Cold calling still the leading light in new business sales

Posted on 27 July 2012 by Maya Saric

Real estate agents are not earning enough. Despite the real estate industry having some of the highest income earners in the country only a small number of real estate agents earn over $250,000 per year.With some many offices around the country why are there so few individuals at this level of personal success? Is it really that the way we do business has changed so much that our old ways do not work and we are yet to find our feet in the brave new economy?

A common path to success that has worked for years is cold calling. The question is whether this tried and true approach is still appropriate in today’s web-based sales world. A new study from the Keller Center at Baylor University reaches some interesting conclusions about this important issue.

The details of the study

“134 agents from 10 different geographic areas were divided into two groups. Each group was asked to set aside a different hour each day, for seven days to make cold calls. They used the same script and were asked to record the results of their calls in an on-line form so that the data could be collected in real time. For this study, cold calling was defined as dialing random numbers, from a certain farm area not previously marketed to by the agent. The result was 14 hours of lead generation over 14 days.”

The goal of the study

“The goal was to determine if cold calling as a baseline lead generation activity – cold meaning no experience, no contacts, no database, no marketing, no listings, and no ‘just-solds’ – would generate appointments for agents.”

The Results

71.6 % of all calls failed to reach a live person.
28.4% the agent did connect with a live person with the following results,

14.8 % said they weren’t interested,
2.1 % the agent to call back later.
11.3% agreed to either an appointment or gave a referral
It took 208 calls (including all the wrong numbers and no answers) to get an appointment or referral.

This means for every 60 people the agent actually reached, the agent would either receive a referral or schedule an appointment.

Conclusions from the results

1. If an agent can make 50 calls per hour, speaking with 15 people, it will take them approximately 6 hours to achieve one appointment.

2. Anecdotal evidence of conversion rate suggests a 2-to-1 appointment to closing (listing) ratio. That means for every 12 hours of calls, an agent can expect to achieve 1 listing.

Who can do it?

By the time the sample agents had spent 11 hours cold calling, all 134 had quit calling. Yet the data showed that it takes 12 hours of cold calling to generate a closed deal. In other words, the agents quit one hour short of reaching the 12-hour revenue generating goal.

What does this mean for you and your business?

The conversion ratios from the Baylor study show that 12 hours of cold calling consistently yields one listing. Or if you want to close one listing a week that’s 144 minutes, just on 2 hours, of prospecting a day, 5 days a week.

Is It Worth the Price?

The Baylor study concludes with this important point: “Spending 3 hours a day, cold calling, Monday through Friday can potentially yield $290,063 in total commissions in a year.” This is based on a single listing being worth $4,800 to the agent.

The question it would seem to be; are you willing to work 12 hours a week on the phone to make almost $250,000 personal income. The answer for most agents is “No.”

But the research from own study of sales ability in Australia is that it is not a question of being willing to cold call but rather; ‘Are you able to Cold Call?’.

The assumption in this study was all sales people are equally able and that they simply don’t have the inner fortitude. The assumption is if they just showed a bit more backbone or energy or ‘millionaire mindset’ or changed something easy within themselves then they really could do it. They just don’t want to make the extra effort. The assumption is we can change ourselves, or our staff, into effective prospectors with just a little more effort.

So we have focused our attention on hiring staff who want the money in the hope they will want to make the effort. But what if no amount of ‘wanting’ can make the difference when they simple are not suited to it.

As we discussed in a previous article Are your staff to scared to cold call, less than 15 % of people no matter how willing, how well trained or how well managed still CANNOT.

The issue then is not whether cold calling works but whether the individual can cold call. That’s something our Sales IQ Inventory can answer for you and your team.

More on calling: Are your staff too scared to cold call?

But are your staff too scared to cold call? http://tinyurl.com/cumo6w3

What is a Sales Excellence Business?

Posted on 25 July 2012 by Maya Saric

My passion in business is all about creating sales excellence for organizations and sales professionals. I do this by helping my clients expand the sales functions within their businesses. My coaching philosophy has always been based on the three part formula: Select. Teach. Expand.

Select

Firstly, I help businesses recruit sales staff who really do have the capacity to sell.

‘Oh no! Not recruitment!’

I can already hear your agony because getting this right in the past has been fraught with danger. But not so for my clients. We have a time and cost effective way of attracting the best candidates your market has to offer and then short-listing them for interview based directly on their selling capacity. So you are only interviewing and choosing from appropriate candidates for your role who can do the job. Importantly the attraction and short-listing of candidates all happens in the cloud, leaving you free to get on with running your business.

If you want to hear what some of our other clients have been saying about our revolutionary new way to recruit go to: https://mayasaric.com/testimonials/

Teach

The second way we help businesses achieve sales excellence is to help their sales staff realize their personal sales capacity by teaching selling. Starting with understanding the psychology of buying we continue by coaching them through their own professional road blocks by instilling self organization, territory analysis and sales planning.

You can read about my sales training here.

I have been providing sale coaching as a job since 1992 (when I was a sales trainer) to help sales people through the learning curve of selling to work at a level of their personal best. When I registered my business, Corporate Coach Australia, in 1994 it was the only business in Australia to be consciously providing coaching services of any kind to the business sector.

Expand

Finally we teach sales staff to manage their energy and emotions. I know teaching sales process has gone out of fashion and everyone is focused on the internal game. But consider this: if you don’t know what you are supposed to be doing and you are totally disorganized and behind schedule then you should feel lousy. No amount of positive attitude will help if you have missed doing the first two parts properly. Most sales people don’t understand how buyers make choices or how to build trust during selling.

To combat this, I take people through knowing what to do (training) through creating systems that support their activity to consistently working at their peak level through on-going coaching and occasional nagging.

The Future

If you need sales staff who really can sell or are wanting to improve your or your teams sales performance, let’s talk. Call me, Maya Saric, on 0407 005 290

For more articles: find out Why sales staff who ‘hit the ground running’ are bad for your business

Sales staff who can ‘Hit The Ground Running’ are bad for your business

Posted on 24 July 2012 by Maya Saric

There is a belief in the corporate sales world that to hire sales staff who are capable of “hitting the ground running” is a good idea. I’d like to suggest that it’s bad for your business. Having staff who, the moment they turn up or really soon thereafter, are out there doing their thing without you and without any clear directions, training or preparation is actually detrimental. Why is this? Well consider this, staff that are capable of ‘hitting the ground running’, without pre-existing product knowledge are also usually capable of creating or choosing outcome.

es that are not in your company’s best interest, because it ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ and they have the confidence to act alone.

To have the courage to perform alone in an environment where you don’t have all the facts and you don’t have all the answers and you haven’t rehearsed or seen in action the practicalities and details of various alternatives, means that you’re going to go with what seems like a good idea on the day. The sales rep who is capable of picking up the phone, ‘having a go’ and has good energy for prospecting and creating new opportunities, needs to be well armed before they start.

If you’ve managed to hire such a person, that person is precious and rare, and there are very few of them in the world as a percentage. If you have one, you need to prepare them. They need to have the entire product knowledge ready at their disposal. So, spend a month or two, or depending upon the technical complexity of your product, 3 to 4 months, training that person, teaching that person, having them sit quietly on the corner of another person’s sales call learning; what sort of answers to give, what sort of questions that they will need to ask, and sorts of answers that other reps who do know the product and who have had correct industry experience in your products, will come up with. Don’t leave your company’s sales success resting on what the new person with enthusiasm and energy, bravery and courage is capable of thinking up on the spot.

Sales people who are capable of going out and prospecting, winging it and improvising, are great for new business roles. They are the sort that every company wants and I encourage you to use the Sales Inventory Profile (SIP) recruitment process to locate yourself some of those people. But I don’t encourage you to set them free without product knowledge and practise because the ramifications of that is that they will make way more mistakes as they will engage in way more opportunities than the other sorts of reps who need more help and haven’t started without the training. Sales staff that can’t possibly start without preparation will do very little for you in the first 6 months, but they will do it correctly and precisely later on.

The net effect might be marginally better for the new business style person in terms of closed business, but the bloodshed, for both your clients and for them, could be huge. If these are prospects and not existing clients, you might never know what the ramifications for the prospects were and by the time anybody else thinks to call on them, if you’re lucky, it would be well and truly forgotten.

The greatest damage to your firm is the effect on your new sales person, as they are much scarcer than prospects in most industries.

The consequences for your sales person who is being demoralised and defeated and denied success regularly at the beginning of their career with you, could be huge in terms of their energy to persist and stay in your business. If you lose this person you haven’t just lost 2 or 5 or even 20 sales in the early stages, but have lost 5 years of on-target sales.

Your new person isn’t going to say “Well, I am an awful sales person and therefore, I should stop selling.” They are going to say “This product is useless” or “My manager is useless.” Or even worse “My company is useless.” They will be saying to this to themselves to make themselves feel better and to everyone who will listen. Not only might they give up early on and find themselves a new job, and you have lost somebody really good, but they will project that negative energy during their sales calls before they leave you and long after when talking to others about their old job.

There is a period between when they are all enthusiastic, they are willing to do the job, they are happy to go out, make new clients and they have no fear…all before that point of dissolution and defeat. So, you need to catch them while they are still fresh and enthusiastic and keen, and teach them well. Teach them about your product, teach them about your industry, teach them the subtleties of closing your sale so that they make only a few mistakes, close a lot of business for you, and feel fabulous about themselves.

So if you think you’re up for having new business reps who really can sell, who really can prospect, who really can hustle, I’d like to encourage you to contact me, Maya Saric at Corporate Coach (0407 005 290) and use the Sales Inventory Profile (SIP) system to recruit some of those people for your team.

For more articles on sales staff and training: Why your receptionist may be your next sales star…

When your idea just wont give up on you

Posted on 18 July 2012 by Maya Saric

What do you think when you hear the word ‘entrepreneur’?

It’s phrase often used to describe a start-up business person. The dictionary.com defines it simply as:

“a person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk.”

But why is it some people take the risk and use their initiative?

Avis Mulhum, born in Ireland, citizen of the world and currently resident of Sydney has made money from the recruitment industry while she follows her passion and a half idea to launch an internet business. Describing what fuels her (including keeping her working on her idea following a serious illness) she said:

“I think the only thing that kept me going was the fact that I knew that I didn’t have that standard boring dull hamster wheel of a life to go back to … I think being an entrepreneur means that you persevere no matter what happens.”

Read more by following this shortened link: http://tinyurl.com/cp6mha5

Whether it is destiny or basic psychological obsession, there is a group of individuals amongst us who are so possessed by an idea that they do persist no matter what to see their idea come to commercial reality.

That is what an entrepreneur is for me. Someone who is almost possessed by their dream that no matter what life throws at them they persist. Their idea drives them forward, in spite of great personal sacrifice.

Get started: What is a Sales Excellence Business?

Get started – what is a sales excellence business? https://mayasaric.com/2012/07/25/your-sales-excellence/

Difference between Business Development Manager (BDM) & Account Managers

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Posted on 1 July 2012 by Maya Saric

We assume that one salesperson who is good at one of these roles will be good at the other. But in reality, the people who are capable of doing these two jobs properly are very different and putting a great salesperson from one side into the other role will give you, and them, a very disappointing outcome. Using Sales Inventory Profile or SIP we can see these differences in capability more clearly but it is often not so obvious observing BDMs and account managers in the wild.

BDMs, otherwise called ‘Hunters’, are people who are capable of working alone, initiating new activity which involves consistent prospecting, improvising and being flexible when they’re dealing with new and unpredictable situations. All of which helps when you’re out talking to people that you don’t know very well.

Account Managers, or ‘Farmers’, are people who deal with clients they (or at least their company) know really, really well and have had a long and established relationship with. There is a history between a Farmer and the client with clear etiquette and methodology that both parties need to continue to fit in with. As a new Account Manager to a long-held client of your company, you need to understand the client and comply with the processes that have come before you. You need to present a clear strategy for change that takes into account the relevant parts of this history.

A Farmer is really a different sort of person than the flexible, and adaptive Hunter. Rather, a Farmer needs to be capable of thinking and planning and performing at a highly detailed level to meet the client’s expectations.

Companies often try to swap BDMs and Account Managers (or Hunters and Farmers) around as a way of promoting the Farmer or satisfying a client. This can be both extremely ineffectual for the client and unsatisfying for the salesperson.

If a Farmer has done a great job with nurturing and growing your largest customers, and you need more customers, you may be tempted to think; “Well, Fred is a fabulous salesman, we’ll send him out to get some new clients.”

Indeed Fred is a fabulous existing customer salesman and his patience, care, attention to detail and thoroughness help him in that environment. But, if he goes out and needs to improvise, deal with the unknown and (heaven forbid) shoot from the hip and be flexible and creative all without his preferred time to think and plan and prepare himself, his results may not be very good. Plus, he is unlikely to be able to stomach the prospecting to get into a sales processes often enough to make as many sales as he did before.

The alternative is also not preferable; i.e. leaving the new clients with Hunters, who have had been doing a great job bringing them in, in order to grow them over a longer period of time. As your Hunters has established the relationship with these clients initially, you may want to keep them with those customers. Given the hunter has established a good relationship, you fear that if you pull the Hunter out too quickly and replace them with a Farmer type, your clients will get upset.

In the short term this maybe a good strategy

But with time your good and effective Hunter has too many customers to do more hunting, and so, ends up becoming an Account executive instead of a BDM. To further the problem, they will not be as effective in growing those accounts as they were in getting them in to start with. This means there is no one effectively bringing in new clients while the existing clients are also not growing at the optimal rate.

You need a strategy that effectively transitions your important new clients from their original sales person – the Hunter – to their long term account manager: the Farmer. A strategy that will keep clients feeling important and wanting to deal with your company over a long period of time as well as keeping your sales staff working in their optimal manner.

One strategy is to partner at a key point your effective Hunter with your effective Farmer. This way the customer knows their account manager from the earliest days possible in the sale cycle. If this is practical, there will be two people in the account (in varying degrees) from early in the process and that when one of them slips out it’s not perceived by the customers as desertion. Rather, they see it as a process of natural transition.

When is the right time to introduce the account manager? The account manager sales person comes in either as soon as the client is on board or preferable, where the logistics of your product allows, they come in during the last few stages of the initial sales cycle to participate in the closing part of the sales process. The account manager should not be just mentioned to the client as only an alternative contact person ‘in times of emergency’ but as having a specific functional part to perform. When the Farmer is first introduced they may appear very selectively but as the sale continues they become a regular participant. Then after the sale is fully completed (sold and implementation starts) it will appear natural that the account manager is the dominant contact for this client and the BDM is attending only 10% of the time now and eventually might not be present at all.

Why go to this extra effort to transition your clients between your original Hunter style sales person and the long term Farmer style? Ultimately, to provide both the maximum support for the client, so they continue to buy from us. This strategy also ensures the welfare and earnings of your differing sales people.

If the Hunter BDM does stay too long purely as an account manager, they may become lazy, lethargic or bored and soon start to make mistakes and alienating clients or just missing opportunities to close more business. Unintentionally, their effectiveness can drop surprisingly quickly even when staying with these clients was their own idea.

Like everybody, hunters, like the idea of having a rest and not being ‘out there’ all the time and will often not complain about having become account managers. Or they might have insisted they keep their new clients because they have a genuine need for offering personal care and living up to their original promises. But good intentions are not enough if they don’t have it in them to be that patient, thorough, detailed or precise to craft an effective long term plan for their customer. So despite the fabulous relationship to start, the customer will soon be unhappy.

Whether you are a Hunter or a Farmer or you manage a large sales team, you have the capacity to be extraordinary and make lots of money for yourself and your companies if you stick to the path and the style that is yours naturally. But if you try to be the other style, you will run the risk of becoming discouraged and demoralized. If you try to be something that is not natural for you, you are just doing yourself a disservice.

Understand your own style. Stay with it. Perfect it. And be Extraordinary.

How to create a company page on Facebook

Posted on 28 June 2012 by Maya Saric

Whether you want to use Facebook (FB) to actively market your business or not, it’s good to have an official page for your company that you can link to from your own profile, especially in our Social Media Age.

I get really discouraged when I am on a Facebook profile of a sales person and click on their work details, only to be directed to an empty page. Such a waste of your advertising space.

How to create a page

At the bottom of your own profile page is a link called ‘Create a Page’.

Give the page your full business name
Upload a logo
Enter all the different contact details: email, phone, website link etc
Add a few sentences about what sort of business it is. Copy and paste from your website if you have one to keep the identity consistent.

All that could take you ten minutes. You can add more stuff to it later if you want to become more detailed, have promotions etc.

How to link your business page to your profile

Open your page and copy the address link, mine is

https://www.facebook.com/CorporateCoachAustralia

then

Go back to your own profile page as an individual
Press the link ‘About’ which is below your profile photo
Press edit for the Work and Education
Press edit again to the right of your employer name and copy the address link you took from your business page into the name slot. If you have done this before it may not let you change it so you could delete that job and add a new employer.

If you have already made your work page and then are adding a new employer for your individual profile you just type in your new page name and you can link to it automatically without the cut and paste stage.

It’s quite easy, and definitely worth the effort.

Are your staff too scared to cold call?

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Posted on 27 June 2012 by Maya Saric

Are your staff scared to cold call?

“Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.”
– Erica Jong

Erica Jong is an American author who wrote about fear, usually her own, and how she managed her life despite those feelings. Her quote is great advice for anyone feeling the grip of fear.

Fear is very a common human reaction and an important part of our survival processes. Fear helps us avoid situations that are dangerous and which could result in our death. However not all things that are scary will actually lead to physical death and we do need strategies to continue to engage in our lives despite our natural fear reaction.
The thing that sales people find the scariest is usually prospecting and specifically, cold calling. Going into the unknown and facing the risk of rejection (i.e attack) will paralyze the average sales person into a state of non action, or freezing, or compulsive business where they do not have the time to do any selling yet feel productive as they are working hard. It is a very small percentage of people who can face their fear and fight on despite it.

When I write about cold calling in this blog it seems like such a trivial thing, but the effect on most of us when confronted with the physical reality of the phone or being on the street door knocking is real and usually very daunting. Our mental danger radar does not distinguish the risk of verbal attack from the physical, so our fear response can be just as strong when the risk is verbal humiliation rather than actual physical harm. To our brain, the risk and thus the fear response, is the same no matter what the nature or source of the attack.

I know from the 20,000+ candidates we have tested using our sales IQ system, Sales Inventory Profile or SIP, that less than 5% of the general population are able to cold call consistently. Consistently, meaning for several hours every day, week in and week out for years.

Another 10% will, as Erica suggests, come to be able to tolerate it given time to acclimatize themselves to the process and with some support from their organization.

So how do you find these precious 15% who can become new business sales people?

No longer do you need to have literally 100’s of people coming through your business to find the very few who don’t run out screaming or work themselves to a standstill or get sick. Using the traditional mass employment i.e hope-some-will-survive mentality within the recruitment system, the cost to the business in direct resources wasted is bad enough. But when you think of the effect on your reputation of having the wrong person on the job representing the company and the revenue not earned while we are distracted with the wrong people, the cost is catastrophic.

Then we often overlook the cost of the subtle energy drain on the other staff as they watch the carnage from the safety of their administrative roles, thinking ‘who would want to do that?’ Ultimately, the morale across the entire business is subdued by the revolving door recruitment strategy for sales staff.

It does NOT have to be that way.

It is possible to recruit from only those people who have the core capacity and inner fortitude to sell and specifically cold call, train them well so they are effective quickly, support them effectively over time and have a sales team that is stable, successful and making themselves and you lots of money. It is also possible to build a team that is admired by the rest of the organization..

Am I dreaming?

No! We have been doing just that since 2008 in Australia and New Zealand. Just ask any of my clients (see our testimonials page which contains a selection of our 100+ client base) how effective it is to accurately identify sales capacity in candidates before they even interview them so that at the recruitment interview they are focused on assessing the candidate on product and cultural fit to their business and/or the market place.

If you have had enough of the revolving door system of failed recruiting lets organize a 20 minute Skype demonstration of our sales IQ system. The system has been used and tested across many industries and will work in any country where English is the primary language.

How to start?
Leave a comment on this blog or send an email to maya@salesinventoryprofile.com with your own contact details and one of our staff will call you to organize a time that best suits you.

More on cold calling? Read on why cold calling is still vital in sales

Vitamin D and curing the flu

Posted on 27 March 2012 by Maya Saric

Yep I’m at the Vitamin D thingy again….but I cannot help myself Vitamin D has been linked to so many diseases including MS and despite being a sun junky since being diagnosed with MS, I am still at the lower edge of normal so how must the rest of the world be.

We think in Australia if we lead an outdoor lifestyle that we are getting enough sun but actually no and our incidence of lack of vitamin D and all its negative health effects are higher than some of the northern hemisphere countries.

Vitamin D can only be made from UVB which is only available for 11am – 1 pm from Nov to Feb in Australia. So unless you are out in this time you get ZERO healthy sun ie UVB. In March-October, i.e. now, they think the Vitamin D window is only 30 mins at midday. In Australia we have extra high UVA all day because our ozone is thicker. Ozone kills UVB. UVB is being blocked by sunscreen.

Melanoma is created from UVA only which does not burn the skin and is in the sun’s rays present all day. UVA cannot be blocked by sunscreen. UVA is only blocked by heavy (thick or dark) clothing and zinc cream.

There is a rule of thumb for healthy amounts of sun that says ‘10 minutes naked at midday’. So unless you are totally freaking out the locals you are getting no Vitamin D except for the 10 min walk to buy a sandwich at midday. They say alternatively 30 minutes of sun on arms and legs exposed at midday is enough. So buy the sandwich and sit in the sun to eat it. But if you are one of those extreme northern hemisphere redheads take your bikini with you as 30 mins may cause burning. The thing about vitamin D conversion is it takes both skin mass (cubic centimetres) and time so the more skin, the less time.

The signal that your skin is converting to vitamin D is: it is getting pink. So if you never get pink you are not converting to D. If you already have a proper tan it takes longer to start pinking and the conversion takes longer to get enough vitamin D, so back to the bikini. I get it now why solariums are still popular in Australian cities.

UVB creates tanning (and so sunburn) and UVA does not.

Tans prevent melanoma. Tans also kill skin elasticity and cause wrinkles (unattractive but maybe better than depression or MS)

UVA heats the skin and UVB does not.

So when you are out in UVA you are feeling the heat on your skin and you think you are burning. Of course the hottest time of everyday is the middle of the day when you have the very small window of vitamin D production so that is when most people are likely to put on sunscreen or stay indoors or in the shade.

There are few other interesting correlations: non elastic skin suffers with lower rates of melanoma, tanning kills elasticity, so areas that never get tanned are more supple and so more prone to melanoma, i.e. leathery tanned or just old dry wrinkled skin does not get melanoma. Smoking also kills skin elasticity but that has a whole set of other problems.

The rate of melanoma in Australia has doubled since 1970. There is a direct correlation between sunscreen strength improvements and increased melanoma.

Does sunscreen itself cause melanoma? No! Even though it is full of serious chemicals that if taken orally would be illegal. The problem is most Australians who are outside during the day are avoiding the midday summer sun and firstly not getting the protection of a normal tan and then double hit they are now over staying (compared to years gone by ) in the other times when their sunscreen offers no protection but they think that their sunscreen is working because they didn’t burn.

Finally an interesting article specifically on the links between sun and melanoma: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeXtGHSt-5o&feature=related

Then using Vitamin D to cure the flu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnnIfqn2c6M&feature=related

Both Youtube presentations are by US doctors

Put your head on!

Posted on 12 March 2012 by Maya Saric

“Put your head on!”

I said this as an instruction to my children as I was pulling up in front of their primary school on a very rainy day last week.

I was attempting to be funny (first mistake – humour before midday). It was an instruction to them to put the hoods up on their raincoats.

Result: anxiety and confusion first, anger second – from both children.

The 11 year old sitting next to me in the front looked at me a little perplexed, got the message when he looked for cues in my face and saw that I was smiling. The 9 year old, who is as bright as a button but sitting in the back seat and had no visual cues, sounded distressed and said “What’s the matter, I have my head on?” The 11 year old came to the rescue “It’s okay, mum means put your hood up”.

It seemed so simple to me but it totally missed the mark and created a negative effect. It reinforced how important communication is and how we should not take anything for granted, even with an audience you think you know well. After I had left them at their school I realised just how unreasonable my statement had been.

This day was the umpteenth day of heavy rain, our whole State was flooding, the dam in Sydney is overflowing (I know as an adult that it is within the dams processes but they don’t). We had just left our own garage slowly flooding through the light fitting and as we were rushing to get to school on time I was unable to do anything about it. They had asked if they would get electrocuted. I had quickly answered no but without any explanation as I was too rushed. To top it off the evening before we had watched a Johnny Depp movie called Sleepy Hollow about a headless ghost horseman in 18^th century America chopping people’s heads off to find his own. As soon as he found and put his own head on he was happy to return to hell and stop killing people.

Well done mum! How far off the mark can my simple statement have gotten?

What a perfect reminder of how important it is keeping our communication simple, to the point and taking nothing for granted. How often in our business day do we communicate with people over the phone, quickly in passing and without any knowledge of the framework in their lives that affects their ability to interpret?

Having thought all this through and knowing the psychology of how the brain functions and the effect of fear I was able to reverse all of the effects of my miscommunication later that day and reassure everyone that they were safe and all is well in our world. Most of us don’t get the luxury of being able to deliver our message a second time.

Brain graphic

If you want to better understand the effect of our words on the way the brain works and how we process information, especially as it relates to developing trust and making decisions, I’d like to recommend my Emotions in Selling workshop. This course will show you how to keep your message within the listeners trust range so that they can continue to communicate with you rather than run for the hills and refuse to have anything more to do with you or your company.

To book your training contact me at maya@salesinventoruprofile.com

What’s the number one issue facing sales organisation, managers and owners?

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Posted on 22 February 2012 by Maya Saric

Hiring staff who cannot prospect and will fail at closing, no matter how well you train them.

It often starts here: A candidate’s résumé tells you: “five years selling software”, “highly motivated and a self-starter”, “a degree in Computer Science”, “retail selling experience”!

Question: What’s wrong with this information? Answer: Everything

It’s not independent
Maybe it’s been polished by a recruitment company
It’s what they think you need to know
It’s what they did in the past
It’s not about what they can do in the future
NONE of it means they can and will sell in your industry for your office
It’s boring and it’s wasting your time!

And, it’s why 70% of NEW STARTS in Real Estate will FAIL within 12 months and a total of 90% within 2 years!

This will cost you, the business owner over $100,000 dollars in the first year for each unsuitable candidate chosen in salary and indirect expenses.

It could be costing you millions in lost sales opportunities in hiring or hanging on too long to the hard-working but wrong ones! Imagine how many sales you lose in the second year as they slowly starve you and themselves before they admit they cannot do it?

Even worse, reading résumés can mean throwing away the sales stars of tomorrow because their résumés are poor, or don’t have the right clues, or maybe (and here’s the big one) there’s nothing in their past worth putting in a résumé because they are still young or returning to the workforce after having stopped for a period for parenting or complete their education, travelling, etc. We all know great real estate salespeople whose past gave NO clue to their future sales potential!

Excellent résumés aren’t always a good indicator of sales abilities!

Question: What’s the alternative? Answer: Start using SIP today!

The SIP system combines innovation, the internet and psychometrics. The results identify only those candidates who have the inherent attributes to enable them to sell real estate.

The SIP team will:

Analyze your existing team to show you how SIP works, review how your current team is structured, who your team needs as the next recruit and give you a personal sales competency benchmark for your office to use in the hiring process. We have provided this analysis for over a 200 businesses around Australia.

Write the advertising copy for you, so the best inherently attributed sales stars of the future in your area apply for your job. In addition, the SIP process highlights those with genuine motivation. Using SIP you now have people who can sell and do want your job.

Provide you with an online Candidate Management System so you need never read another résumé AND only organize to meet candidates who can sell and live locally.

Use SIP first before you read yet another résumé or hire another salesperson.

What our customers are saying about SIP: “We agreed to Maya applying her SIP test to all our Sales and Property Management, Managerial and some admin staff. The results produced, when compared with our own staff assessments, were surprisingly accurate.”

– Jim Shortall, Sydney

Want to have a chat? Contact Maya Saric, Managing Director maya@salesinventoryprofile.com

Want more Sales articles? Check out these from our blog:

Einstein’s Theory of Selling | Sales Excellence business

“Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open” – Sir James Dewar

Grow your sales results in 2012/13 with an innovation out to change the way we recruit sales staff

Posted on 30 January 2012 by Maya Saric

It’s mid-way through 2012, but never too late for big sales by the time Santa comes ’round. Or even by the time the fireworks go off for 2013!

If you or your organization are ready to grow your sales results lets talk!

Corporate Coach Australia, after a few years as a successful boutique provider of sales recruitment and sales enhancement technology to Real Estate and IT companies, has some huge plans for the next few months, and I’m inviting you to support our growth by using our world leading technology to enhance your own sales effectiveness and make this your biggest sales year ever.

If you read our testimonials you will see that the SIP technology has achieved some dramatic success since it’s launch in October 2008. Now we’re planning on changing the face of sales staff recruitment and training.

If you are interested in saving some money and growing your sales ability or the capacity of your team please send me an email to maya@salesinventoryprofile.com for a full price list or if you are reading this on Facebook press the Like button and I will contact you.

If you haven’t heard of Corporate Coach or SIP then here’s some background for you. My name is Maya Saric and in the mid 90’s I undertook extensive research into what attributes individuals need to possess to succeed at selling. I was frustrated as both a sales trainer and a sales manager because I was watching very intelligent and genuine people failing. From that research a sales IQ assessment was developed called SIP which stands for Sales Inventory Profile.

In 2008 the stand alone sales IQ assessment was incorporated into a cloud computing sales recruitment website at www.salesinventoryprofile.com

After three full years of selling sales recruitment and having helped our clients hire over 250 people in direct sales and sales support roles I would like your help to grow SIP from a successful small business that supports a few hundred businesses in Australia and New Zealand to a force in recruitment that will change the way we recruit sales staff and bring an end to wasting money and shattering dreams.

Now I’m frustrated again at all that wasted human potential and all the businesses wasting thousands of dollars on hiring staff who will never be able to sell. Worse still are the millions of dollars in unearned revenue and the new staff who start with great hope and energy and dreams of a new career in selling only to end up shattered by the drain of doing a job that just isn’t them. I’m super frustrated now because there is a real alternative that allows businesses to hire the right person at a quarter of the cost of traditional résumé driven recruitment with minimum time to create the shortlist and is about TEN TIMES MORE EFFECTIVE. I had to put that in capitals as I really do feel like ‘shouting it from the roof tops’. There is a way for the individual to find out if they are suited to selling before taking the plunge and if you are; to understand your own sales strengths so you can really focus your training on making a real difference to your sales results.

To spread the word I need your help.

In May 2012 we are moving offices and hiring a full sales team to directly engage more businesses. I want to make the software even more functional so we can support multi-manager recruitment programs. This will allow us to target much larger companies who have several overlapping levels of management involved in recruitment.

How to Buy

Review the price list below (please excuse the formatting) and select the products you wish and note how much that totals.

You can either email me this amount and we will send you a tax invoice with bank transfer details
or
You can pay using the link to Paypal from our website

Got to www.salesinventoryprofile.com
Go to the products tab from the Home Page
Press ‘Pay an Invoice’ on the top left of the page
If you are not an existing client put your business name in ‘Username’
For the Invoice number enter ‘February 2012 promotion’ and the amount you wish to pre-purchase.
Press submit and you will be transferred to Paypal to pay by credit card
You will receive a TAX receipt by email within 3 working days and instructions on how to book training or start a recruitment program.

Our 2012 investment in SIP

At the moment SIP is a ‘single manager’ system which works best for small businesses. We built the system so that only one person at a time can have access to the candidate information within their SIP account. In other words if the sales manager, for example, is logged in and the HR manager logs in too the sales manager is automatically logged off.

We then want to redesign the layout and give the website a facelift and provide some simpler client interfaces for both managers and candidates.

We also have plans to ‘white label’ SIP when the website is ready for multi-manager recruitment for large companies to use as their inhouse talent management database.

Finally over the past three years we have assessed nearly 20,000 individuals. Included in that figure are nearly 4,000 people currently employed in client and prospect companies. I would like to use this additional data to further define sales management and service profiles which are different to the sales or sales support roles we have defined so far. Using this raw data in a statistically valid way is a huge undertaking and will require specialist statistical support work. When I first researched sales staff I had access to the statistical expertise of the Psychology Department at Sydney University.

Sales Training Options we provide

Corporate Coach Australia also provides sales training which is totally different to the parrot fashion ‘say this’ style that has come to dominate sales training programs. I am not against scripting, in fact I love it, but only when the sales person understands what they are trying to achieve with the script so that they are able to vary their presentation from the scripts at the correct moment.

I am a qualified Psychologist and have been in selling since leaving University in 1985 and Coaching sales staff since 1993. I have used this combination of knowledge of the human thought processes and experience in commercial selling to develop a course that teaches how to interact with the decision process at a very profound but easy to achieve level. I teach how people make decisions and how to build trust in order for your prospects and clients to make decisions in our favour. You don’t build trust with clever one-liners but by communicating in a way that effectively answers all the clients’ insecurities.

This material has been available in workshop format and1-on-1 coaching and you will see these in the price list.

In 2011 I recorded a cross industry version of my ‘Emotions in Selling’ workshop with the intention of it being a home study system. Some of you received the prospecting portion of this training as a Christmas gift in December of 2011. The full recording will be available as download content with the direct transcript in February 2012. We have a deadline to produce a companion book with exercises by June 2012 to help you learn and implement the ideas in the recording.

This commitment to guide my clients through changing their techniques and achieve better sales results, rather than just giving them a few good ideas is the corner stone of my Corporate Coaching philosophy. Anyone who purchases the DVD pack during the February special will also receive two complimentary coaching sessions to the value of $400.00. I can conduct these by Skype or at our Newtown office in Sydney.

I encourage EVERYONE WORKING WITHIN A SALES ORGANISATION, even if you are not actually in selling to buy these DVD’s so that you can understand the psychology behind how people make decisions.

If you want to discuss your sales recruitment or training needs please contact me this week so we you can take advantage of our February special.

SIP sales recruitment, training and coaching programs pricing

Recruit Sales Staff with SIP. It works!

The number one question in recruiting sales staff is “Who can sell?”

SIP is the best sales staff pre-selection tool in the world and it answers this important question by means of a proven independent psychometric online assessment. The SIP Assessment can determine if a person has the necessary attributes to sell. What is best of all it does this with no human intervention before your first direct contact with them.

SIP: SALES CAPACITY AUDIT $ 950 + GST

SIP: FULL RECRUITMENT CYCLE $2,950 + GST

SIP: 12 MONTH SMALL BUSINESS RECRUITMENT LICENCE $4,950 + GST

SIP: SINGLE CANDIDATE OR STAFF MEMBER $ 190 + GST

SIP: PRIVATE SELF ASSESSMENT $ 190 + GST

Sales Training Programs by Maya Saric

Group Workshop

EMOTIONS IN SELLING: Trust based selling to help clients make strong decisions Duration 2 hours $750 + GST

DVD Set

EMOTIONS IN SELLING; Introduction to trust based selling to help clients make strong decisions. $249 + GST includes transcript. Workbook due 1 June 2012

Group Workshop

EMOTIONS IN SELLING FOR RE: Appraisals to Listing by overcoming the fear barrier 3 hours Duration $950 + GST

Group Workshop

EMOTIONS IN SELLING FOR RE: Prospecting for Real Estate Duration 3 hours $950 + GST

Group Workshop

EMOTIONS IN SELLING FOR RE: Full day combined program Duration One day ,$ 1800 + GST

Sales Excellence Coaching Programs by Maya Saric

Individual Coaching Program

NEW LISTING AGENT START UP Duration 9 hours over 3 months $2,500 + GST

FIRES OF HELL: Understanding your personal action triggers. Duration 8 hours over One Month $1,800 + GST
SALES EXCELLENCE: Creating sustainable action, Follow up to the Fires of Hell Program. Duration 9 hours $1600 + GST
What is included:

Sales Management Programs by Maya Saric

SIP SALES CAPACITY AUDIT Understanding Your Current Sales Team 2 hours $950 + GST

WORKSHOP: SALES PLANNING Duration One day $1,800 + GST

________________________________________
TERMS AND CONDITIONS
• Settlement due in full 7 days before program starts, including recruitment.
• * All facilities, refreshments and transport costs are additional and the client’s responsibility to organize.
• Pricing valid until 1/03/2012.

SIP sales recruitment training and coaching programs pricing

Posted on 28 January 2012 by Maya Saric

Sales Recruitment

Recruit Sales Staff with Sales Inventory Profile (SIP). Why? It answers your number one question in recruiting sales staff is “Who can sell?”

SIP: SALES CAPACITY AUDIT $ 950 + GST

Includes:
• Test your existing sales and support team to achieve an independent sales capacity audit.
• Team results debrief with the manager – two hour onsite / phone review with a SIP specialist.
• Includes eight team members. Additional staff $180 + GST per person.

SIP: FULL RECRUITMENT CYCLE $2,950 + GST

Includes:
• Advert copywriting – the creation of the compelling, emotionally engaging, sales message advert.
• Loading and managing your advert on SEEK.
• All candidates tested with SIP.
• We analyze all the SIP reports and résumés within the score range for your job.
• We will recommend questions that you can ask each candidate within the score range for your job.
• Manage and communicate with the candidate pool via our online SIP Candidate Management System.

SIP: 12 MONTH SMALL BUSINESS RECRUITMENT LICENSE $4,950 + GST

Includes:
• Includes a Sales Capacity Audit of your existing team.
• Two full recruitment cycles including everything listed above.
• Direct employment inquiry program includes:
a. Copywriting an employment information pack for individuals who inquire between recruitment campaigns.
b. Copywriting an employment page on your website including a link to the SIP website.
c. Unlimited assessment of individuals (written summaries by SIP staff not included).
• Vocational guidance promotion program to local students includes:
a. Copywriting an invitation to complete a SIP.
b. Unlimited assessment of individuals (written summaries by SIP staff not included).

SIP: 12 MONTH UNLIMITED RECRUITMENT SERVICE $19,950 + GST

Includes:
• SIP becomes your recruitment provider across all job functions for 12 months.
• Write, load and manage all your adverts’ on SEEK.
• All candidates tested with SIP for all your jobs.
• We analyse 10 SIP reports and résumés per job for the first 3 months.
• Manage and communicate with the candidate pool via our online SIP Candidate Management System.

SIP: SINGLE CANDIDATE OR STAFF MEMBER $ 190 + GST

Includes:
• We analyse the SIP report and résumé and provide a written summary.
• We will recommend questions that you can ask this candidate during the interview.
• Manage and communicate with the candidate via our online SIP Candidate Management System.
• For existing staff we include a one hour coaching session directly with the individual or their manager.

SIP: PRIVATE SELF ASSESSMENT $ 190 + GST

Includes:
• Immediate access to your own 14 page SIP report.
• 45 minutes of personal coaching directly with a SIP Sales Excellence Coach.
• SIP Sales Potential Certificate to include in your job applications

Sales Training Programs by Maya Saric

Group Workshop

Emotions in Selling:
Trust based selling to help clients make strong decisions. Duration 2 hours $750 + GST

What is included:

• Understanding the neurological structure of the brain and how the flight/fight mechanism drives all decision making. We will review the progress of data arriving from the senses (hearing, sight etc) to the two levels of thought processing; emotional and logical.

• How to uncover the buyer’s personal perceptions of safety and the decision process they are using in order to guide them to use your service. If you contradict this process and trigger even the smallest feelings of fear they will reject you and your product.

• Learn how fear and anxiety can turn your client’s thoughts from caterpillars into pythons and how to prevent this; so that the caterpillars turn into butterflies instead.

• Learn how selling your own home is the scariest decision a person may ever make and how to guide your client safely through their anxiety to a stable decision to list with you.

• We will look at very specific strategies to maximize your message and the way you present it, so that your clients are able to safely process the message through their emotional filter to make effective decisions. Decisions that will not unravel when they continue to think about the situation after you have left or when they hear new data from your competition.

• Importance of the customer doing at least half of the talking during the sales process in order for the purchase to be stable. Using the magic wand technique that helps a buyer express their needs so you can discuss the real value to them of your offering.

• How to manage your clients fear response to help them to continue to listen and have the ability to buy from you.

DVD Set

Emotions in Selling:
Introduction to trust based selling to help clients make strong decisions $249 + GST

What is included:

• Learn how fear and anxiety can turn your client’s thoughts from caterpillars into pythons and how to prevent this so that the caterpillars all turn into butterflies instead.

• How to manage your client’s fear response to help them to continue to listen and have the ability to buy from you.

• Managing your own fears and rejection responses.

Group Workshop

Emotions in Selling (RE):
Appraisals to Listing by overcoming the fear barrier. Duration 3 hours $950 + GST

What is included:

• Overview of neurological systems that drive decision making specific to listing and selling Real Estate.
• Brag Sheet: exercise to define why a property owner should hand their greatest financial decision over to you. Having clarity on how vendors choose agents.
• How to manage the vendor’s fear during both appraisal and listing meetings.
• Detailed scripts for appraisal walkthrough. How not to give your opinion on the spot.
• Setting up the parameters for a return meeting to conduct a listing call. Includes how to have all decision makers present.

Group Workshop

Emotions in Selling (RE) –Prospecting for Real Estate. Duration 3 hours $950 + GST

What is included:

• Overview of neurological systems and the role of fear and trust in selling. Learn to manage your own fear response to overcome your fear of cold calling.
• Managing your own fears and rejection responses.
• What is effective prospecting in real estate for residential listings and new property management?
• What is the difference between warm and cold calls? How to be warm calling most of the time.
• The role of scripting and developing your own script.
• Getting started: territory definition, personal organisation of your time and energy.
• Introduction and explanation of six different types of prospecting, each with starter scripts includes a Door Knocking System and Survey Prospecting. This is a specific system, fully scripted with supporting tools.
• Prospect tracking systems: Managing prospects from first touch to formal appraisal, role of follow up contact and marketing material.

Group Workshop

Emotions in Selling – Full day combined program. Duration One day $ 1800 + GST

What is included:

• Emotions in Selling – Trust based selling to help clients make strong decisions
• Emotions in Selling – Appraisals to listing by overcoming the fear barrier
• Emotions in Selling – Prospecting for Real Estate

Sales Excellence Coaching Programs by Maya Saric

Individual Coaching Program

New Listing Agent Start Up. Duration 9 hours over 3 months $2,500 + GST

What is included:

• Emotions of selling overview.
• Personal motivation exercises targeting addressing cold calling issues.
• Getting started: territory definition, personal organisation and
• Introduction and explanation of six different types of cold calling, each with starter scripts.
• Door knocking system: Survey Prospecting. This is a specific system, fully scripted with supporting tools.
• Prospect tracking systems: Managing prospects from first touch to formal appraisal, role of follow up contact and marketing material.
• Weekly prospecting reporting by email.
• Three end of month coaching sessions on self emotion management.

Individual Coaching Program

Fires of Hell- Understanding your personal action triggers. Duration 8 hours over One Month $1,800 + GST
What is included:

• Understanding the neurological structure of the brain and how the flight/fight mechanism drives the specific decisions you make.
• Identifying your personal blocks to action.
• Creating a clear plan for overcoming your blocks.
• Identifying goals that are fuelled by your own motivation structure.

Individual Coaching Program
Sales Excellence – Follow up to the Fires of Hell Program. Duration 9 hours $1600 + GST
What is included:

• Defining goals for your immediate sales issues.
• Agreed action plan on daily and weekly levels.
• Joint review of:
1. activities
2. sales situations
3. obstacles to current performance

Structure:

• Minimum program is set up session of two hours then eight weekly sessions.
• Conducted in person or on Skype with video.

Sales Management Programs by Maya Saric

SIP SALES CAPACITY AUDIT

Understanding Your Current Sales Team. Duration 2 hours $950 + GST

What is included:

• Test your existing sales and support team to achieve an independent sales capacity audit.
• Team results debrief with the manager – two hour onsite / phone review with a SIP specialist.
• Includes eight team members. Additional staff $180 + GST per person.

Workshop

Sales Planning. Duration One day $1,800 + GST

What is included:

• Total territory definition.
• Define and agree the business sales mission.
• Set sales goals: Five years and annual.
• Individual territory creation within the total territory by geography, product or industry classification.
• Staff matching to territory (includes results from SIP Sales Capacity Audit).
• Define existing staff development needs to match territory definition.

Here’s some more information on what SIP can do for you.

________________________________________

TERMS AND CONDITIONS • Settlement due in full 7 days before program starts, including recruitment. • * All facilities, refreshments and transport costs are additional and the client’s responsibility to organize. • Pricing valid until 1/03/2012.

Happy to be home, honoured to be their mother

Posted on 13 January 2012 by Maya Saric

After 12 hours on the road driving back from our summer holiday I am in heaven; first there was no bloodshed in the car among 4 very tired and bored veggies (3 kids and me), we have unpacked the car and all the luggage and I am at my own desk working at my own PC which i managed to leave behind for the trip and I am feeling really blessed about my kids and sharing all this with them.

As we turned left off the express way at Hornsby there was such relief to be in Sydney that if we hadn’t been travelling at 60 km per hour the kids would have been kissing the ground. When we were on the approach to North Sydney and saw the top of the Harbour Bridge and the shells of the Opera House peaking through the buildings of North Sydney there was open squealing from everyone.

The final sign of relief was as we passed Sydney University and joined the queue of traffic at the edge of Newtown… we were home (only the heavy traffic within Byron can compete with Newtown) and then Luke said….’no more McDonalds for dinner, we can have real food from Clems’. Clems is the local chicken shop in the middle of Newtown and nowhere on the planet can compete with Clems or being home for that matter.

I hope everyone has had some chance to relax and unwind for summer.

Maya Saric

What about us? Growing your talent from within

Posted on 21 December 2011 by Maya Saric

An interesting statistic that shows recruiting good staff is getting harder “Spending per employee on recruiting went up 6% this year…which is more than 3X the money spent on the training of internal candidates.”

So why don’t companies spend more money training existing loyal and product savvy staff to take on these new roles?

Not because they don’t have enough talent already, but because there is no established or efficient way of managing internal mobility options. Managers do not have effective ways of identifying existing skills and desire to move outside of the staff in their own departments.

We certainly don’t want all our staff ready with updated resumes anticipating or actively searching for new positions within or our business and certainly not outside. We don’t want to give our staff an urge to move. Yet many larger companies are losing their existing talent through boredom being in the same role too long or not seeing a clear career path to give them a long term perspective inside the business. But imagine if as part of staff’s initial employment process or later during a career planning program we are able to create a register of our existing talent.

For sales based organizations SIP can provide a company wide ‘Sales and Service Capacity Audit’ of existing staff providing a register of staff interested in considering other roles with clear indications of their sales capacity as well as their current product and industry knowledge. Combined with using SIP in its recruitment format this would allow managers literately at the press of a button to list amongst the current staff those with potential sales ability and existing product knowledge.

To find out how to maximize your company’s existing talent pool contact Maya Saric

Want more reading on why finding the right staff is crucial?

Conquer your fear of prospecting, a Christmas present

Posted on 16 December 2011 by Maya Saric

Hi Everyone

To all my fabulous clients and friends who have journeyed with me since SIP was relaunched in 2008

Another year of selling comes to a close and before our focus turns to some well earned rest and time with families

I’d like to offer you a Christmas gift to make a difference to your sales results in 2012.

How to conquer your fear of prospecting. See the link is at end of this post.

This video is just a taste of what is happening when we recoil from prospecting and how to train ourselves to conquer that. As business people we are all selling ourselves and prospecting is the single biggest issue limiting our sales results, followed closely by closing. If you, or one of your staff would really like to conquer this or any other fears you have associated with selling once and for all I run personalised Coaching programs which cost $4,500 +GST and costs in the privacy of serviced offices so you don’t have to expose any of your vulnerable bits to family or staff.

Let’s book you now for January or Feb before the New Year gets away from you.

I can also run small team 1 day version to conquer the common fears that a sales team experiences for the same rate plus facility costs.

Have a fabulous Christmas and a very prosperous New Year

If you’d rather download the video Right click on the link below and choose “Save link as…” (or similar) to save the video file to your computer.
Download – Emotions in Selling : Part 5 by Maya Saric here

Loading video…

“When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.”

Posted on 2 December 2011 by Maya Saric

“When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.” – Tuli Kupferberg

Love this quote! It’s the most elegant way of saying if you
change yourself the world changes with you. Unfortunately change is the hardest of all things and rarely occurs elegantly. Indeed most of us have it hoisted upon us through some catastrophe.

To proactively create changes takes great clarity about the workings of
your internal belief system as well as acting in new and unfamiliar ways. It’s
rare that any of us have the energy or courage to walk a new path alone.

If there is anything you want to change in your working life, let’s
talk. I’m a qualified psychologist with over 30 years experience in Sales and
Business Management who has been coaching people to create new realities for
themselves in business since 1993.

Email me for a personalized coaching plan maya@salesinventoryprofile.com or call now on 0407 005 290

Want more inspiration?

Why a Receptionist for a Sales Organisation Needs to be a Gun Sales Person

Posted on 2 December 2011 by Maya Saric

We have tested over 400 receptionists through all the businesses we have worked with and the profiles of the ones the business owners tell us are very good, are identical to the sales people.

Yes, equal to the BETTER sales people, especially in specialist sales organisations like Real Estate offices. You’re surprised that this role is so important to your business achieving new sales? I’m not.

One of the characteristics with new business or ‘hunter’ style sales people is they are not focused on details as they are often working too quickly. The upside of that is they are willing to handle a million balls at once, which is the first reason you need a hunter at reception. That is, they don’t handle a lot of detail as a normal part of their work, but in a busy office they need to be good with volume and not get flustered.

The second reason is the reception deals with the most important people, your public, often in times of crisis and confusion and if they cannot calm, or stall, an unhappy caller before they are dealt with more fully, the caller will turn their distress at your business and most often never call back. You get one chance at the really important issues to make a difference and the front desk is the first person the public will deal with so they can make a huge difference in supporting your prospects and clients before they are heard by the ultimate representative.

The third reason is that reception is the best way to give someone too young to sell or unable to work full-time a chance to learn the whole business while you wait for them to be ready to sell. Given how hard it is to find quality sales staff at any level why waste this role on someone who does not aspire to a career path inside your business.

If you are interested in a simpler more accurate way of finding sales staff who can sell, whether for reception, a listing agent or a BDM for new managements contact me at maya@salesinventoryprofile.com or call now on 0407 005 290

Wanting to grow your sales team? Have you considered growing your talent within?

Learn how to achieve your deepest desires

Posted on 30 November 2011 by Maya Saric

We are all aware of how our fears drive us but few have any clue about how the pull of pleasures really works. Have the people who amassed the greatest fortune really driven themselves from the compulsion of survival?

Many coaches say their job is to ‘keep your feet to the fire’ that is remind you of the fire and keep the survival instinct switched on. I know to achieve greatness takes something else. Can you imagine Bill Gates was in perpetual struggle? No!

Then there is the positive thinking crowd and the elusive ‘Secret’. But most of you equally know that plastering your walls with goal boards and photo’s of lives unattainable isn’t working either. You need a much more intrinsic personalized pleasure to achieve greatness. Pleasures that are an expression of your real personality fit into
your belief system and are lived with love.

In a recent speech to a group of students on my role models, Warren Buffet said:

“I may have more money than you, but money doesn’t make the difference. If there is any difference between you and me, it may simply be that I get up and have a chance to do what I love to do, every day. If you learn anything from me, this is the best advice I can give you.”

I invite you to understand the Emotions in Selling program. Get your own copy of the DVD’s or book your team for a personalized training process to understand what specifically motivates your prospects and how to use that consciously to close deals.

If you want to uncover your own motivation triggers email me for a Coaching plan on: maya@salesinventoryprofile.com

It’s fun to play games together

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Maya Saric

We played a fabulous family game on one Saturday afternoon recently. We’re a game playing family. Amongst our recent favourites is Uno (a classic) Tri-Domino’s (travels well) and Dragonology (world’s most complex game
for the under 100’s).

Saturday was a mum favourite; ‘Clean the Fridge’. Luckily Luke, Mr almost 11 who is good at cleaning, is capable of turning everything
into a competition!

Game on!

The rules:

Clear kitchen bench top and dining room table

Remove everything from refrigerator door to bench top

Remove contents of each shelf to different corner of the dining room table

Remove shelves to sink for mum to wash

Dry shelves

Luke to return shelves to original position (Luke’s also good at fine details and loves the puzzle of making things fit). See photo….mum asks; can I help? Luke answers; NO I’m not giving up.

Total game time: 30 minutes! Wahoo!

Emotional Engagement during an Appraisal

Posted on 11 October 2011 by Maya Saric

Selling without emotion is hard work!

Emotion stimulates the mind 3000 times faster than rational thought. The brain is structured in such a way that the emotional processing (instinct) starts responding first and creates much stronger chemical reactions then the logical processes, which are triggered much later. The emotional processes are designed to turn on the flight or fight (or freeze) mechanism and are on a 24/7 hair trigger for anything that creates fear.

It’s an emotional world we live in. Many people say we live in a rational world but nothing could be further from the truth. Emotions drive our behavior; the world is driven by emotions. Rational thought leads customers to be interested but it is emotion that sells.

Capturing minds is one thing; capturing hearts is quite another.

The most successful sales involve strong emotional connections between people. People don’t actually make life decisions on clear logical grounds. We often decide first and rationalize second. We are emotion based creatures that are first and foremost run by our fears and instincts. Our brain has been designed so that logic cannot easily override our emotions, especially strong emotions.

The better you target that human instinctual connection with the vendor the easier the sales process that follows will be. You need to start targeting their emotions the second you walk across their threshold. Given we sell Real Estate at a very intimate, personal level (in their homes) you have the opportunity to connect with them not in a brash, blatant way but in a simple and very profound manner.

To maximize your chances of getting the listing you must first connect with their hearts then later you can rationalize with their minds. Remember that the fear emotion has the strongest effect on the decision making process. You need to connect very directly with their fears in a way that explicitly helps reduce their fears.

So what are you selling that you need to be emotional about before you get the listing? Until you have secured the listing you have just one product: YOU.

Who are you? (some standard stuff, you need to tailor this to you):
• A committed member of your local community.
• A professional real estate agent of XX years standing.
• A highly experienced sales person who knows how to sell the value in each and every property.
• XX years young, e.g. through your own midlife dramas with plenty of drive and ambitions (people want personal content i.e. who are you?)
• You’re a specialist with Blue Bay Real Estate.
• A Licensed Agent partnered with one of the area’s most successful agents.
• Educated and raised in this community.

BUT of what value is that to them? How do you meet their emotional needs?
How does that make you the right person to sell their castle? How can you reduce their fears? You have to translate these things into specific benefits to them, in their context.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Will to Win

Posted on 24 September 2011 by Maya Saric

In my life I have been a couch potato then an amateur Australian title holder in a team rowing sport.

Yes the same person within just a few years of each other.

I have also trained a team of coach potatoes to a level of local sporting success in just a few weeks. The team I coached was a corporate Dragon Boat crew made up of staff from a large Sydney law firm. They varied in age, shape and level of fitness.

They were all very startled to find themselves with a coach who expected them to win. A coach who was a winner and assumed that they would be too. I didn’t ask why I had been chosen to coach. I was honored to have the job and was determined to do it to my very best abilities. Plus I was a driven and competent athlete. They were a group of novices with only 4 weeks before the race.

I assumed they had asked for someone good to give them some chance at winning. Other wise they could have been given a coach who wasn’t as good nor as driven as I was. So I drove them. I did notice some surprise from them on the first night that I was being so thorough in my style and so demanding in the tasks. They didn’t complain and I chose to ignore it.

Over the 4 weeks I implemented a very detailed training program. I never said anything discouraging to any individual or singled out anyone for non performance, though I had plenty of examples of both. It isn’t my style to focus on the negative. But I did continue to expect improvements and I never slackened on the pace. We spent our weeks ‘doing’.

Race day came and I was ready for victory!! They were still a bit amused. I lined them up before the race into their positions. They had been lining themselves up at practice and choosing their own positions. I hadn’t interfered with that as I had felt it was more important to learn the technique fully first. But today we needed to be at our very best. Everything we could do to win was important. Luckily that day I was really angry with the world and so I was taking no crap. Someone complained that they wanted to be further up the rank. I told them without flinching that heavy strong people get to be the middle. I wanted small skinny agile people in front tall skinny people at the back. They had all been weighed at the last training session. End of discussion. What discussion?

I myself was also competing this day in the open sports division. After lining every one up and having a brief chat about why they were in these particular positions and that I had every confidence in them and all would be good I left them to compete with my own team. My sports team came second. Right well now I was really angry! I told my corporate crew what they had ‘a chance’ of winning, because:

1. They had completed a professional training program designed by an expert
2. They had been training well for 4 weeks
3. They were seated in the prime position for the group dynamic
4. If they gave it 100% and expected to win, they would

Someone laughed, the rest were deathly quiet. I said if there was anyone who isn’t going to give it 100% and expect to win, it is best they stayed out of the boat. Yes I’m serious. We will do better racing with less crew than racing below our personal best. Was there anyone here that didn’t want to give it their personal best? No comments. They very quietly got in the boat. I sat in coach position at the drum. While we were moving into position I was repeating what our strengths were and that I expected them to win.

We were waiting for the gun. Silence. Everyone in start position eyes on the water. The gun went and I was yelling:

We can do it!
Push yourself!
Pull harder!
Work together!
You are good at this.
Pick it up! (What do you mean pick it up we are dying out here)
Faster!
Come on you’ve got plenty of stamina I know you can do it.
We are winning (What! Who is?)
Yes we are in the lead.
Push it now we can win.
Come on we are doing it
Death or glory there is no second time
Now is it
Pick it up

On and on I yelled.

To everyone’s absolute amazement, we won!! Indeed we won by an obvious margin.

They were so busy laughing and hugging that we nearly capsized. We rowed back to the pontoon without a glimmer of fatigue. When we got out of the boat one of the blokes gave me such a big hug it picked me up of the ground and told me I was awesome and that was the greatest thing he’d ever been a part of. I said:

“The team is awesome. You’re a winner!!!”

Later I discovered the bloke who hugged me was the MD. The bloke who had complained about the seating was a senior manager. The two women who were in lead position where both juniors (skinny and agile).

This race was a heat. It qualified us for the finals.

There were almost 30 corporate crews there that day. Most like us had joined just weeks or even days before. Not one had a serious coach. There were also well organized corporate crews who had trained for months and used the sport as a regular fitness exercise. They too had amateur coaches. In the final we came second. The crew that beat us had been training together for many years and were using the sport as a fitness process and a company social bonding (drinking) thing. We did plenty of drinking (I mean bonding) too.

This is a true story and has some great lessons for anyone in a leadership role whether in sport or business. This was neither the perfect team dynamic nor the ideal coach/leadership model. Reality has a tendency to imperfection. The story is still important however, as it does illustrate some of the key issues required to achieve a successful outcome.

7 Keys to Victory

1. A clear and highly specific goal.

I mean clear! Not ‘give it a go’ or ‘try our best’ but WIN! It is usually better to have the goal clearly articulated and known to all team members. In this case, I had assumed their goal was to win. It later turned out that some of them had very specific individual goals, all of which were surpassed by their results. While getting buy-in from all members at the start of a project is preferred, it is not mandatory.

What is mandatory is that there is:
a. A specific goal that is clearly defined and,
b. Known to the leader who will be creating the plan and then,
c. The members provide all the required actions to complete the plan.

2. A lot of thinking and planning done by someone qualified

In this case this was me, the Coach. I used my great depth of knowledge in this sport to assess in detail the available resources and developed a plan for each training session in 10 minute intervals. The individuals didn’t need to know any of these details so long as there was a good plan to follow.

3. Lots of Action

By them – the Coach never rows. They came to the training sessions and did their time on the water. They had worked much harder on the water than any of them had expected to and all said later that the training was as good as the racing. On a long journey (which this was not) the daily work must also be rewarding as the glory of the outcome can be too brief to provide any on-going motivation.

4. Having a qualified and specialist Coach or Leader responsible for implementing the action process and ensuring the team keeps to the plan.

It can be the drawback of many teams that one of the participants is also the Coach. In the years we had won we always had a separate person who did not row as our Coach. In fact, in this type of rowing, the Coach is an extra weight in the boat to be carried by the workers. However, it still works better that way to have someone dedicated to coaching and, that they are an expert.

5. Absolute drive

Initially that was just me but it became infectious. Lots of members of the crew increased their dedication during training when they could see the rate of improvement. No-one had dared say that they were serious about it, until after we won the first race. But I had already seen they were serious by their demeanor and improvement in the boat at training.

6. Group Dynamic

There is something special about working in a group. For some it is the companionship that gives them extra strength. Some people do not want to embarrass themselves in front of others. So if the Coach says we are rowing at full capacity for 5 minutes, who wants to stop before the end? For some, it is the inspiration provided by others. Either by someone who does this so well they are delights to have around or by watching someone struggling heroically against the odds. For example, in that crew watching some of the smaller people put in so much energy make you feel like doing it too. I have often trained on land alone using the same strength program we use as a group. I know that when I am on my own then 15 repetitions can seem plenty. When I train together and the Coach decides it will be 30, I’ll do it. Groups are not always easier. Just as a group dynamic can be good it can also create problems which are beyond this article to consider.

7. Positive feedback

Firstly, they received lots of positive feedback from me at each training session. They could also see for themselves, at each training session, that they were moving faster and further than the time before. The absolute feedback came with winning the first race. Instantly, they all thought they could do it, not just the optimists amongst them and that driven Coach of theirs.

What about their drive, passion and vision?

Often in corporate projects you will be working toward a given task and be expected to make the project work, despite your personal beliefs.

Is that realistic?

It isn’t necessary, though it does make it easier, if everyone is personally passionate about the vision. In this case someone obviously was. That was me. A few other people were secretly almost as passionate.

What is mandatory is that there is a viable plan and that everyone is genuinely committed to executing their actions effectively. While I did use visualization techniques to teach them about stroke style and timing, our results came from ‘the doing’.

What will sabotage the result is if an individual reduces their ‘doing’ for any reason.

If someone is holding back on the amount of effort they are contributing it maybe because they don’t share the vision. It is very hard for people to work against their own values and beliefs. If this is the case, effort must be made to align the individual’s beliefs and values with those of the project. This process need not be difficult or complicated but cannot be ignored if a person is dragging their feet and you want them to stay with the project.

I was lucky with this group as they had all volunteered to participate. As it had not been a formal company requirement so they were all equally willing to do the work. It is the nature of volunteer organizations that people are unlikely to join a group that contradicts their personal needs. There was one bloke who complained about the plan (remember the seating issue) but his commitment to the team was sufficient for him to complete his actions well.

As a leader, or coach, you must expect people to challenge your plan.

Some people need a thorough knowledge of what is required of them, and why, in order to do their part properly. It does not mean they disagree with the plan. There may be people who are questioning the plan because they do disagree. If you cannot gain their co-operation they will become useless in the team.

This event is a good example of how great results can be achieved by having a qualified coach experienced in planning, individual performance enhancement and team dynamics.

Want to achieve your deepest desires?

Another dash of motivation anyone?

Posted on 12 August 2011 by maya-admin

Staying energised and focused is the bane of every salesperson’s existence.

Lots has been written on this topic and some of it like the Law of Attraction and many sales courses talk about having clear goals.

One of the sorts of goals people have for themselves relates to being able to afford to buy better stuff, like new cars. So we pick a car to help us visualise making more sales and so earning more money.

Recently I was at the Ferrari and Maserati dealership in Waterloo Sydney talking with one of their nice salespeople Tom Westlake. The photo included here is of one of the Ferrari’s Tom currently has for sale. Tom also sells Alfa’s if anyone is up for the challenge of owning one of them.

If you want to see more photos of beautiful cars you can check them out at http://www.ferrarimaseratisydney.com.au/

Anyway….back to how people use goal imagery to stay motivated. People think to have a lot of motivation you need to set BIG goals so they plaster their walls, and their devices, their wherever-they-are-often places with pristine beautiful images of cars and what could be more pristine and beautiful than a Ferrari.

Then we think a few minutes each morning of our dream car, chat a few affirmations and perhaps a moment or two of gratitude focus and hey presto we will be motivated to achieve more sales to get that car.

WRONG!

As a Sales Excellence Coach of over 20 years, I know your brain does not work like that.

Your brain will orchestrate, on your behalf, what you REALLY want at the subconscious level. Most of us don’t really want a $500,000 car because we cannot conceptualise actually having it in the mental frame of our current self-perceptions. In plain English; the Ferrari doesn’t fit our current image of self or our current life. I’d never fit it into my garage and where on the streets of Newtown would I park it?

A highly specific goal will work to motivate you only if it is something you REALLY want at your deepest gut level and it is just outside of your current reach. So if you really want to change your car and you currently drive one worth $300,000 you might plaster your life with pictures of a Ferrari.

You need both elements for a goal to work;

at your deepest core level you want that exact thing and
it is at the outer edge of your current self-image.

So if you currently drive a $30,000 car and you WANT A NEW CAR and it’s not just a marker for more money, then you need to start focusing (not fantasising) and wallpapering your life with images of $60,000 cars. So when you ring Tom ask him about the Alfa’s instead!

But if you have no clarity about what you really want and why then you should connect with me first.

Untangling your deepest motivations is a journey in its own right and getting them out of your head is quicker and easier with the tools and objective guidance/probing of an experienced coach.

Maya Saric

Sales Excellence Coach

maya@salesinventoryprofile.com

Maya Saric – The Sales Psychologist

The Sales Psychologist

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Another dash of motivation anyone?