It’s a pretty consistent fact around the world that approximately 50% of small businesses fail within the first two years of operation and only about 8% of them make it to 10 years. Michael Gerber discusses the reasons for this at length in “The E-Myth Revisited”, but I’d like to discuss it briefly here and tell you a story to illustrate it.
A lot of small businesses are started by ‘technicians’ who are very good at what they do, and angered when they think that their employer doesn’t value them enough. The accountant who leaves a big firm to start his own practice because he knows he’s being charged at $180 per hour, but only receiving $90, the chiropractor or physiotherapist who knows what each patient is being charged, but only receives a percentage of that fee, or my friend Josie, who is a hairdresser.
Josie worked in Angie’s Salon and she was paid $15 an hour. At the end of every week Josie saw that her income is far less than the total takings that Angie has in revenue. She worked out what each client paid for her services and compared that with her weekly wage and said to herself, “How come Angie gets paid this much and I’m only getting $15 an hour and I work much harder than her. I’m a much better hairdresser than she is and I see more clients!”
After a while Josie decided to start her own Salon. She knew that she is a really great hairdresser, in fact, she loves hairdressing so much she told herself that this would not be work! She worked really hard, put in long hours (all that administration as well as hairdressing!) and to encourage people to come in she started discounting her services. Josie was now working much harder now than when she was employed by Angie. When we sat down together and looked at Josie’s numbers in a Business Coaching session, we worked out that her new pay rate as a business owner was $1.20 an hour.
You see, what Josie didn’t understand were all the other tasks that Angie did behind the scenes. Things like rent, utility bills, doing the payroll, looking at how she’s actually going to get business walking in through the door, (Angie’s clients didn’t just show up with their money on the day she opened the Salon!), and managing stock levels. Josie only saw the big picture with all the zeros at the end of the week’s takings, she didn’t even consider the rest of the picture.
In this classic example of the standard Small Business Owner Josie went from scoffing over $15 per hour as an employee to buying herself a very stressful job for the bargain price of $1.20 per hour! Wasn’t that a great move?
Josie was down – but she was not out! She had signed up for a 2-day Confident Closing workshop that I ran because she was determined not to go back to being an employee. She was going to make this work!
We started by laying out all the bad news … the tasks she had to do, the bills she had to pay, etc – and then the good news … the clients she already had, the staff she had working for her and so on. The picture was pretty ugly, but with all the facts in front of her, Josie could see clearly why she was feeling so stressed and she could make a plan to get out of it.
Find out what happened next … Part 2
Meta Description: What many small businesses owners don’t consider before they start their business and how this leads to despair and failure.
By popular demand we have turned many of our multi-day workshops into multi-week online courses with a live day to kick them off. Learn more at https://businessgrowth.mykajabi.com/masteryoursales
I firmly believe that each of us have all the resources we need to make a success of both our business and our personal lives – it’s just that sometimes we get caught up in ways of thinking and behaving that mess us up over and over again. I’ve seen it a lot in teams I’ve worked with, and individuals and corporate groups I’ve trained.
In my book, “Confident Closing: Sales Secrets That Grew A Business by 400% in 6 Months And How They Can Work For You!” I talk about the transformation Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) brought to my own life, and how quickly I was able to teach others so that they had similar transformations in their own areas of particular need.
In a way, we hate to hear this because we like to think that our problems are unique and that’s why we can’t move past them, but if you think about it differently, this reality is quite comforting: – If others have found a tool that helps them change, then I can too. I don’t need to stay ‘stuck’ in my problem!
The root cause of all our problems is our unconscious mind, and the beliefs and behaviours that we store there. The real problem here is that they are unconscious so it’s very hard to pinpoint them and change them. When I attended my first Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) training I’d been seeing a psychologist to help with depression for months and going over the same pile of misery every week. It’s hard for me to believe even now, what a transformation a few days made in my outlook, but I’ve seen the same thing happen over and over again in other people.
The key is that while Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) doesn’t teach that your past isn’t important, it does teach that you are not bound by your past and it delivers the tools you need to release the chains that are holding you to your old ways. It is almost like magic!
Let me tell you about a couple of the transformations I’ve seen as people overcame the personal and professional roadblocks that had been keeping them stuck for years (I’ve changed names, but the stories are real):
she is so bubbly that she scares some people. In a sales team this is great because it doesn’t matter how many rejections she gets, she’s always ready to get up and go again – on the other hand, she scares off some really great prospects. She was in one of my group trainings and we looked at ways to develop rapport and relationships. As she learned to read her prospect over the phone or in person she was able to tone down her effervescence and close more sales.
Samantha never felt as though this was ‘putting on an act’ because she was simply thinking more about what would make the other person comfortable than herself. She was excited about the fact that she was able to close nearly twice the number of sales, but she was even more excited by the fact that she was able to build a closer relationship with both her sister and her own son – both of whom were introverts. They’d always got on fairly well, but now they were actually enjoying being together.
Clive has been moving ‘away from’ things his whole life. He didn’t want to be fat, or unfit, or poor. In the business context he didn’t want to fail – so every month he reached the acceptable target that he set for himself. The problem with this is that you end up on a see-saw. If you feel fat at 60kg (or 80kg or whatever) then you start to work on losing weight – but your only real goal is to be lighter than that point. So you lose a bit of weight, feel better about yourself, relax … and next thing you know your weight is right back up there (or even higher) – and that was Clive’s problem – he just got heavier and heavier incrementally.
It was the same with finances – he wanted to be ‘not poor’, so he’d make some good money, feel much better, relax and his financial situation would sink back to where it was. Fitness … Sales Targets … same story. When we uncovered the unconscious beliefs which were driving his behaviour and dealt with them, things started to slowly change for Clive. He learned to move toward genuine goals that he was passionate about, rather than ‘away from’ states which he didn’t like.
I could keep telling you stories about others who have been able to overcome their roadblocks, and achieve their personal and professional goals after years of frustration. But I’d like to invite you to experience it for yourself. Come along to my next Confident Closing workshop CONCLO and learn more.
Meta Description: Most people have roadblock – barriers they keep coming up against no matter which route they try. The good news is that NLP is a powerful tool that can help you overcome them and live resourcefully.
By popular demand we have turned many of our multi-day workshops into multi-week online courses with a live day to kick them off. Learn more at https://businessgrowth.mykajabi.com/masteryoursales
I am one of those weird people that sort of enjoys cold calling – within limits. My results have always been good, and that has given me the confidence keep going when I am rejected. But there’s a reason why my results have usually been so good, and that’s what I’d like to tell you about.
One of my early sales positions was in a highly competitive industry with very thin margins. Our performance was judged on the number of calls we made, not on the number of appointments or sales we got. I always thought that was a mistake because it put the emphasis on the action, rather than the outcome and it seems to me that if you expect really poor outcomes you’ll probably get them. Anyway, my outcomes were excellent and I ended up booked out for weeks ahead because I used this system.
People often said, “It’s all very well for you Chandell, you’re a natural salesman so it’s easy for you to get these results.” And I’d kind of smile and think, “Well, if you knew how hard I worked before I ever picked up the phone you’d probably realise that there’s not much natural about it!”
When I became sales manager I started to teach my teams the system I was using, and you know what? Most of them became ‘natural salesmen’ too!
So here’s my 7-Step Sales System – it works for cold calling, and helps you close sales in other contexts as well because it gives you confidence in what you’re selling. The one thing that makes it even more powerful – which I talk about in another post – is principles of observing your prospect and understanding what’s going through their mind. I learned those through neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and they supercharged my results because they also helped me identify prospects who were not a good fit for the product or service I was selling and to offer them an alternative (or suggest they just keep what they had).
You’ll notice this is not an effortless process – it takes real work and thought. It is fantastic when you have a team of people who can brainstorm features, benefits, and objections way beyond the ones in the handbook, but it works almost as well when you do the process alone and then practice it on friends or relatives to refine your script.
Handling objections is usually the hardest part of sales, but it’s much easier once your realise that no matter how complex an objection seems, it usually has roots in one of 3 categories:-
Once you practice mentally identifying which of these 3 categories you’re facing, you’ll be able to answer almost any objection that comes your way, without much difficulty and that will give you added confidence in any sales situation.
It’s amazing how much difference this level of preparation gives to both your outcomes and your attitude. Several times each year I run a sales training workshop called Confident Closing – it has that title because I’m passionate about sales and I believe that everyone can learn to close more sales, but the ‘Confident’ part is just as important as the closing in my mind. It’s rather like going into an exam knowing you’re well-prepared – it doesn’t matter what the questions are, you are confident you’ll be able to deal with them – and as a result your answers demonstrate that confidence.
If you’d like to learn more about my Confident Closing Sales Training go to CONCLO.
Meta Description: A 7-Step Sales System that gives results even when you use if for cold calling – and which will help you close more sales than you ever imagined was possible.
By popular demand we have turned many of our multi-day workshops into multi-week online courses with a live day to kick them off. Learn more at https://businessgrowth.mykajabi.com/masteryoursales
How can you take advantage of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) to set off your sales in an upward trajectory?
In a sales meeting, you have to listen really well to your client. Not the distracted kind of listening that you do as you think of the right things to say next. You must give your full attention to the client. You must be attuned to him through matching and mirroring — words, tonality and physiology.
And you must find out what his frame of reference is. In NLP, a frame of reference is defined as how a person judges the results of his actions. This could also mean his standards. You can ask a client how they know they are doing a good job and you can immediately identify whether he has an internal or external frame of reference.
When the client answers, “I instinctively know I am doing a good job, I don’t need anybody to tell me so”, then you have someone who has an internal frame of reference. These people make good entrepreneurs. They don’t need a lot of validation from outside to go on with their work.
But when he says, “I seek other people’s opinion about my work”, then he has an external frame of reference. This kind of people is perfect for service-oriented businesses like salons. They would seek client’s opinion for them to find out if they did their work well.
A person with an internal frame of reference with an external check looks inside then outside. A person with an external frame of reference looks outside then inside.
Frames of reference have been used in the past for personality profiling and you can use this too in closing sales. Be sure to follow the 5-step selling process discussed in a previous article – 5 Steps Sales Process Works.
For clients with external frame of reference, you can use testimonials from satisfied clients/customers for your product or service. Tell them the great things other people have to say about your product or service. You can build your presentation around these testimonials. These will definitely catch their attention.
For clients with an internal frame of reference, you can emphasize the benefits your product can bring to them. You must do a good job of stacking up your product’s value. You must ask questions to find out if your solution suits his unique needs and problems. When you have done this, it would be like feeding salt to the horses and they would thirst for your product.
Selling based on a client’s orientation would then be natural and would require less effort.
To find out how you can harness the power of NLP in closing sales, come and join our 7-Day NLP Training!
By popular demand we have turned many of our multi-day workshops into multi-week online courses with a live day to kick them off. Learn more at https://businessgrowth.mykajabi.com/masteryoursales
Through expert sales training, NLP coaching, and business development consulting, we’ve helped professionals refine their communications, accelerate their sales and supercharge their personal satisfaction and confidence. Do you want to be one of our success stories?
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