KEYS TO MOTIVATION AND SALES
 

Some Core Ideas

Your Goals: Let's make sure you get the most from these articles. Do you have goals and objectives for your sales and career? Think about what inspired you to get this book. Write down things that you want to get from these articles; your goals for reading this book.

Unconscious Mastery: I suggest that one of your goals be unconscious mastery. That doesn't mean selling while sleep walking. It means practicing while awake. As with anything you practice, these sales skills can become part of you; skills that you improvise with. As you practice these skills, you will get more and more out of them. You will become more and more strategic. As you get natural with each skill, your brain will make room for more. Brain research has shown us that the skills you practice become like reflexes. Your brain does this so that you can add layers and layers of skills. This makes you able to pick and choose your sales techniques like a jazz musician does riffs.

Practice Right: To practice right, you have to keep leverage in mind. Your learning is leveraged by picking a few skills and making them your focus of practice for a week or a month. That means you need to get your highlighter out and mark this book as you go. Mark the skills that you feel you would most benefit from now. I have made them easy to digest with my own italics, bold print and numbering. But nothing beats your own highlighting.

There is structure and flow to this book. You could go through one article at a time in order. That would work. But you might actually be better off scanning through the titles and picking the ones that most attract you. There are sections that you will want to go through in order though. My sales processes are very engineered pieces that fit together just so.

I'm honored that you have chosen me to instruct you. I'm going to do my very best to make it enjoyable and profitable!

Core Philosophy

Right Out of the Box: This book will boost your income at least 20%. This is no idle promise. I admit that there are so many techniques in this book, that you will be absorbing and perfecting them for years. But you'll get an immediate boost because most of them work right out of the box. You can literally pick a few and start practicing them today, with an immediate improvement in your sales. From there, you'll be fine-tuning them and pulling in even more profit.

It's Real Money: As a professional salesperson, you don't have the luxury of saying, "Well, it's only a couple hundred bucks." That's because you make many, many transactions. If you make 500 transactions and fail to get that extra couple hundred bucks, you have reduced your income by $10,000.00 per year. If you're just getting started in sales, and making $50,000.00 per year, $200.00 is really 20% of your income. Always be sure to think in those terms. That's the professional way to think. In the customer's life, that $200.00 is pale in comparison to the value that they are getting from the deal.

Do the Math: Apply this formula to your sales work now. How much do you think you can increase the average deal if you consistently and expertly applied a well-rounded set of advanced sales techniques and persuasion methods throughout the sales process? Don't even count the occasional extra big fish that you hope to haul in. Now multiply that dollar increase by the number of transactions that you intend to complete over the next twelve months. There you go. Is it $50.00 times 1,000 transactions? $500.00 times 200?

Think about how that little philosophy nugget can drive you. Imagine that annual amount goal injecting more motivation into your every sale! Every sale equals that annual bonus. Even the littlest technique equals that annual income boost. Add to that the big fish that you reel in from time to time. How much might you make from boosting your creativity, charisma, connections, and cutting-edge techniques?

Compliment Your Talent with Technical Prowess

Maybe this is a little basic to say, but I think I'd better say it just to make sure we're on the same page. This book is all about your success in sales, and it's mostly on the more advanced side, as these things go. This means that I can't waste time saying mushy, contradictory things that you hear from some motivational books and speakers. It also means that I will be pulling from scientific research in practical ways. So I'm asking you to remember that when I throw in some verbiage that sounds technical or impersonal, please don't take offense. You can apply what you learn in the most personal and spiritual way that you care to muster, but you need a technical foundation.

The great jazz musicians you hear play with their heart and soul, but their heads are full of technical knowledge. They have spent countless hours practicing all sorts of scales (predictable progressions of notes). But their music doesn't come across as a technical exercise. They have mastered the technical, and expressed the spirit in music. So is it that you can take sales to a level that astonishes your peers and makes you legendary.

Please indulge me in a quick example. Since people identify with their conscious minds, calling the conscious mind an "it" may sound offensive, but no offense is intended. This is a technical manual, so I don't want to waste your time going too far afield, padding this work to make it very politically correct or warm and fuzzy. You will be just as human and spiritual after reading this work as you were before, and actually capable of being a better advocate for your highest values, because you will know more about how to be a leader and motivator; more about how to influence and inspire.

Leading-Edge Sales Psychology

I'm going to give you a very special challenge. It isn't one of those effortful challenges, like increasing your sales volume 1,000% or climbing Mount Everest with a Sherpa on your back. It's more about being willing to swish around some very different perspectives. In order for me to share with you the concepts (yes, they'll be practical, I promised you that) of modern sales psychology, I'm going to need you to just psych your self up a little bit. That's because of two things that could easily go wrong for a lot of readers. One, they might reject the idea before they have had time to see how right it is, and two, they might not really let it sink in well enough before they sort of toss it aside and move on. Many of the ideas in this book are real game-changers.

Our neuro-diversity section can open up sales with many more people than you currently know how to sell to. Our Automatic Behavior section asks you to see how we have triggers that are pretty much hard-wired. This requires a really different mindset that you were probably brought up with. It's one thing to know that people can be irrational, but it's quite another to really get how complicated we are, and how the greater portion of that complexity is a concert of unconscious impulses that you can play a conductor.

Sections such as Identity Shifting ask you to try out some things that might be a bit hard to believe, but these are things that come from very serious behavioral and sociological research, as well as scary-successful historical examples. But I'll help out by providing some background that will show just how credible these odd things are.

I'm talking about things like actually helping your prospects and customers shift their identities in small ways that can produce big sales success. So be ready to explore and experiment. That means having an open mind and a little discipline (or fanaticism, better yet). Really give each idea enough time to see how you can start applying it to your work now, and how much it can feed your success.

Beyond Formulas to Flexible Sales Intelligence

The history of business is full of examples of people who had a great formula UNTIL THINGS CHANGED. There are people who were doing great in the stock market, until things changed. Sometimes, these formulas were quite insightful and novel, but the didn't last forever. Nothing can substitute for flexible business intelligence, and this includes some depth in understanding human motivation. We are going beyond formulas such as "the five key motivations" (not that that is a bad formula) to more flexible application. That's because you are in this as a career, not as a technician who is disposable. This is your life.

Take, for example, the idea of value as a core trigger of automatic buying behavior. We know there are amazing examples of raising the price on an item, and finding that sales dramatically improve. But if you did this to every product with flagging sales, it wouldn't work every time. It might not work for any of the products. This takes us to the core of "flexible sales intelligence"; understanding with the depth that you need to choose the right ideas for the right situations.

The primary aim of this book is to give you that depth regarding human motivation, because that is where the lion's share of flexible sales intelligence awaits. We will include some other areas that come from hard-won lessons in the real world. That's because we, too, are being flexible. We will not limit ourselves to motivation factors when there are other valuable skills and ideas to impart. For example, we'll talk about something called knowledge management, which is a little bit like "just-in-time' inventory management, in which costs are saved by investing in less inventory, less storage overhead, and less inventory management. This was...