Hello guys,
I’ve actually started turning off my alarm and seeing what happens when I allow my natural sleep cycle to take charge.
This is as a consequence of listening to this book – which may bring to an end my ‘430’ wake up…I’m still yet to decide whether it will or not – but certainly it’s demonstrating the transformative power of sleep.
One of the things I’ve already been doing is not drinking caffeine after midday.
Typically my last caffeine intake would run till 4pm – but I’ve since learnt that caffeine with it’s ‘half-life’ of 4-7 hours…
Would still be significantly present in my system by the time I go to sleep.
So I’m now trying to reduce its presence in my system in search of a better sleep because of all of the medical benefits it carries.
And certainly the last two nights I’ve slept better 🙂
But anyway – I’ll write a book review about my ‘fun-book’ once I’ve got to its end.
_______________
With there being two new sales starters (siblings! – I may have already said), I’ve decided to renew my commitment to learning once again – more about the sales process.
And so this is the book I just finished yesterday:
Whilst somewhat obvious in some places, and in others, it had ideas I didn’t agree with – again when I consider it’s value – all I need to do is turn to my notes and see how detailed they are.
From a quick google – here is what you need to know about the man:
David H. Sandler, founder of the Sandler Sales Institute, began sales training and developing the Sandler Selling System in the late ’60s and early ’70s.replica rolex
And this is how his journey started: “Someone gave me a record by Earl Nightingale titled ‘The Strangest Secret.’ There was one message on the recording that had a life-changing impact on me. Earl Nightingale said that if you make a commitment to a given field of endeavor, and if you spend the next five years of your life with the magnificent obsession to learn all there is about that field, you can be certain [you will] become a success in that field. When I heard the recording that night, I made a commitment to go into sales training.“
(Taken from here)
Just reading this has inspired me actually – check what I just paused to do in my Audible (add these five books to my wishlist):
There’s around 45 hours of audio here.
Assuming I read 30 minutes a day per book it would take me 90 days. However, if we also combine the fact I read at 1.75x speed it becomes 50 days.
So just under 2-months to have ultimately read 5-sales books.
Let me check what date that is:
It’s roughly the 5th August.
Game on!
Let’s see if I can get through all 5 of these books – by ensuring I’m putting in a minimum of 30 minutes of listening time per day.
____________________
As you can see all – I don’t need a huge amount by way of motivation to try and take something to the next level.
What Sandle quoted about Nightingale has inspired me because I don’t know that I intend to become the ‘best salesperson’ out there – but i do believe that selling is one of the most valuable skills I’ll ever need as a business owner.
Moving forward I’ll try and follow the newly dubbed ‘rule of 7’ – meaning that when I find a subject that feels fascinating to me – I’ll try and focus upon it more by reading 7 books on the subject.
And so – we return to my notes:
As you can see – there are a lot of them!
[convertful id=”197358″]
___________
Briefly then – what I’ll do is take you through some of the most interesting things I learnt from the Sandler method that I think I can look to start implementing:
Table of Contents
Pre-empting objections
That you could face as a salesperson is an awesome skill to develop –
So, in this case, it’s about thinking about the typical objections or concerns people have about SEO/agencies etc
This is why I’ve gone painstakingly into building these pages.
However this rule, in combination with this rule:
Has led me into creating this:
And ultimately demonstrating why Pearl Lemon is specifically different from any other agency out there.
This will become powerful for my sales reps as well as within our proposals and website.
This has also been insightful for me – as I definitely know that on calls I talk too much –
Shut Up
Given the prospect should be talking 70% of the time – the trick is to steer them towards being convinced of you.
I’m quite bullish on the phone and so I’d consider this a definite weakness.
In combination with that – answering questions with a question I think is very powerful, as it’s important to get to the root cause of what someone’s issues really are.
This one is also excellent:
Weigh Out The Silence
The importance of silence as a tool to drive the conversation is fascinating to me.
I’ve not used this effectively enough at all – and I’m going to experiment with it to see what happens when I allow silence to be used as an opportunity to see what else comes from the prospect.
Certainly, when I hear objections I rush in with a response and what I’m seeing here is that ultimately it’s better to wait and let the objection unfold…
And to also answer statements with questions and then simply wait…to see what the prospect says.
Much like a doctor investigating a medical problem the rationale here seems the same as well
Run A Sales Analysis
This one is huge for me, as I don’t think I take the time at all to REALLY (and objectively) think about what happens when I have a successful sales pitch
It’s literally worth deconstructing the conversations to understand what happened, what went well, what was said and then to use this as an opportunity to go back and improve/continue to firm up aspects of the sales process:
And also – when you have a client who’s now working with you – you can ask them to share the data from other pitches they received as well as for them to understand what helped them make their final decisions…
As outlined here:
I definitely do not analyse these types of outcomes in a bid to understand what is effective and what isn’t and it’s incredible how much you can learn as a consequence of just doing this.
It’s like the 1% rule that James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits, just focussing upon making yourself 1% better each day – and the results that drive over time can be incredible.
__________
Well as you can imagine there were 49 principles discussed in this book and so a ton of things that I could discuss from:
- 70% of your interactions should come from you being the nurturing parent – i.e you’ll treat the prospect’s business like your baby.
- A life without risk is a life without growth – so don’t ever take your foot off the innovation pedal
- The evidence that demonstrates you should ‘fake it till you make it’ i.e feign optimism, success, that you don’t need their business you simply want it
- The uncomfortable close – i.e when a prospect asks for a discount you could say ‘I did this last time and ended up making zero commission/returns’ so, to be honest, I’m a little uncomfortable – what would you do if you were me?
And more!
Anyway – it’s an excellent book that was hard work to read because it contained a TON of advice and now….
I move onto ‘ ‘Way of the Wolf!’
Catch you next time guys 🙂
