid risk and stay put. The best salespeople help customers overcome their fear of decision making and change, so they can move forward. When customers make a choice and are satisfied, they love the salesperson for it.

The most successful people in the world get what they want by concentrating on first giving other people what they want. What other people want is to be listened to, cared about, made to feel important, able to trust someone—and then have their needs met. If you’re able to listen, care, and help someone, you can be absolutely great at selling.

THE FIVE UNIVERSAL STEPS TO SELLING

Whether you are talking about person-to-person, face-to-face selling, relationship selling, organization selling, or any other new-age kind of selling from the latest seminar, the timeless sequence for selling never changes, no matter what names are put on it by what consultant.

Here that timeless sequence.

Figure 13.1 The Sales Pyramid

The Sales Pyramid is shaped this way for a reason: the size of each level of the pyramid is proportional to the importance and time you should spend on each step. You start at the bottom.

All five steps are critical to the sale. But the great salespeople spend far more time and energy on those two wide steps at the bottom, because they know that will propel them directly to the top faster and with less effort. Getting the bottom two steps right makes the rest fall into place. Knowing this enables the best salespeople to say, “The sale was easy—the customers closed themselves.”

Enthusiasm

Finally, there’s that one emotional part we mentioned that goes with the other five. This is the part that little kids are so good at, even though they haven’t taken a sales course by Dale Carnegie.1 It’s simply this: a genuine love and respect for your product and the sincere belief that it will improve the lives of anyone who buys it. This is what great salespeople call enthusiasm. This one element transfers trust and belief from your mind into the customer’s mind, and that’s the most important selling step of all. It allows even a rookie to get out there and sell with confidence. And it’s the one thing you can’t fake. If you don’t have honest enthusiasm for your product, you must either fix the product or sell something else. Life is too short for you and your customers to do otherwise.

Using the Pyramid

We’re not going to turn you into a super-salesperson in the next several pages. Most sales courses take at least a couple of days and require you to read a basic selling book. And, of course, as with any other skill, true mastery begins when you get wet—in this case, when you jump into the marketplace and start selling. But we can introduce you to the steps and ask you to take our word for it that mastering this simple sequence is the key to it all.

Once you get it, you’ll also recognize when professional salespeople are going through the same sequence with you. You’ll appreciate it when they do.

Important Note

We’re going to assume the classic sales scenario in our examples because it’s the most challenging. It’s the kind where you initiate a conversation with a stranger, a qualified lead or prospect, who didn’t ask to meet you first and probably has never heard of you. This is what any salesperson on the road, or any phone salesperson required to open new accounts, has to do. It’s also what you have to do when you meet an attractive person at a club and decide to ask for a date, or when you show up at a county voters’ caucus and present yourself as a candidate for the local legislature.

Even if you work in a clothing store or an auto dealership where interested people walk in looking for you, you’ll still have to go through all the steps in the sequence to close the actual sale. You just won’t have to do the cold-approach part. So we think everyone benefits from knowing the whole process start to finish.

1. Make a Connection

Our starting point is quite simple: you have to create a connection with another person to get permission to have the conversation that results in a sale.

When you approach a qualified customer for the first time, they are generally in the middle of doing something else. They are worried, anxious, or absorbed in their own issues. They are not interested in being interrupted by you unless you give them a good reason to be, very, very quickly. Once they’re listening at all, you must get their permission to take their time to begin the sequence of selling. Remember, this is 100 percent voluntary.

There is one best way to break through this ice: you must use an approach question. The approach question puts an important proposition in front of a customer so fast and so convincingly that she only has one reasonable response: “What is it?”

The following is our all-time favorite approach question. If you use only this question in your entire sales career, you’ll still be successful. It’s a work of art:

“If there was a way for me to lower your phone bill by at least 50 percent, while doubling your network, you’d want to know about it, wouldn’t you?2

As you can see, we’ve italicized a few words that are specific to a particular product. Depending on the product you sell, you’ll modify those words to fit the situation and to capture your DSI.

You can see what this question does. It implies in an nanosecond that you may have something specific and valuable to give the customer. You’ve instantly transformed annoyance into curiosity. In a moment, the customer is asking you to tell her more about your product.

We’ve all had call center people who have never been taught this fundamental rule interrupt us just as we’ve sat down for dinner. They’ve been instructed by their supervisors to sound pleasant and friendly, so their first question is: “How are you doing today?”

For most people, the true response would be, “Rotten, you just spoiled my dinner.” Click. The only way for a salesperson to get through would be with an instant approach question that forces the listener to ask, “What is it?”

We have another motive in giving you this specific example. We want you to see that the art of selling has a real method to it that’s been honed and practiced for thousands of years. There are concrete techniques you can learn very quickly to turn yourself into a far better persuader and negotiator than you are now. No matter what you choose as a career, from politics to parenting, these selling skills will make you better at it.

So the first key step is to get permission to engage another person at all. If you engage without permission, it’s called harassment.

Once you’ve made an initial connection, you must start to build rapport. Rapport is the beginning of comfort and trust with another person.

Rapport does not mean being liked, which is the second great misperception in selling. Because the fact is that people don’t buy from people they like, they buy from people they trust. Being liked never hurts, of course, but you don’t have to get someone to want to have a beer with you to persuade them they will benefit by owning your product.

Again, there are whole branches of psychology and books written on how to create instant rapport with others. Many success gurus, including Tony Robbins, have advocated various techniques, like Neuro-Linguistic Programming—the process of consciously getting in sync with another person’s unconscious pace of movement, cadence, and volume of speech to make them feel “she’s like me.”

There are probably grains of truth in these theories. What we’ll say is this: genuine friendliness, a genuine smile, genuine good manners, and a genuine interest in helping another person understand a benefit you sincerely believe in have never diminished anyone’s chances of creating rapport with another human being.

You have one job now in the sales process: to get to step 2—to get your customers to reveal their concerns.

2. Reveal Their Concerns

The best listeners always make the best salespeople. The reason is simple: if you ask people questions about themselves, then you shut up and listen, they will tell you. They will tell you how they feel, what they want and need, what pains them, and what they prefer. They will feel more rapport with you the more they talk because being listened to makes them feel valued and grateful. Sometimes they realize feelings or needs they didn’t even know they had. But this is certain: the more people talk to you, the more they will tell you exactly how they like to buy and exactly what you need to do to sell your product to them.

The big, loud sales talkers barrel in and try to crack the safe open by blowing it up with dynamite. The great listeners let their customers drop the keys to the safe right in the palm of their hand. That’s why, contrary to popular myth, the best salespeople aren’t the closers, they are the openers.

The basic way to get customers to reveal their concerns is to remember the Six Honest Serving Men. These are the so called open-ended questions, the kind that have to be answered with information, not a simple yes or no. Use them again and again to peel back the layers until you approach the real heart of the issue. Here’s a little rhyme that will help you remember them:

There are six honest serving men, they tell me all I know,

Their names are what and why and who and where and when and how.

If you practice using these words to create open-ended questions, you can easily become a psychiatrist and charge people $600 per hour to sit on your couch and tell you all their concerns. It works like Lego: you just keep attaching one open-ended question onto the back of another until you get to what really matters to them: “What happened? And how did that make you feel? And why do you think you did that? And how would you feel if that happened? And then, how would you feel if that happened? I see. Okay then, our time is up for today. Six hundred dollars, please.”

Getting customers to reveal their concerns isn’t a whole lot different. Once they’ve told you about their real wants, fears, and needs, you can zero in directly on those needs in step 3.

3. Present the Benefits

Now you present your stuff. This is where you lay down your DSI and your product’s key supporting features and benefits.

The difference between features and benefits is simple and important:

You should always tailor the features and benefits you describe to the needs revealed by your customer. Why, for example, did we mention the leather-trimmed radio? Because the customer spent 10 minutes telling us about his love for C&W music and that he loves to cruise around El Paso with his friends on Saturday nights. We know this because we asked about the customer’s concerns and interests before the pitch, and he told us his hot buttons.

This is the most important advantage you can get in personal selling and you never want to waste it. By listening and finding out individual preferences, you can tailor your DSI to that customer on the fly—you can emphasize the key attributes that matter to that person most. This is an advantage that no mass-market advertiser who has to appeal to 50 million people in a 30-second Super Bowl commercial will ever have.

4. Answer Objections

As all serious buyers get closer to “yes,” they raise objections.

Amateur sellers get nervous and afraid when this happens. But professionals love objections. They know an objection means they are right on the threshold of the sale. It’s the customer asking for his own permission to buy, and asking you for help in making the decision. An honest objection is also an indication of the customer’s trust in you as the seller because she is sharing her real, final fears and concerns about going forward and handing you the opportunity to sweep these fears away.

Knowing that objections are key to the psychological sequence of buying, professionals are calm and ready when they come. By exposing the objections to the sunlight of information, they can help the buyer see them fully, correct any misunderstandings, overcome final reluctance, and reduce the chances of buyer’s remorse the day after. They know every objection is an opportunity to turn a perceived negative into a positive. In so doing, the final barriers evaporate, leaving the buyer content—even eager—to say yes.

What throws off professional salespeople is not an objection, it’s no objection or a hidden objection that the buyer won’t share. When a buyer wants to “come back later,” “needs to check with his spouse,” or “will consider it along with the other bids,” he is not objecting (i.e., continuing the conversation), he’s telling you he’d like you to stop and go away. At this point, a professional either asks directly for the customer’s hidden objection—“Jack, it would help me to know: what’s the real reason you’ve decided not to go ahead today?”—or leaves politely because this selling opportunity is over.

Learn to love objections. They’re not obstacles; they are your opportunity to close the sale.

Great salespeople have discovered there’s a method to handling objections that can be practiced and applied by anyone who wants to learn. When a customer voices an objection, she wants to (1) be listened to, (2) feel that she is understood, and (3) think that her concern is fair and sensible. Then she’ll open herself to the answers you give back.

There are classic templates for handling objections that are so well known, they have names. They are often taught in sales training because they’re simple and effective.

The most famous is called “Feel, Felt, Found.” It automatically acknowledges the concern, makes the customer feel reasonable, and only then offers a gentle counterpoint, proven by others, all contained in a little story. After listening intently, the salesperson says:

“Mr. Jones, I know how you feel. Many of our best customers felt exactly the way you did when they first saw our solution. But then when they tried it, they found . . .”

Again, the reason to demonstrate a script like this is to show you how straightforward and easy to apply the techniques of effective selling can be.

There are dozens of other ways to answer objections (although we think that “Feel, Felt, Found” is an excellent one). But the underlying psychology remains the same. You must listen, acknowledge, empathize, and then show how the customer’s (valid) concern will be cancelled out by the benefits.

5. Close (Ask)

Closing means asking—requesting that a customer take the action that will get them the desired benefit. It’s asking for the order.

Closing strikes fear and loathing into salespeople and customers alike because it’s the term most associated with the pushy, aggressive, obnoxious salesperson who always seems to be pressing customers to buy what they don’t need or want to do. When a salesperson closes too aggressively or prematurely, customers will pay good money just to get him to go away. This type of selling doesn’t just turn customers off, it keeps nice people from going into selling because they think they’ll have to behave this way.

But once again, the opposite is true. The hard closer is simply trying to go straight to step 5, without going through steps 1 through 4 of the pyramid.

The person who understands the first four steps—who makes a connection and starts building rapport and trust, helps the customer reveal his concerns and needs, presents a solution tailored to those needs, and then responds convincingly to the remaining objections—never needs to push, force, or pressure the prospect. By the time it’s time to close, the prospect is already sold. Now all that’s left for this seller to do is to simply, calmly and confidently, ask.

As painless and nondramatic as this kind of closing will be, there is still no getting around the fifth step. As long as we are selling to humans, if you want someone to take an action, you have to ask. It’s as simple as that.

In recent decades, a whole genre of sales books and programs have appeared that are dedicated to the notion that closing is obsolete in the new age, so you don’t have to trouble yourself or the prospect with this final step.

Sorry, but it just ain’t so. If you’re not sure whether to believe us, consider this. A young man and woman in love may have the world’s most tender relationship, the ultimate in rapport and trust. They may be 100 percent ready to spend the rest of their lives together. But unless one of them, one day, stops and simply asks the other, “Will you marry me?,” the marriage never happens. Somebody still has to close.

If it takes asking to accomplish a sale like that, it’s hocus pocus to think you don’t need to close when you’re asking a stranger to hand you his money. It has to be done—but it doesn’t have to hurt. If you learn and practice the Five Steps, it almost never will.

Classic Closing Techniques

No step in the sales process has been more analyzed, discussed, or written about through the ages than closing. Some of the closing gambits are so classic, they even have names: “The Order Book Close,” “The Door Knob Close,” “The Puppy Dog Close,” “The Assumptive Close,” and maybe the most famous, “The Ben Franklin Close.”3

As with the Feel, Felt, Found script or the Dale Carnegie approach question, these closing techniques are just structured bits of psychology that can help salespeople get proficient in a skill set quickly, using proven templates.

You can find these classics in any traditional sales course. They’re kind of fun to learn. Yet they all come down to the one thing you need to remember: When it’s time to make the sale, you must simply and plainly ask. Your prospect wants and needs to be asked.

Ask and ye shall receive.

THE X FACTOR IN SELLING

The X factor is your enthusiasm—the feeling you project directly from your own love, trust, and belief in your own product. There is the emotional piece that powers the most successful sellers and persuaders. It trumps just about everything else.

This mastery comes built in to anyone who was ever a three-year-old. Enthusiasm is your natural gift and advantage. If you don’t love your product and everything it stands for—and you don’t want the whole world to share your enthusiasm—find another product.

TEACH YOURSELF TO SELL THE ACCELERATED PROFICIENCY WAY

The finer points of sales training are beyond the scope of this chapter, but if there was ever a subject already packaged and available for Accelerated Proficiency, sales is it. You and every member of your team should read one or two of the great books on selling; listen to one of the great CDs that are available by the great trainers like Brian Tracy and the legendary Zig Ziglar; or take a short, high-quality sales course, preferably one not longer than a couple of days. Then get out in the marketplace and start selling.

You really can teach yourself to sell in an accelerated amount of time by studying and applying the lessons offered in these short, entertaining works by the masters of selling. You will get it after that, and you will never look at persuasion, presentations, or even negotiations the same way again.

HOW MUCH REVENUE? JUST BREAK EVEN

Let’s come back to what selling exists to do: generate the revenue for your enterprise.

As an entrepreneurial founder, you’ll need to think ahead and plot your basic plan: (1) Who is going to buy from you (that is, who is your target market)? (2) How much do you need to sell them to cover your costs? (3) How much money, development, and time will you need to get yourself to market so selling can actually begin?

Don’t make your plan complicated. Don Valentine, one of the founders of Sequoia Capital, the famous VC firm, once said, “Your business plan should be able to fit on the back of a business card.” He was exaggerating slightly, but he made his point. Don Valentine had just been pitched too many business plans that were six months in the making and took hours to present, but couldn’t clearly answer the basic questions, “What is it? Why do I need it? Who’s going to buy it? How much cash do we need to get started? And how much time, money, and staff will it take for us to break even?”

Breaking even is the goal line, folks. Crossing it is the magic moment when your business becomes a living thing. It’s the moment the plane flies, the aspiring surfing stands up straight on the board, and the homing pigeon makes it home. It means having enough customers buying from you to sustain a business that sells enough to cover all of its costs, including yours and your teammates’, day after day, month after month. It is the first, great milestone in any UnStoppable company’s success.

Your mission from day one is to focus on reaching this revenue moment.

After that, you’re off to the races.

1 Dale Carnegie is often considered the father of modern-day sales training. His original classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People, still sells thousands of copies annually, 75 years after it was published. We recommend it to everyone. It’s proof that the human principles behing selling (and lots of other key business activities) never change.

2 This is the great approach question taught by the international Dale Carnegie Sales Course.

3 In the Ben Franklin Close, the salesperson says, “When old Ben Franklin got to decision time, he used to pull out a sheet of paper and draw one line down the middle. On one side he’d list all the reasons against. On the other he’d list all the reasons for. It was easy to make the right decision, once he could look at the pros and cons like that. The side that was greatest, won.” The salesperson pulls out a sheet, draws the line, and asks the prospect to list as many reasons for and against as he can. He might remind him of a few additional ones they’d agreed on. Then he asks, “What do you think we should do?” If the salesperson has done his job, the positive side nearly always wins.