The 2 Biggest Myths in Selling Today
The 2 Biggest Myths in Selling Today
#1. Selling is a Numbers Game
Most of you hear this all the time: “Sales is just a numbers game“, to get as many No’s as you can to lead you to a prospect who says Yes. I know I was taught that when I first got into my sales career 15 years ago.
Now, I will tell you that selling can indeed be a numbers game for you if all you know is “traditional selling” techniques. If you want to, you can, of course, call people over and over again and go through hundreds of calls a day.
You can also chase them down until they listen to you, just so they can come up with an excuse to get rid of you.
Where did the “Numbers Game” concept come from?
In my opinion, it came several decades ago, after the invention of the telephone.
The sales manager, in order to make his salespeople feel better about themselves after continually calling prospects and getting rejected, said, “Selling is a numbers game.”. He made it up just to make his salespeople feel better. If selling is a numbers game, then in their minds, it’s normal to get rejected on 95% of their calls.
It’s supposed to be how many calls you make and how many contacts you can reach that will determine your success in selling, right?
What if you didn’t have to go through all that work, all those objections, and all that rejection just to make a few sales and barely get by?
You see, in the “post-trust era," trust is at its lowest point. It’s never been in the marketplace; it’s no longer about the quantity of calls you make or how many contacts you speak to; it’s about the quality of those conversations and how “deep” you go in each conversation or how deep you get with your questions to bring out their emotions.
It’s about how good you are at creating trust. It’s about how good you are at detaching yourself from the expectation of making the sale, so you become open to your potential customer, what their problems are, if any, what’s causing those problems, and how it’s affecting them, to see if your solution will help them.
Now I’m not talking about just having a regular conversation. I’m talking about a very, very skilled conversation, asking the right questions at the right time in the conversation.
When you have these conversations in a calm, relaxed conversational voice rather than the typical enthusiastic, sales pitch voice, you will automatically attract your potential customers to you like a magnet.
Why?
Because for the first time in a long time, someone, which is you, is genuinely interested in them and what they are looking for, rather than trying to stuff your solution down their throat. They feel your Intent, and they start to lean on you and TRUST you as the “Trusted Authority” in your entire market.
Sales Myth #2: Rejection is just part of Sales
Ask yourself this question: What is the greatest fear you and other salespeople have that holds you back from making calls or talking with prospects about your products or services? Well, of course, it’s the fear of rejection, right?
Have you ever considered that if you get anxious about meeting prospects, cold calling, or calling your leads and it prevents you from talking with them, or you feel the need to get pumped up before you meet your prospective clients, or you drag your feet before making those calls, it could be because it’s the way you are communicating or think you have to communicate that is causing this problem?
My question is: “Why do you accept that rejection is just something you have to accept in selling?”
You accept it because that’s what you have been told, right? And you have experienced it yourself. I know I was taught that when I first got into sales.
But what if the reason why your prospects rejected you was that you were actually triggering that rejection by the way you were communicating with them?
And what if you could learn what those triggers are that are causing you to get rejected so you can eliminate them in your sales conversations?
In my experience, there are two types of rejections:
The first is the “I’m not interested” slam in your face.
The second is the type where someone has looked at your solution and finds it really doesn’t fit into what they are looking for.
The second can be disappointing, but it doesn’t necessarily feel personal.
So let’s take a look at the first one.
You have probably been told over and over again that rejection is part of selling and to learn to expect it, to deal with it, to get over it, and that you have to have thick skin to succeed in sales. And you might have even learned how to do that.
Well, I will share with you that I believe that it’s completely nonsensical.
I don’t subscribe to that way of thinking and training because you can actually eliminate rejection, not by mind games, mental tricks, or by popping in motivational CD’s to pump you up, but by actually diffusing the cause of it.
Once I broke the “Old Model” of selling (traditional selling techniques), my income went from about $300,000 a year to over 2.4 million dollars a year selling the exact same thing, which is almost a 1000% increase.
