Sell it to me!

Posted on 26 September 2017 by Maya Saric

Is selling something one person ‘does’ to another?

Nothing could be further from the truth. Selling is not a one-way process and without clarity, about what it really is it’s impossible to become very good at it.

I believe selling is a conversation between two or more people at the end of which somebody makes a decision.

Ultimately customers buy from us when they come to a point in their decision process that gives them the confidence to act. That decision journey, if you like, starts firstly with clarity about the need for the item/service based on many factors that have nothing to do with you or your competitors. That intrinsic first level decision is the basis for how urgently they will search for the ultimate item, how much they will pay for it and when they will act.

If all of that occurs privately before they engage with potential suppliers than the salesperson has very little influence over the decision processes and they become nothing more than a talking brochure and price is the only issue left to resolve.

True selling is being part of the fuller journey of bringing that need up from a subconscious idea or unplanned issue to a conscious detailed process. The earlier in that process you are talking with your prospect about all aspects of their actual or possible need the better you can position your offering when it’s time for them to act.

In the Emotions in Selling course, I teach how to conduct these conversations from the earliest stages and how to prospect so you can engage your prospects long before they are actively ‘shopping’. Equally importantly you will learn how, through conversation, you can manage their fear to effectively build trust so that they can confidently complete the transaction and not withdraw or becoming swayed by competitors.

Call 0407 005 290 or email maya@salesinventoryprofile.com to find out more.

5 ways SIP shields you from poor recruitment

Posted on 15 June 2016 by Maya Saric

When we think of poor recruitment outcomes it is easy to imagine the financial loss of salaries, resources and training that having the wrong person in the team will cost the business.

But even interviewing the wrong ones can have a subtle more devastating effect on your business. These are why we recommend everyone who applies for your job or approaches your business should complete a SIP before you make any contact with them.

Don’t waste your own selling time

Never waste a manager’s time reading résumés and interviewing candidates who a low probability of success. Every interview you conduct with the wrong candidates is an hour of productive work lost and potentially a sales hour lost. We are all strapped for time; this is easy to conceptualise but saving your time is just the tip of the iceberg of issues to be avoided.

Never miss a superstar

Selling capable candidates, especially for listing real estate, are incredibly scarce and their lack of industry knowledge means they often appear in disguise, as accountants, nurses, tradesmen, barristers and, the trickiest of all, as school leavers or retirees. LJ Hooker’s first million-dollar agent was a 45-year-old retired nurse and recent migrant who had been passed up by five offices.

What happens to your market when this star does eventually emerge at your competition?

False hope in candidates can destroy your reputation

Building false hope in candidates can have an incredibly long negative impact on your business’s reputation. Candidates who feel they have been shunned at the eleventh hour after a huge build-up can have very long memories and retell their story to hundreds of people. Candidates have invested the time to come for an interview, (maybe taken time off work and lost a day’s pay), dressed up (bought something special, maybe the entire outfit), researched your business, rehearsed their answers and then had a great interview. That is a lot of personal investment to turn against you.

It’s also a much deeper, more personal rejection than if they didn’t meet one of the ‘standard’ criteria at the very beginning, like completing the SIP in the privacy and convenience of their own home. People apply to tens, if not hundreds of jobs, each year and completing a SIP will just fall into the mill of many uneventful hours of job hunting. Getting an interview and feeling it went well is something significantly different.

Is it too late to contradict yourself?

No one likes it when the video referee overturns the on-field decisions. When you have met someone who is really keen on your role; who interviewed well enough to be seriously considered, any warnings provided by SIP afterwards may be too hard to accept. At this point, if SIP contradicts your judgement it is often too late emotionally to turn back from the candidate. But their SIP results will linger between you like a little black rain cloud threatening the relationship from day one.

Setting candidates up for a lifetime of failure

Finally, when you interview and worse still recruit someone who does not make it; you can have an irreversible impact on their entire life. Candidates come to you with their careers, if not their hearts, in their hands, trusting that if they work hard this will be the beginning of a fabulous stage in their career. Hopefully the beginning of greater wealth for themselves and their families.

But if they don’t have enough of the core capacity to sell, no matter how hard they work, no matter how genuine they are, they will become a statistic; one of the 90% of candidates who fail and leave the industry within two years. They leave you feeling lousy, maybe even angry, having wasted their precious time and now uncertain of their next step, with the flow on effects in their family life that no-one can foresee when they could have gone on to find a job to be good at.

The industry is littered with the walking dead, sales staff who have spent years, decades even, barely breaking even. People, who have moved offices countless times, fixated on self-improvement, read every new sales book, attended every seminar, spending hours listening to audio files and then berate themselves for not being focused/motivated/something enough and believing when they just get the ‘right’ mental attitude their career will rocket them to success.

Is it time for a better way?

To find out how using SIP as your in-house recruitment specialist can give you 90% accuracy:

call +61 407 005 290 or

email maya@salesinventoryprofile

Greatness is a team act

Posted on 25 June 2014 by Maya Saric

“We are, each of us, angels with only one wing, and we can only fly embracing each other.” – Luciano Decrescenzo

Like me Luciano must have believed it is too hard to achieve greatness alone. The focus on the individual genius in business, the push for a ‘personal brand’ takes us further from the reason humans have become the dominant species on the plant: our strength is in our ability to co-operate.

Co-operation is our greatest strength. Whether that be physical co-operation (circling the wagons) for our safety or intellectual co-operation, sharing medical research, we get better outcomes when we work together. When we are isolated we do less work which means we achieve little, as we preserve our energy to survive till help arrives.

Humans have very complex social structures underlying our survival and quest for greatness. Co-operation not competition brings out our best. The smallest workable unit is the couple, then a family of three, to villages and then tribes. Where do you belong?

About Lucian o Decrescenzo

Luciano Decrescenzo, the Italian writer, filmmaker, and intellectual, has published 28 books on subjects ranging from Greek philosophy to his own childhood in Naples. He was born in 1928 and worked as an engineer for IBM for several years before turning to philosophy and writing. He has also directed, written, and starred in a number of Italian language films and received honorary Athenian citizenship in 1994.

Einstein’s Theory of Selling

Posted on 24 August 2012 by Maya Saric

I love this quote from Einstein:

Everything is Energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not Philosophy. This is Physics.

Long before he and many other Physics Scientists proved this to be the truth and said so in public, we have known this to be intrinsically true because…well it is true. It has become part of our consciousness long before anybody was able to articulate it quite so elegantly.

We know it as affinity or being able to relate to each other and being on each other’s wavelength. If you’re on somebody’s wavelength, you’re intuitively able to connect with them and understand them. There are lots of great phrases from the past such as “Walk a mile in my shoes” that tell us it’s important to be in sync with somebody.

How does this relate to selling?

Certainly, there is a very special definitive level of energy required for people to make purchases and sales buying decisions. A Sales person needs to be able to bring a prospect to that level of energy first before they start to close or for the prospect to be confident to buy. If a customer is confident and clear about what they’re doing then they will proceed with the sale and make a decision without having second thoughts and withdrawing later.

But if your prospect is confused, fearful and anxious or just nervous, they will resist making any decisions. If you, the sales person is able to force a decision in that moment, maybe because of some extraordinary technique or external circumstances are forcing them to act faster than their abilities to confidently choose, that decision will be unstable. That customer will withdraw from the sale as soon as the circumstance, or the sales person, has changed. This is why many legal contracts now have a seven day ‘cooling off’ period.

In order to bring a customer to a level of confidence and clarity, there are lots of great sales processes to be followed. But any salesperson who attempts to close a prospect where that particular clarity or energy level isn’t present will in fact be creating more grief than it’s worth for themselves.

Using Einstein’s Theory of Energy, selling then becomes a process of ‘energy matching’ starting with recognition of the prospect’s level of certainty or uncertainty at the start of the sales conversation and effectively leading the client to the confident energy state required for buying. As Einstein said, when you help your client “match the frequency of the reality (confidence) you want and you cannot help but get that reality (sale).”

Considering a career in sales?

You must read this article and check out what Eliza, our sales team member has to say about changing from being a Business Analyst to a Business Development Manager

21ST Century Sales – Can you increase the chances of employing people who can actually Sell?

Posted on 22 August 2012 by Lesley MacKenzie

Q: WHAT IS THE QUESTION THAT AFFECTS PROFITS AND IS ONE OF THE TOP ISSUES FACING BUSINESS OWNERS TODAY?

A: HOW CAN I HIRE SALES PEOPLE WHO WILL NOT FAIL WITHIN THEIR FIRST YEAR.

Today there are normally two ways of looking for staff, either by advertising yourself or using a recruitment company/employment agency. There is always the “friend of a friend” method of recruiting but the rules for engaging any member of staff should apply in all three cases. A typical scenario when searching for new sales staff (in fact any staff) is figuring out the need for hiring someone new, writing an advert which is placed in the local paper or online and waiting for responses. Alternatively you ring an agency which takes down information about what you are looking for in an employee and they go off and look for someone for you. All this takes time and effort on your part. Some of this is essential as a precursor to hiring; some is not.

Starting off with a rough idea of what you are looking for in the needed position, you write a job description and then make several attempts to write an advert which will attract the right “caliber” of applicant.

Let’s take Real Estate as an example. A typical advert for a real estate sales person looks like this:

Real Estate Sales

Are you passionate about real estate?
Are you self motivated, well presented and reliable?
Are you a good communicator?
Do you want to be respected and appreciated?
Do you want to be part of a team?
Do you want great sales support?
Would you like to pay NO franchise fees?

Applications come flooding in! They say things like “five years selling software”, “highly motivated and a self starter”, “a degree in Computer Science”, “retail selling experience”!

You think this is great until you have to start creating a shortlist of people you may be interested in. You don’t have time to go through them all, but what choice do you have? Maybe you should have hired a professional after all?

So, what does reading all those CV’s tell you?

They’re often not independent, objective and possibly incomplete
They describe what someone thinks you should know
Maybe it’s been polished by a recruitment company
It’s what they did in the past. It’s not about what they can do in the future
NONE of it means they can and will sell real estate
It’s boring and it’s wasting your time!
They can’t validate an individual’s potential. At best they contain clues that require interpretation
If a candidate has no previous selling experience just what is it in their résumé that will identify their selling potential?
If you have a great quantity of them you will spend huge amounts of time reading and studying information that is often of marginal value

Conclusion: RÉSUMÉS Drive Poor Recruitment Practices!

Having spent all that time and money trying to hire someone yourself you decide to use the services of an expert. So you spend even more time going through yellow pages or word of mouth to find a suitable recruitment company that says they will do it all for you. I know from personal experience (on both sides of the fence) this is not always the case! There are many excellent recruitment companies around (I’ve worked in at least four myself) but psychometric testing is not always used and if it is, it’s used as a last check rather than a way of creating the shortlist.

First of all they will want to clarify in their minds exactly what you need. They will develop an advert to attract the most suitable candidates for the role, a unique marketing campaign is created and appropriate candidates targeted. Typically, a tailored marketing campaign can involve a range of specialist services such as:

Database Targeting
Online & Print Advertising
Media & Strategy
Candidate Referral Program
Head Hunting—Strategic Roles

Then they qualify; drawing upon a broad list of potential candidates. The recruitment consultant will then conduct telephone interviews that will consist of qualifying questions designed to indicate suitability for the position.

Then they justify—up to around 8-10 appropriately skilled candidates will be shortlisted for face-to-face interviews. Alternatively, overseas or interstate candidates will be extensively interviewed by phone or video conferencing sessions.

Then they verify—a complete background check will be conducted on the most highly rated candidates to confirm their qualifications and professional work history, as well as clarification of residency status and criminal history.

Then we have simplify—a shortlist of 2-3 highly suitable candidates will then be submitted to the client for the purposes of the formal interview process.

Next comes satisfy—should a candidate meet with your expectations and an offer of employment is made (subject to references), the recruitment consultant will conduct two final reference checks and submit the results to you.

Almost finished—the employment offer is confirmed in conjunction with the candidate’s acceptance. As the contract of employment is finalized, the candidate is prepared for the resignation process.

Finally—an appraisal with yourself and the successful candidate is conducted 6 weeks into the probation period to determine success.

Phew!

Question: What’s wrong with all this information?

Answer: Everything!

The failure of a high percentage of new start sales people in the first six months is alarming. This failure can cost you, the business owner, up to $20,000 dollars in direct or indirect expenses like training, printing etc for each unsuitable candidate chosen and then there’s the lost sales opportunities! It all adds up when you think about it in these terms.

Even worse, reading résumés can mean throwing away the sales stars of tomorrow because their résumés are poor, or don’t have the right clues, or maybe (and here’s the big one) there’s nothing in their past worth putting in a résumé. We all know great real estate sales people whose past gave NO clue to their future sales potential!

There is an easy solution to this problem!

Using a specialized psychometric testing process which is done before you even get to see résumés allows you to go about the business of making money without the frustrations associated with hiring new employees.

Emotionally engaging advertising will attract candidates to your company.
The advert drives candidates to the testing website so the first result of this is that you see if the candidate is motivated enough to complete the registration and then complete the test.
Candidates must complete tests taking up to forty five minutes.
Only candidates who really want your job will complete this process.
You end up with reports based on automated, online, multi-search functions; sorted firstly by their SCORE!
No need to read dozens of RÉSUMÉS, or go by “gut feeling” and first impressions!
You manage and select candidates easily and decisively online, so personalities don’t come into it.
You find people who can sell based on their score, nothing more!

You can then read the CV and set up interviews with people you know are able to sell, fit in with the management style for your organization and feel confident about the choices you make as they are based on extensive research and backed up by results.

The bottom line is that specialized psychometric testing undergone right at the beginning of the recruitment process saves you time, money, frustration and ultimately gives you sales people who can sell and who will achieve BETTER SALES RESULTS.

PLEASE STOP READING RÉSUMÉS—THEY ARE BAD FOR YOUR BUSINESS!

Author: Lesley MacKenzie

WHO CAN SELL? Find out by emailing lesley@salesinventoryprofile.com

Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives—William James US Pragmatist philosopher & psychologist (1842 – 1910)

Maya Saric – The Sales Psychologist

The Sales Psychologist

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