Success means staying on one path

Posted on 15 July 2017 by Maya Saric

“Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing until it gets there.”
– Josh Billings

What are you going to be when you grow up? It’s a cute question to ask a 5 year old. Sadly with the endless array of choices, it’s easy to get trapped into asking this throughout your entire life. There are all these different pulls and pushes that tempt us to stray from our path. But being a jack-of-all-trades can be detrimental to your success; it’s about choosing one thing and getting really good at it!

But how do you know what is worth sticking to?

Ultimately you don’t. It’s a decision you make.

Many of the worlds greatest achievements and success stories resulted from stepping into something radical but then many failures are too. Business plans and market research will give you some clues and it’s worth spending a few (many???) months doing these before you decide. But there are no guarantees and ultimately it’s just your choice to commit.

Once you commit there is nothing else but to persist, till success or bankruptcy do you find.

If you want to find out if you have the tenacity/persistence/endurance to stick to your path we invite you to complete a Sales Inventory Profile.

http://salesinventoryprofile.com/prk=re-41ac-sale-001

How To Series Episode 6: How to Sell

Posted on 10 October 2013 by Maya Saric

Many of us get into selling entirely by accident and many of us are petrified of being sold to. But selling is just a conversation – it is as simple as that. But selling is a conversation with a purpose; selling is a conversation at the end of which someone makes a decision. As a salesperson, you need to guide the conversation to a point where somebody can make a decision and that is the only thing to it. It’s deciding when is the end, and how much information do you need, to buy?

So, it’s a conversation between people, which means you need to ask as many questions as you’re giving answers because in order for a customer to make a decision, they need to have all of the facts and figures. Yet, when they come to you when you first meet them, they don’t have any questions because they don’t know, yet, what it is that’s missing in their framework, and that’s why it’s a conversation. You need to explore what they know, and what they believe in order to fit the new information in so that it makes sense to them. So, giving your blanket product information and the Ten Top Benefits of buying my teaspoon is not a conversation, and therefore, it’s not selling. You need to find out, first, what they know, what they believe, and why they wish to buy one. And then, you present your information.

Emotions in Selling program provides lots of various, specific things about how to converse, how to provide information, and how present yourself in such a way that engenders trust. Because if they don’t trust your information, then they won’t accept you.

Selling is a conversation – it is as simple as that.

How To Series Episode 5: How to Close the Sale

Posted on 19 August 2013 by Maya Saric

Selling is a conversation. At the end of which, somebody gets to make a decision. At the end, we close.

How do you know when that conversation is at its end?

Some training programs will say, close, close, close. Close a million times. Close all over the place. Close every second that you can. In fact, that’s not true. If you close too soon and all of the issues haven’t been fully resolved, in your prospect’s mind, they won’t be able to make that decision. If you force it or in some way try to corner them into it, you get a generic reaction where they will automatically say no and it’s very hard to recover from a point blank No. you can also let the conversation ramble on way too long, spend way too much time, give them way too much detail, not be really clear on what the final aspect that they need to resolve is, and talk your way around the conversation so that you totally confuse them, and then you can’t close because now they are overwhelmed. You need to be really clear about what sort of information they need form which they are capable of making that decision.

So what sort of information needs to be contained in the conversation?

While selling is a conversation and we all know how to converse, it is much more complicated than that and you need to understand both the psyche of the person that you’re dealing with, the content of your product, and how that fits into their current situation or their current… the way they run their current business.

If you are interested in learning how to sell and learning how to close and when that moment is, and how to maximize your calling rate, you really need to understand those facets. We run a training program called Emotions in Selling which clearly identifies how people make decisions. What will get in the way? How to build trust? Because if they don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you no matter how well you explained the product. Finally, when have they had enough content that they can make a stable decision that they won’t freak themselves out the next day or when they talk to somebody else back at the office or at their own home, and see that in fact, they’re not ready to decide? They need to be fully aware of what they are buying and confident before close will stick.

Learn how to identify what the needs are thoroughly and how to have that conversation so that your product answers those needs before you close them.

For more on Sales Training & Coaching, contact Maya on 0407 005 290 today.

Enjoying the series? Check out the next episode: How to Sell

How To Series Episode 4: How to Build Trust

Posted on 19 August 2013 by Maya Saric

It’s a fundamental process in human interaction whether you’re building a relationship or trying to sell a product, and the process is exactly the same.

In the Emotions in Selling program we spoke a lot about the mechanisms of fear – and fear is an instinctive and absolute reaction; we are hardwired for survival. And that means that the tiniest, little flicker, of uncertainty or danger, will instantly freeze the person you’re speaking to. And why is that important? Because you can only develop trust in the absence of fear.

So if your friend, your customer, your business partner, is in a state of fear they cannot trust you because you are bundled into the equation. So you have to look at your environment, the really simple attributes of where you’re standing and what’s happening around you, through to how you look, and how you dress, and how you speak, and then to the information that you’re giving, because that person will take the data in from the biggest cues down to the most sophisticated.

So what you say, matters least. If they’ve already been frightened by standing in an environment that’s a bit open, exposed, their fear of being overheard…or you’re wearing something that’s out of context with what they expect of you. So if you’re a professional, then you need to dress like a professional. You need to dress like that person expects of you, not how you expect, or would like to dress. So if you’re a medical professional, you have to look like their vision of a medical professional, not your own. And when selling, same in any important financial transactions, we have this stereotypical accountant or bank manager impressions of the world. People expect, when they go to the bank, to see people dressed like their stereotypical visions of a bank manager. So exactly the same thing applies to the words that you use and the things that you say; what you say has to be congruent – that’s a really big word – it means, it needs to fit in to the context of their current knowledge, including their belief system.

So say if you’ve got a piece of knowledge that conflicts or is incomplete then they cannot accept the truth of what you’re saying. So you may have to start at the beginning and educate them if it is some important and complicated procedure that you’re explaining. Or you may have to have a really long chat about what they currently believe so what you say, is then fitted in with what they currently know. And if it does contradict then you’re able to discuss why it’s still safe information, despite the fact that it doesn’t fit in. Developing trust is the first step in any relationship – it’s the most important in selling.

If you’re in sales I recommend that you explore the Emotions in Selling program and understand how to guide your clients through a simple process of conversation to making stable decisions.

Learn how to build trust with the Emotions in Selling Program blog series.

Call Maya on 0407 005 290 or send her a message on Facebook.

Want more? Watch the next episode in our How To series: How to Close a Sale

How To Series Episode 3: How Resumes are Killing your Business

Posted on 15 August 2013 by Maya Saric

Recruiting sales people is the trickiest part of your company.

Recruiting sales people is harder than recruiting any other part of the business because the number of people who can sell is actually quite small. But the number of people who think they can sell and are certainly interested and willing because sales people earn such good money, have flexible working hours and all the benefits of being in the sales department, amounts to a huge level of interest. There’s a larger level of interest than the people who are capable of doing it.

How do you work that out?

Traditionally, we’ve been doing it with resume. Resumes are incredibly flawed as recruitment tools. They talk about the past. They are full of historical facts or historical fictions sometimes. They’ve been edited somewhat but regardless of whether its fact or fiction, it’s about the past and where that has been and what they claim to have done for themselves. It’s totally impossible for you to prove any of it. It doesn’t tell you what they are capable of doing for you. It doesn’t show you the feat between their history and their abilities and your job.

What we do in the Sales Recruitment Process is identify people’s ability to sell and their ability to sell is based on 75 different attributes so impossible for them to articulate that document. We, however, have a sales IQ process that will identify all of that in 30 minutes of their time online before you meet them. Don’t rely on what they say about themselves. Allow us to measure their current ability which is core to their capacity regardless of whether they have already started to learn the skills and have had some experience.

Learning skills and having experience is important, but even how small a population can actually sell, you sometimes don’t have the luxury of recruiting just within the pool of people who have already done your job for another company.

Find out who can sell and whether or not they are sufficient of those attributes before you interview them, not by reading their resumes but by allowing them to do the sales inventory profile assessment.

You can contact us, Corporate Coach Australia, on the details provided below and allow us to help you recruit people who really can sell.

Call Maya on 0407 005 290 or send her a message on Facebook.

Next in the series: How to Build Trust – watch it here.

How To Episode 2: How To Cold Call

Posted on 5 August 2013 by Maya Saric

The first part of the process is, can you really do it? It looks easy and many people think that anyone can do it. We all have phoning blitz or a called calling day, get the whole company out there, do a bit every day or have some major function where we all get out there on the street and hassle up some new business – but less than 5% of the sales population, now that’s 5% of the sales population, not the total population, can actually do it.

The first part of how to cold call is to find out if you are able to because you don’t want to spend. This is the hardest part of the sales cycle. Despite it looking so simple, you don’t want to spend endless hours following my instructions first of all and perfecting your script or rehearsing your technique only to find that really you can’t do it. It’s going to slaughter your energy. It’s going to make you feel miserable and dejected and horrid.

First of all, do our Sales Inventory Profile IQ system. It will identify a whole bunch of things about your selling ability and one of those is whether or not you can cold call. If you can cold call, then develop the skills Then, prepare a magnificent killer script, rehearse it to depth so that it performs naturally and practice it to a whole bunch of people before you start doing it with prospects. Because cold calling regardless of how clever you think you are or how magnificent your product is, take the whole bunch of energy. It’s really emotionally draining.

So, how do you develop a killer script?

There are 3 key components. The first 10 seconds is the most important. In the first 10 seconds, you want to do only 2 things. You want to identify yourself in the simplest, clearest way possible, and you want to give them a reason to listen. A reason a listen so that you can interrupt their current activity. You can bring their attention to you and your content. They will make all sorts of polite noises about whether or not they are listening. You can ask them on what hours they come home, if they’ve got a moment to talk and most polite people will say yes certainly. But what you really want to do is slice through their attention so that you’ll have a 100% of it yourself, that is about what is in their current environment that you can fix. So the first 10 seconds is about knowing what pain your product will address and clearly articulating how in those first 10 seconds.

When you introduce yourself that’s, “Hello, this is Maya.” That simple, right? That clear. My name is a bit harder than hopefully yours is, but you don’t want to say, “Hello, this is Maya from Corporate Coach. That’s just too many words. And why do you want to listen to me? Because I know how to improve cold call outcomes. That’s the biggest pain that most of my prospects are in, is their ability to generate cold call outcomes. “Hello. My name is Maya. I’d like to talk to you about increasing your cold calling rate.” Those are really clear why they should listen to me and it has identified a specific pain that my business can address.

Next is, how your product does that and the final thing is getting permission to take further action. In the middle is a little bit about your product and how you do that. Then, is the permission to proceed.

What is the next step that you can gain permission for during that one cold call? Is it to meet in person? Is it to send them some information? Is it for them to attend an event? Is it to do some sort of demonstration? Be really clear about what you’re trying to achieve. Introduce yourself and your product and then ask permission to proceed to the next stage.

First of all, find out if you or your staff can in fact cold call, then get really clear about the script and do some rehearsing before you engage with clients.

Lovin’ the series? Check out How Resumes Are Killing Your Business here.

How to choose a Business Coach

Posted on 26 July 2013 by Maya Saric

Lets leave aside the question of when do you need a business coach and skip to: How do you choose the right one for you?

I often hear comments by people trying to sell their coaching services that only current superstars in any profession have the right or capacity to coach others to excellence.

Really?

What I think all good coaches need to have is not the ability to perform particular activities well themselves, but the ability to bring to consciousness your performance on those activities so that they can help you improve. But – changing human behavior is a difficult thing. Thus, the profession of coaching has moved into the business world as the bridge between classical training, i.e. giving people new information about how to perform tasks and creating sustainable changes in behavior.

Coaching is about helping people move from ‘knowing’ to ‘doing’. That is a complex process.

A good coach – a coach that will give you the outcome of better performance – is one that is able to translate your current performance, which you may be unconscious of, into consciousness, then help you to improve from there. A good coach is someone who understands the psyche of the human being; how to guide people through change; how to support people through levels of insecurity and fear and doubt, all of which dominates the process of change and learning; who are able to guide you through that process, and bring to consciousness your abilities. Then they have a good long look at where you’re currently at, how much runway you have ahead of you (i.e. ability to change) and formulate a plan that has absolute clarity from your perspective about how to make changes in your current behaviors to create a performance improvement.

I often hear coaches selling their personal sales success as the key to being good sales coaches. You know, currently, the best blah, blah, blah in the whole planet, or, the most squirms of any human ever blah, blah, blah. Well congratulations on your personal success! But often these people are successful, but can they coach someone else? They may have a great natural grasp of their topic and they may have been on a journey of growth, maybe they’ve received support or good training from somebody else and they have merged all of those things together into a system that works really, really well for themselves. Their intuitive knowledge, their education, the support they’ve received from people around them whether that was from an official coaching process or just from the warm and the encouraging words of their peers or their parents or sometimes even the insults and challenges that they’ve received, that they’ve been able to rise and prove them wrong.

But, as a coach, how do you recreate that process to another person?

How we motivate ourselves, how we change, how we responded to fear, how we deal with the uncertainty, these are the things that stand in the way of our success. And what you want in a good coach is somebody who knows how to systematically guide you through your fear, uncertainty, confusion, boredom, irritation, etc.

You don’t need a coach who is good at the individual tasks but has no consciousness of how they got good at these things themselves. A good coach is someone who is conscious of how success comes, and thus will be able to guide you through change.

I’ve recently saw this awful caption of “Is your Coach yesterday’s Hero?” Meaning, have they been a great performer in the past but have long since lost their touch. First of all, I find that kind of thinking offensive and secondly, it’s actually irrelevant whether the coach is yesterdays or today’s superstar in the performance of the actual activity. It would be like saying that you can’t coach Olympic athletes unless you were yourself currently an Olympic athlete. Unless you hold the world record in breaststroke, you cannot teach, or more to point, coach to excellence a current star in the swimming pool.

For more on training and improving your sales skills, check out our Emotions in Selling training blogs here

How To Episode 1: How To Recognise a Sales Person

Posted on 22 July 2013 by Maya Saric

You need staff and you need to interview a pool of candidates and see which one of them can sell.

There is a myth that some people believe that they can recognize sales people as soon as they see them, as soon as they chat. To some extent, that is true because during the chat, they will exhibit some of their selling abilities. Certainly, they will exhibit their communication style but whether that style is the right one for selling or not is harder to tell, so being able to be a good communicator is a really small fraction of the equation for being able to sell.

Another myth is that, it’s their energy, the twinkle in their eye, the spring in their step, their motivation, their ambition that really counts, so people that really want to succeed, that are passionate about selling or the product, or some other aspect of their life, this energy will exude when they are selling. This energy may indeed exude when they are selling but it isn’t going to help them sell. Their energy levels is about how interested they are in selling all their product which is certainly helpful, but their ability to sell is what’s crucial. There’s a huge chasm between being interested in something and then you are able to do it.

I have a great passion for quantum physics and a whole bunch of engineering topics but I’m never going to make an engineer because despite my passion and interest, I don’t have any of the relevant abilities. So we have a sales test that identifies the 75 attributes which you can never see in an interview that allows people to sell. It’s not a skill-based test because skills are something that people can develop, you can teach them, you can change them, and you make skills better. what you need is that they have the core capacity on which to build those skills. Find out if your candidates can sell before you interview them, before you get mesmerized by their passion and certainly do observe for yourself as many of those skills that they may possess, but remember the current skills can be topped up, that core capacity. It’s either there or it isn’t.

Visit our Facebook page and leave a message for Maya, or call her on 0407 005 290.

Next in the series: How to Cold Call

Starting a Sales Career Part 1

Posted on 12 July 2013 by Maya Saric

In this short interview, Maya Saric – Sales Psychologist and founder of Sales Inventory Profile – will be talking to Eliza Doueihi, a member of the Sales Tribe team. Eliza starting with Sales Tribe as a Business Development Manager, moving on from her career as a Business Analyst. This interview looks at why selling – especially cold-calling – is so difficult, and the components of success in real estate.

Maya: Hello, welcome back. Today, we are talking to a sales person who has journeyed from watching from the sidelines to being her own personal superstar. Today, welcome, Eliza Doueihi, a member of the sales inventory profile team. Eliza you were in IT, tell us a bit about your pre-sales career.

Eliza: In my pre-sales career I was a business analyst role.

Maya: Yep. Sounds boring.

Eliza: Business specialist, basically. I’ve been in the company for quite a while and my ultimate passion was to get into sales. I love to talk to people and I really wanted to move to sales but my boss just love so much and he valued what I contributed to the business that he wouldn’t let me go. Really, it came down to that. it wasn’t though I wasn’t able to do it, it wasn’t that I couldn’t sell – because I’m sure if I got the right training, I could. It’s just that, he wouldn’t let me go. That was really frustrating. It’s where I wanted to be. then I got the opportunity to move into real estate and that’s when I started really building relationships and talking to people and helping them out, getting them to where they want to be.

Maya: Alright. So before you go into real estate, what was your perception, what did you reckon?

Eliza: Well, I thought it was crazy, and I thought this will be so good. I’ll be driving a Merc in 6 months time…and I have my home line paid off. My kids are going to be doing all of these extra things that they never dreamed of. I didn’t get that far but I’m getting there, the thing was, the challenge was the fact that I didn’t realize how much work was involved in building my profile within the community and building my sales, and building my pipeline – which is really critical to a successful sales person. It’s to keeping that pipeline of funnel filled.

Maya: Right. So real estate has to be the most popular sales job on the planet because it does look easy, doesn’t it?

Eliza: Absolutely. [Chuckles]

Maya: Those beautiful people wearing lovely business suits, standing at the front door greeting – that part is easy.

Eliza: Not in the cold winter morning, Maya! Have you ever done that? There’s frost on the grass, 8 o’clock in the morning. It’s not pleasant. Putting sign boards, it’s not pleasant. And I tell you that. [Chuckles]

Maya: Eliza is an Australian who had a small voyage into New Zealand land, but there are natural hazards as well. But, back to things, that part where you see them in the house and you first meet them is easy.

Eliza: Yes.

Maya: But what is the hard bit? Knowing, as the failure rate is astronomical.

Eliza: Okay, the harder bit is when you’re got that list of contacts that you’ve taken from an open house and qualifying them and saying whether they’re going to be buyers or they’re actually sellers having a bit of sticky beak. So it’s taking that list and work again basically. The other harder bit is the actual building up of your client base, so actually cold calling. Building relationships.

Maya: That has to be a dirty word, cold calling. Back to the ice and snow of New Zealand. Why is cold calling so difficult?

Eliza: You can imagine you’re picking up the phone and you’re talking to someone you don’t know what they look like, you don’t know what their situation is and you want them to trust that you know what you’re talking about, and that you’re there to will help them out.

Maya: They’ve never met you before and you’re probably ringing in the middle of dinner.

Eliza: Yes. That too. That too.

Maya: How many people survive that in the real estate world?

Eliza: Not that many. I’d say 5% to 10% of people can really prospect and cold call.

Maya: 5% of the population can cold call which is to pick up the list from the phone book or get on the street and knock. A small percentage can warm call, which is the ringing the people that came to see the house on the weekend. What’s the next component of success in real estate?

Eliza: The fact that you close the same I guess would be the next one. You’ve got a buyer there and they’re still trying to decide what they’re going to do and it’s just working out how you’re going to get them to that next level. That’s another challenge on its own. Working at negotiating price that’s going to suit both parties. It’s just basically…a sales person rings 2 people like in real estate, you’re bringing 2 people together. So you’re bringing a buyer and a vendor and working out, finding a common ground. That’s really what an agent does from a selling perspective.

Enjoyed this video? Watch Part 2 here. Remember to ‘like’ us on Facebook and subscribe to our YouTube Channel for more videos!

Starting a Sales Career Part 2

Posted on 12 July 2013 by Maya Saric

Continuing on from part 1 this short interview Maya and Eliza talk about using SIP – the Sales Inventory Profile – to recruit people who can really sell, and why this is.

Maya: So Eliza, you’ve journeyed from not selling to selling, you’ve entered in an industry that you didn’t have any significant background in…what would you recommend to other people who are thinking of the same thing?

Eliza: I would highly recommend you find out if you can cold call, first and foremost. Because if you can cold call, then you are more than half right there. So, that’s the first thing I will recommend because if you can’t there’s plenty of other sales positions where you don’t need to make cold calls, whether it’s real estate or in other industries. There are jobs out there that you can still sell without that cold call but if you want to move into real estate particularly as a listing agent, you need to know if you can.

Maya: And how do you find out?

Eliza: You have to use SIP. That’s the only way you that you can find out if you can cold call. It’s the only accurate measuring tool that can tell you that.

Maya: SIP is a profiling system that allows you to see if you have the inherent attributes to sell even if you’ve never sold before like Eliza and allows you to identify whether you should be in a new business cold calling environment or more in the account management, or in retail which is sort of half way. What’s your recommendation to businesses looking for sales staff?

Eliza: My recommendation to businesses is, cold calling is critical to business growth. For you to have a staff that can’t cold call it means that you won’t be growing. You need to find out if the people that you’re recruiting can cold call and the best way to do that is to use SIP.

Maya: What would you say to people…I’ve often spoken to business owners who say, well I don’t cold call, so how can I possibly make them do it?

Eliza: I would say to business owners that say that, you’ve had the experience; you’ve been in the industry for a long time so you won’t need to cold call. You’ve already built the relationships. When someone comes in new into the industry, they need to cold call to build relationships. They need to fill that funnel, and it’s the only way to do it. If they can’t cold call, don’t take them on.

Maya: Right. So it is as simple as that. If they can’t cold call, don’t take them on. You as the business owner might have 5,10, 20 years experience and a reputation and a client base. They have a telephone. They need to be able to pick it up.

Eliza: I also remind them when they say that to me, to cast their mind back to when they first started. I’m almost 100% certain they would cold call to build that client base in their area, and to build the reputation they now have.

Maya: Right but like with all things that are painful and difficult in our lives, they’ve wiped it from their memories, right?

Eliza: That’s right. They’ve forgotten. They absolutely have forgotten.

Maya: There are no shortcuts.

Eliza: Right.

Maya: If you’re in a cold calling environment, it’s the phone and real estate is a cold calling environment to get the listing.

Eliza: Yes.

Maya: Eliza, thank you for your time.

Eliza: Thank you, Maya.

Enjoyed the interview? Check out our latest How-To Series. Happy watching!

Sales Myths Episode 5: Anybody can sell

Posted on 8 July 2013 by Maya Saric

Sales Myths: There’s no skill required to sell. Anybody can do it.

Indeed, there are lots of people who have tried to sell and failed miserably. The mutli-level sales organizations of the world would testimony to that. They have thousands of members but less than 1% of those are generating their revenue. It’s a very small percentage of the population. It’s less than 5% if you need to proactively make phone calls and initiate sales conversations.

Find out if you are one of those 5% before you waste your life and oodles of your money learning to sell when it just isn’t you.

Liked our series? Watch more videos: Starting a sales career

Sales Myths Episode 4: Selling is not a real career

Posted on 1 July 2013 by Maya Saric

Selling is not a real career. Indeed, many people do get into it by accident. But, 90% of managing directors having during their career been sales people. Sometimes for a long period of time, sometimes for 4 or 5 years, sometimes for 10 or 15. You cannot lead an organization without understanding how to generate revenue.

Selling is a skill that you can perfect and hone and develop if you have the real capacity. SIP — Sales Inventory Profile will identify that for you. If you’ve got it. You can make it. If you’ve got those attributes, you can then craft a really spectacular long-term sales career and perhaps management career.

Watch Part 5 here.

Sales Myths Episode 3: There’s only one sort of sales person

Posted on 24 June 2013 by Maya Saric

Sales Myth – the myth that there’s only one source of sales person. I have tested 30,000 candidates and I know that that’s NOT true. There are at least 2 types in the simplest definition. There’s the sort that can generate new business and there’s the sort that nurtures the existing client base. It takes totally different skills, perceptions, and style to successfully do those 2 different jobs.

The new businesses go out there into the world as people have to be agile, adaptive, fluid, sometimes they’re spontaneous, sometimes they shoot from their hip but that’s the sort of style they need to be able to work their way through the unknown respond to whatever comes at them with precision and become proactive in the smallest little nuance of opportunity they’re able to move themselves to effectively deal with it.

Account managers are very different. They will be effective when they’ve had plenty of time to think about, strategize, plan, thinking through the details of what does my customer need, where does my customer need to be in a years’ time. How will I help them get there? That is a stay-home-and-think process. If you interchange those jobs or if you interchange the people who have to perform those jobs, you will NOT get the optimal outcome.

You can keep the hunters at home, the new business people at home and make them tend to the crops. You can. They will be willing. They will think. Oh, lovely. I can rest. I will just, you know, have a chat to the existing customers because, you know, I created them probably 3 years ago, they will know me. It would be lovely to catch up with friends and have a bit of a yang. But if you keep your hunters at home, they become lethargic and stroppy and careless because to perform well, they need to stay on their toes and deal with the unpredictable.

You cannot make the farmers go and hunt. They are not able to do that, willing or otherwise. There are lots of times business do telemarketing of promotions for Christmas or something where they think they can get the whole company on the telephones, 5% of the sales force is capable of initiating a sales conversation. 15% are able to continue a conversation. That’s the account managers. So, be really clear if you are hiring people. What you need for this job and be able to identify them.

Sales Inventory Profile is able to identify, to the last degree which sorts of sales person, if at all, your candidate can become.

Bringing your more Sales Myths Videos here with Part 4.

Sales Myth Episode 2: Selling Ice to Eskimos

Posted on 18 June 2013 by Maya Saric

Another sales myth that is the most popular is that if you can sell, you can sell anything.

And a lovely cliché of selling ice to Eskimos. That is also not true.

There are several types of sales people and they perform better if they stick to their marketplace. So, there are people that can generate new business, and we often call them hunters and they have a series of different formal business names. And then, there are those people who can nurture and grow an existing client base, we call them account managers and farmers. They are not the same people.

If you move people between the two jobs, they will fail. The hunters who are agile, adaptive, fluid, capable of dealing with the unknown and that ultimately means people that are new to the business, new to your client base, will get bored and stroppy and lazy if you make them step on and farm. They won’t object though. They’ll agree happily because farming is easier, or it is to them anyway. So they’ll happily say, “Sure. I’ll take over the client base and the prestige of being the account executive,” but they would do a bad job for you.

On the other hand, the strategic long-term precise people who are really good account managers who can sit themselves down and really think about what they need to say and why and how, and prepare the tools that they’re trained, who don’t need to improvise and don’t like doing it. They cannot ___. Not just won’t they willing, they actually can’t. The different mentality. It’s a different skill sets. So, you will waste their skill and capacity if you make them go out and do it. Lots of businesses, when they’re short of cash just get everyone on the phone, let’s all make cold calls including, yes. I’m the managing director. I will sit down because I’m brave and I will do it with you.

Five percent of people are able to do that. Don’t torture and discourage and demoralize your staff by making them do something that they really cannot. It’s not about their willingness. It’s not about them being being diligent.

Find out more by contacting Maya.

Watch Part 3: Answering whether there’s only ONE type of Salesperson?

Sales Myths Episode 1: Willing to sell is able to sell

Posted on 14 June 2013 by Maya Saric

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The Importance of the Herd effect in selling

Posted on 10 June 2013 by Maya Saric

Having started in previous posts to talk about the role of fear and trust in selling, we now introduce two additional concepts; “herd” and “separate”. The Herd response signifies safety in numbers and falls into the trust side of the decision making process as they keep as safe. Much as media use the term “following the herd” as a negative concept it is fundamental to our nature as we as humans are, after all, herd animals.

The alternative to being part of the herd is to be “alone” and “separate”. Being separated is scary for most of us as humans; we only have to see psychology experiments which confine people in rooms to see how much it really affects us. Being alone and separate heights our fear response and subsequently triggers our expectations of danger or death. This heightened anxiety is no state for calmly making commercial buying decisions or splurging out on personal luxuries.

How does this relate to the commercial world? Being part of the “herd” is about staying with the majority, doing the things the majority are doing and definitely buying the things that the majority are buying. There are only a few brave souls who are able to explore uncharted territory, implement unproven technologies or make decisions without regard to the opinions and reactions of their peers. There may be a reasonable number of people showing interest in new products but few will take action and buy them while they are in the minority.

Obviously then, when making sales, you want your prospects to feel the comfort and safety of staying in the “herd” and keep them miles and miles away from this dangerous “alone” and “separate” zone where they associate themselves, or you, with danger during your sales call.

The first issue in the safety of the herd is whether they perceive you to be a trusted member of their herd or an outsider. Do you clearly belong to a herd they expect for the product you represent? Or do you appear as an obvious outsider of their herd or any they want to relate to? Your membership of the herd can be about simple appearances and dress code or it could be about the content of your conversations. Are you making them feel like they belong to a safe herd when they are talking with you? Or are you talking about things that are unknown and are trying to draw them away from what is known and safe?

Making prospects feel safe buying your service or product is easier if your product is well established with many testimonials, great client case studies or endorsements from people they trust and admire. As the old advertising said “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”. Getting fired is definitely a commercially dangerous outcome to be avoided by clients.

However if you’re selling something new to your market, no matter it’s obvious revolutionary benefits you are effectively asking your prospects to make a stance alone by taking the risk of a new product. To achieve the sale you will need to develop much more trust on other issues to compensate for the lost sense of safety being alone in a new market will trigger for them.

Stay tuned for our next installment about what motivates people to make decisions to change their current state including making decisions to buy new products.

The Role of Trust in Overcoming the Fear Filter

Posted on 7 June 2013 by Maya Saric

Continuing on from The Role of Fear in Selling where we looked at how the fear filter works, we continue to discuss the Trust barrier in selling.

To recap, the fear filter separates the Primal brain and its flee or freeze or flight response and the Modern brain with all its logic and rational decision making; it’s the bit that can make or break your deal. Expanding on this, this article introduces you to the critical Trust barrier and how it is the foundation of stable buying decisions.

As we established, the fear filter blocks your prospects from being able to think logically and rationally if there is any risk of harm in your sales processes. Now here’s another thing: the same filter, this same line, can stop data coming down to the primal brain where the ability to make a final decision resides. In short, information and data must pass UP to the Modern Brain and then DOWN again to the Primal brain for any decision to be made, as seen below.

This means that the information you give a customer and the conversation you conduct with a customer has to pass through two filters in order for them to make a decision. We talked about the fight or flight mechanism and the survival instinct.

As we mentioned, data doesn’t go up from the primal brain unless it’s not frightening, and when coming back down, the data will not come down from the modern brain unless it is trustworthy. And now we have the second filtering process – the Trust barrier.

Now say your information gets past the prospects fear filter the first time your prospects are able to make sound, rational and logic decisions thanks to the modern brain. This information must once again come down and pass the trust barrier.

So once again, your prospects are assessing the risk of decision. Will the decision to buy have any negative consequences? If it does then they will not make the purchase; that is, they cannot act on the decision despite having come to it in a logical and methodical way.

To optimise your prospect’s decision process, you need to be really conscious of how to communicate data so that it is absorbed by the logical brain and processed complete enough for them to make a decision that they can confidently act out.

Part of this is the way you explain things but an equal part is knowing their current knowledge and beliefs on this issue. Until you know what they already know and believe you cannot make sure the information you present will make enough sense to them to be trusted as correct and used reliable to make the decision to buy it. If you say something that contradicts their beliefs or they cannot understand completely they will not be able to use your information as part of their rational processes.

Next, we’re going to talk about the data you present to your prospects. Tune in for the next article on how to gain their trust, overcome the fear filter and the trust barrier, and sell your product/service.

More in the series: The Herd Effect and Selling

The Hunter vs. The Farmer

Posted on 31 May 2013 by Maya Saric

In our world, there are a lot more Farmer types than Hunter types. The people that interview and hire you, such as HR Managers, Sales managers, and even some Managing Directors, tend to be Farmers. This means that they are more likely to “buy in” Farmers to their organisation – and if you happen to be a Hunter, it is much harder to come across as someone they would like to hire, and much harder to show them your sales abilities in the interview if the interview is geared towards showing off Farmers’ skills. It’s like trying to show how fast you can swim, when you’re made to fly!

Bottom line: It’s important to know your sales style so you can present yourself well during an interview. If you are a natural new business style salesperson rather than an account manager styles you will most likely be the exact opposite of the people who hire you.

Know how you are coming across to ensure you are really understood and appreciated….and get the job!

All about SIP Recruitment: Why we write your adverts for you?

Posted on 22 May 2013 by Maya Saric

All about SIP recruitment program is that we write the adverts for you. We use your logo, your identity, and we write elaborate detailed adverts that are designed to attract a broader and deeper candidate pool.

So if you are a well recognized international brand, you may be swarmed with candidates. But to find those rare and few sales people who are suited to your job, we need as big a candidate pool as possible. The SIP software means that you only need to relate and to talk to the ones that are an exact match. So the staff who takes care of the majority of the people who are not going to be suited to your selling position, so it’s very time efficient. We attract the candidates. You only interview the small population who are suited to your job.

More videos about SIP: Why you should recruit with SIP

All about SIP Recruitment: Best Sales Recruitment tool in the world!

Posted on 21 May 2013 by Maya Saric

Sales Inventory Profile. I like to call it SIP, is the world’s best recruitment program because at its core is a selling IQ program.

We’ve recruited hundreds of sales people around the country; 70% of those are still in their jobs, 70%! That’s a huge retention rate for sales people. Many industries are averaging 10%. It’s a recruitment system. It has an IQ-based program at its heart that identifies the 75 attributes required to be successful at selling. From these attributes, we are able to detail exactly what’s in a sales person your candidate will become, whether they can cope which is really important to some new business jobs but not all. Whether they are generally a new business or account manager; and whether they have, if they are an account manager, the attention to detail and long term perspective.

We help you with the advertising so that you attract the biggest pool of candidates possible because the number that is really qualified is very small. The program does the short listing. Every candidate who applies to your role has to complete the SIP process, and then you only interview from the shortlist of people who are capable of doing your job.

More on how SIP started: A Lesson in History

All about SIP recruitment: A Brief History of SIP

Posted on 20 May 2013 by Maya Saric

Sales Inventory Profile. Its acronym is SIP and it has been in the market since 2008. The research was conducted in the mid 1990s.

When I was offering sales training, I was going around the world saying, “Let me help your sales team.” “Let me make them do better.” The biggest objection to my sales training was nothing to do with the training or the quality of the content, or its workshop material. The greatest objection I’ve got through the training was the candidates. My customers will tell me over and over again. No matter who we train them with. No matter what program we put them through. They’re not getting better. One of my clients said that he would spend all of his budget on finding out who could sell before he trains them, and that has been my mission since 1994. It is to work out who can sell before you recruit them and then before you train them.

So you got people in a company that might be good at selling, don’t move them across and say you got _____, find out before you move them. If you move people who are currently not in selling to a sales job and they failed, you’ve lost them forever. Nobody wants to go back to their old life, their old job. We’re able to test your current staff and find out if any of them has this heated dominant sales potential and we are definitely able to recruit only amongst that pool of candidates who are able to sell.

More about SIP and the value of recruiting with SIP for your business

Book your January Sales Makeover – Build sustainable growth in 2013

Posted on 19 December 2012 by Maya Saric

If you’re wanting to Grow your Sales team in 2013, we’re offering our selling, coaching and recruiting expertise for a FREE planning session in January.

Making big changes in your life, personally or in business, is one of the hardest things we all face. It’s that time of year and everyone is trying to change for the new year. But achieving sustainable growth alone is near impossible. So don’t let 2013 be yet another year of good intentions.

If what you want to change has anything to do with selling, we can help!

We are experts in building sales results, by improving personal skills, crafting sales strategies and recruiting new members to the team who can sell.

Yep we know how to attract and spot real sales aptitude and then turn that into sales results.

We would like to offer our sales expertise for a free planning meeting to help you change your sales results, personally or for the whole company in 2013.

Ring now on 0407 005 290 or email maya@salesinventoryprofile.com to book your meeting at our Sydney office or by phone.

More info about SIP here

A Brief Guide to Starting a New Residential Real Estate Agent

Posted on 14 November 2012 by Maya Saric

Ensuring the new recruit realises all their inherent capacity without getting demoralised or exhausted before they reach their full potential.

By Maya Saric

Managing Director Corporate Coach Australia P/L | 0407 005 290

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to outline a specific model for how to help and organise a new person entering the world of real estate listing so they can learn the process and make a respectable income towards the end of their first year. The process outlined here may take more than a year considering the nature of the market, their energy and the assistance that an experienced agent is able to give them.

If you have used SIP to recruit your new sales person then they should have the energy and style to succeed; the remaining variable is the quality of the training they receive in their first year.

The method we are proposing here is only one of a number of methods to induct new staff into a residential listing role. However we believe this method has the highest likelihood of success.

Defining a separate territory for the cadet

Define a set of streets that will become the new cadet’s territory and which will be prospected exclusively by the new agent. They will be provided with all office generated leads in this territory within three months of starting and the defined territory will remain the agent’s indefinitely.

Effective territory definitions are very important to creating harmony in a sales office and allow for easier lead dispute resolution. It is best to define your entire geographic area into individual territories of equal worth before hiring additional staff. We suggest defining the worth of each territory by the number of and sale price of the total transactions in the previous year.

If your business has a large enough reach then set each territory at a maximum of 2000 doors. The objective is to have territories that can generate adequate personal income while being small enough for the cadet to engage each household personally every quarter. A territory that is bigger than 2,000 doors – especially in the first 12 months – is not a good idea as it will dilute the agent’s effectiveness and or the territory’s viability.

List street names on a sheet/spreadsheet or copy a map and highlight the boundaries. Be as clear and as specific as possible.

Partnership with an Experienced Agent

The trainee agent needs to be partnered for a planned 12 months minimum with an experienced busy agent who is either the Principal or an experienced agent who is good at listing, but may not be actively prospecting.

Why partner the cadet with the principal?

Principals will have the greatest interest in the development of this person. As principals want this person to succeed as quickly as possible so they will spend the time helping them analyse each situation they have just participated in and plan new activities for the cadet that re-enforce learning. The Principal is also the most willing to have them fly free at the end when they show an interest and the ability to work as an independent agent.

Are they a cadet or a PA?

Having the cadet work as a simple helper or admin support person to the experienced agent will not provide enough exposure to the sales process to allow for effective learning to become a listing agent.

If you have hired an effective listing agent, (i.e. SIP hunter style,) but do not allow them to get stuck into learning the components of their ultimate role quickly they will lose their energy and may leave your business before exhibiting their real capacity. Also people with stronger hunter profiles are not inherently well suited to being in an administrative role and will make mistakes and underperform, further disillusioning themselves and you. You have hired them to become a listing agent and they need to be in that processes as fully and quickly as possible within the effective control of an experienced agent.

When to use an independent coach?

Many principals do not have a strong background as listing agents having come into their owning businesses from property management or commercial real estate. If they were once a listing agent and are now just too busy with the daily running of a large office to go back into a proactive sales role. In this case I recommend you use an external coach so that the cadet has someone to turn to on a daily basis in the first few months.

When to use an experienced agent who is not the principal?

An experienced agent who is not doing enough prospecting is often motivated enough to have a trainee partnered with them, someone who can set up appraisals for them. While they will need to share their commissions with the cadet (see section below) the extra appraisals will still make this attractive.

But this has the drawback of having poor habits rub off on the trainee. It is for this reason that this option is suggested last, if a selling principal or independent sales coach is not available.

The other problem is that an experienced agent may not be interested in the trainee’s long term development, only wanting them to prospect, for more appraisals and thus listings. To overcome this you may hire the new person with the intention of them being a long term partner agent with a cadet style phase so there is no loss to the experienced agent when this person has become effective. The issue then is forming effective long term partnerships.

Finally a busy experienced agent does need a real PA. However putting the cadet in that role will fail to give the experienced agent adequate support and will in turn demoralise the cadet because hunter style cadets are not well suited to administrative work.

How long does this partnership last?

The partnership stands for a minimum of 12 months or until it has listed AND sold a minimum of 10 properties or a minimum of 12 months. This will then have given the new agent two advantages:

The cadet will gain enough experience with variations of appraisals, listing meetings and buyer negotiations to be able to deal alone with the majority of complications that they will face in the market.
Ten examples of their selling capacity to validate their ability to potential vendors in the future (i.e. their name on ten boards and old marketing material samples). This can be critical for them in responding to vendors who want “the local real estate stars to sell their property, not some unknown rookie”. This success with 10 properties in their own territory removes the ‘rookie’ tag!

We don’t suggest a maximum duration. It is acceptable for this partnership to last longer if the two individuals so choose with a title change from cadet program to partner selling, to give the cadet a sense of progression.

First two listings: Who will do each part?

Open for Inspections: Together, i.e. cadet with experienced agent.

First buyer phone follow up after open homes: Cadet only as they are already experienced on the phone. (Ideally within the same day of the open and to a script agreed with the experienced agent).

Private inspections (especially return viewings): Together.

Negotiate close with serious buyer: Experienced agent with cadet listening if possible.

Prospecting

It is very important that you get staff into the habit of doing two hours of prospecting every day from the beginning. There is nothing more important to learn or habit to develop. If staff do not establish this habit early in their career with you it will be near impossible to achieve later.

The first two weeks

The focus of the cadet’s work from the first day is learning how to prospect. Ensure you have a few tested sample scripts, a database and even a professional coach ready for the first week the cadet starts with you.

Go through the sample scripts with the cadet and provide examples of wording in your own style to get them going. Be sure to explain that he or she needs to evolve their own style and to use the sample scripts and your style as starting points.

The first three months

The most important mission in establishing an effective listing agent is to teach them to prospect and develop good work habits for a career in selling.

When to prospect and how much?

Ideally 2 hours on the phone and 2 hours on the road each day.

One of these sessions should be in the morning the other in the afternoon/early evening for summer time, with the review meeting with you and other administrative tasks in between. Be careful not to give the cadet too many administrative tasks to hide inside of.

Letter box drops do not count within this prospecting time so should be done before or after working hours. Doing your own letterbox dropping is a great way to get to know your suburb and see relevant changes but it is not effective for the generation of MA’s which is the priority in the first stage.

Mix up the routine each day of which activity is performed at which time to help the cadet identify a pattern which suits them and gives the best results in their target market. If you are phoning mobile phone numbers, within reason it may not matter what time of the day it is, but you will find better days and times of the day for catching vendors at home for door knocking depending on the demographics and size of your suburb.

How to teach prospecting?

All forms of prospecting feel weird to anyone who has never used them before. Acknowledge this with the cadet in the first week and assure them that with a few weeks practice they will settle into a comfortable groove with one or more of the recommended methods. Within six weeks they will think it’s easy and boring. The boring element remains forever.

Start the cadet off with a few types of prospecting methods only until they develop their own style and you see their strengths. They will have no strengths when they are first starting so they will need to use the same system for six weeks before deciding it doesn’t suit them. The only real definition of which style suits them is the one that gives them the three MA’s or more per week in the least amount of time.

Three prospecting methods

Cold Calling using a public database of property in this territory. Develop a script with them.

Door Knock inside their own territory (See survey style prospecting system from SIP as an example method).

Previous Buyers in this territory or from agents no longer in the business (if no conflict exists with another agent). That is, old open for inspection sheets. How old? The return (chances of locating a listing) on people who were looking in the last six months is more likely (i.e. they haven’t bought and thus sold yet) but any age is possible and it’s a good excuse to establish contact.

How long to stay in prospecting only mode?

The first two weeks are basic training. Then we recommend a minimum of ten weeks or longer if they are not consistently achieving 3 MA’s per week.

We call this 12 week period the “prospect” only stage and it has a different recommended remuneration plan.

Targets

Activity: 50 contact calls (Phone- cold, cold MA’s, old buyers or door knocking) per day.

It is better to state this as a daily target rather than 250 per week. A weekly target looks daunting to some and gives others a sense of their being ‘plenty’ of time

Outcome: Three Marketing Appraisals booked (i.e. time and day agreed with the vendor) per week.

Manage activity Reward outcomes

Set clear KPI’s for activity (see suggestions above) that is realistic for the first few months and reward for over achievement of these. Setting the performance bar low and having over achievement rewards creates a baseline or floor level of activity that is sustainable indefinitely while stating your expectations that you are planning on them to be doing more than this.

Manage their activity on a daily basis starting with a 20 minute formal in person review of their work. After a few weeks you may drop this to a formal sit down review twice a week plus daily ‘quick catch-ups’ ideally in the middle of the day which can be by phone or in person.

What time of day to conduct reviews

We recommend middle of the day, preferably before lunch and definitely before 1 pm. This is for both the formal 20 minute sit together session as well as the two to three minute quick chat. This has several positive effects:

There is less dread to starting the day if yesterday went badly
If the morning is going badly you may be able offer some wisdom to make the process easier for the afternoon, or suggest they change to a different prospecting method
Reassuring them after a few hours of work will give them additional energy for the afternoon

Salary and Commission

First one to three months:

Straight salary at the rate for administrative staff. Do not start cadets from day one on debit/credit as it’s too discouraging when they don’t have the skill to achieve listings. Being on debit credit too early means they are in catch-up mode for many months which reduces their feelings of success for the early sales. Given that positive re-enforcement from success provides the extra energy to achieve more success you do not want cadets feeling defeated by having completed a training phase. Without a training phase they are unlikely to succeed or help with existing listings no matter their suitability.

Prospecting only phase

This is before cadets start attending the MA’s they have generated and is designed to reward them for learning to prospect well. We suggest the admin salary plus a piece based incentive:

$50 for booking MA’s

$100 for MA’s they booked that becomes listings.

$100 for more than 3 MA’s conducted in any week. (‘Conducted’ still counts if the experienced agent fails to attend)

Cadet shadow selling with experienced agent

For the first ten properties sold where the original MA was generated by the cadet in the experience agent’s territory, share available commission 50/50 with the experienced agent.

This is no matter how little work the cadet has done toward closing the listing or the sale. In the first few properties sold, the bulk of the work (after prospecting) is being done by the experienced agent. This ratio should reverse by at least by the fifth property sold.

In the case of other listings in the experienced agent’s territory not initiated by the cadet but where the cadet assists in the sale of the property (i.e. runs the open, manages buyers etc,) the cadet receives 20% of the experienced agent’s commission.

Cadet selling to own territory with help

Where the cadet continues working under the oversight of the experienced agent into the second year, (or for the duration of the partnership,) but is now working in the cadet’s own territory the cadet and experienced agent shall share available commission 50/50.

Where, after 12 months, the cadet begins working independently in their own territory they can choose to return to the 50/50 split with the experienced agent. The cadet and experienced agent may choose to do this irregularly for unique situations where the cadet feels insecure completely alone or for planned absences by either party.

Training Programs for the Registration Certificate

Real Estate Institute of New South Wales http://www.reinsw.com.au/

Real Estate Institute of Queensland http://www.reiq.com.au/

Real Estate Institute of Victoria http://www.reiv.com.au/

Real Estate Institute of South Australia http://www.reisa.com.au/

Real Estate Institute of Tasmania http://www.reit.com.au/

Real Estate Institute of Western Australia http://reiwa.com.au/

Real Estate Institute of Northern Territory http://www.reit.com.au/

Real Estate Institute of Australian Capital Territory http://www.reiact.com.au/

To grab your own PDF version of this Guide:

Click on the link below
You will be redirected to a new page – then, click on the link “Maya’s Guide to Starting a new Cadet Residential Listing Agent-PDF”
Save your PDF copy
Enjoy!

Maya’s Guide to Starting a new Cadet Residential Listing Agent-PDF

SIP Report comparison

Posted on 19 September 2012 by Maya Saric

Can we make Ian Thorpe a football player?

Posted on 7 September 2012 by Maya Saric

What has Ian Thorpe to do with Sales? Well, essentially, we can also ask:

Can a good sales person sell anywhere?

Hello! This is Maya Saric, Sales Psychologist and Inventor of SIP, Sales Inventory Profile.

I’m about to create every video making mistake in the book. I’ve got noise in the background and too much lighting and the sound of the wind on the microphone. Hopefully this will come through well enough that you’ll be able to understand it but I wanted to capture an idea before it was lost and I thought you might appreciate the nice boats in the background if you can indeed see them.

There is a belief that all sales people who are good at selling can sell anything and in any context and often people promote really good account managers to become BDMs or really good BDMs to become account executives and nothing can be further from the truth.

Sales reps are good at, those that are good, are good at particular parts of the sales process or in particular styles of selling because that’s where their attribute match is best so we know from SIP that some people are better at performing new business environments and some are better in account management and we know from SIP and our 4000-5000 existing clients that if you mix them up you get a bad result – you can’t make a farmer hunt and if you do make hunter farm, they get bored and knacky with you.

I’d like to use an analogy about why you can’t make someone who’s good in one field perform well in another. Here is something that’s true, let’s use athletes, really good, high competition World Class athletes.

I’d like to take the swimming group first, high quality world class swimmers, the end talks of the world, have great cardiovascular fitness. Their heart and lung capacity is awesome, and that’s a requirement of a sprint-style sport and swimming is certainly and some distances in swimming more so that others but it’s generally speaking a sprint style sport and you need high cardiovascular heart and lung capacity.

There are lots of other sports that need high cardiovascular lung and heart capacity that are sprint based on land. Let’s use football as one of those, one of my favourite sports or past times is to watch football and if you’ve ever watched a game of football by the end those guys are really sweating and their hearts are raising and you can see that they’re breathing heavily because they’ve done stacks of sprinting in that last 80 minutes. But could we make Ian Thorpe into a football player? No. Despite having that particular aspect in common, the other sport, the football, requires a whole bunch of other skills that are equally important; skills in terms of tactics, ball handling, precision, etc. Tactics that are or components that are not in swimming (even a tiny little bit) and the same is true of sales jobs.

A good sales new business person, BDM, has to have a level of agility and intuition almost about the sorts of information they need to give out in any point in time versus account managers who need to precise, and planned and detailed. If they’re going in to see their clients for the third year in a row or their businesses even if they’re new, they need to know what has happened over those three years and what have been the consequences, what have been the highs and lows and where we’re up to today and what’s next. If they’re whinging it or hoping that their client will give them a tidbit of information that will make the whole story become transparent and capable of closing, they’ll get shot, they’ll get thrown out.

A new business rep has to rely on that ability because they often don’t have the ability to research in any great detail, some ability yes, always some ability, but not in enough detail to be able to predict and ask questions that pinpoint specific issues. They have to have a conversation and they have to ask questions and they have to be prepared to assimilate really quickly on their feet the answers that they’re getting in order to formulate correctly the next set of questions and get better and more precise details from which to close the sale.

I’d like to suggest that if you are good at selling, that you find out why you’re successful and make sure that you use those skills consciously and proactively or if you have a team that’s really good or a team in general, find out what their strengths are and structure your team so that they utilize those strengths to the maximum potential. We could work on fixing their weaknesses but that is such a slow process. The best effect you’ll get, the greatest increase in sales performance you’ll get is by using what you’re good at more often.

So Maya Saric, Sales Psychologist and Inventor of SIP – thanks for your time.

Want to know more about BDMs vs Account Managers?

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…

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 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.

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.

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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.

Emotions in Selling – Part 1

Posted on 15 December 2011 by maya-admin

I have produced a range of training videos entitled “Emotions in Selling”.

You will soon be able to purchase these videos through my online shop, however to get you started on the way to understanding excellence in selling I am giving the first one away free! That’s it, for nothing, gratis, on the house as it were.

So without further ado, here it is.

Loading video…

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 you computer.
Download – Emotions in Selling : Part 1 by Maya Saric here

Are your staff developing trust or creating fear with your clients?

Posted on 11 October 2011 by Maya Saric

Are your staff developing trust or creating fear with your clients? Have you ever wondered why clients DON’T buy from you when the call seemed to be going well?

I have launched my new workshop that is changing the way we sell in Real Estate. It is called Emotions in Selling – Helping clients make strong decisions.

I have developed this content from 25 years of selling having been a sales trainer and Coach for half of that time and from knowledge of how the brain works learned in my degree in Psychology. So the content is clearly anchored in understanding the workings of the mind first then translating that to the specifics of your sales situations.

I’m a bit over trainers who teach how to execute specific actions that have worked for them. Some parts of my training do include specific actions but I believe if you understand the intent of the underlying process you will be able to adapt the action to your own style and execute them well and so get the advertised outcome for yourself. If you just blindly copy others (even if the technique you are copying is absolutely fabulous) you don’t get the same outcomes they did because your situation is never exactly the same.

Content:

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 clients’ thoughts from caterpillars into pythons and how to prevent this so that the caterpillars turn into butterfly’s instead.
Learn how selling your own home is the scariest decision a person may ever make and how to guide them safely through their anxiety to a stable decision to list with you.
We will look at very specific strategies to maximize your message and they way you present it so that your clients are able to process safely through their emotional filter to make effective 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.

I believe this program will up skill the sales effectiveness of the entire office as well as providing more sales energy and focus. I encourage my clients to have all staff in their business sit in on it as everyone in a sales organization participates at some stage with our clients whether they are vendors, buyers, landlords or tenants. Most importantly each client interaction contributes to the reputation of our business and builds trust for our brand.

I’m offering to run a two hour session for just you or your team for just $750 +GST conducted at your office. Call me, Maya, for more info on 0407 005 290

For more articles on Trust in selling, check out our Emotions in Selling (EiS) training series here