Improve Your Sales Skills The FASTEST (and Best) Way Using This Framework

The answer to this question, the best way to improve your sales skills as fast as humanly possible is incredibly simple, somewhat unpleasant, but it's going to help you bypass getting your teeth kicked in, losing confidence, and feeling miserable at work. So this video was inspired by two camps of people asking me a question. One was owners and managers. Adam, what's the best way, the fastest way to give my sales team the skills and path to success? So when they're out in the field, they're bringing in deals, they're happy, we're happy, everybody wins, they stick around, and we grow a great team. And the other folks are individual sales reps saying, adam, I'm new at this. My company doesn't provide a bunch of training. I'm on my own. I'm applying what I'm learning from your videos and your podcast, but I need some help applying this stuff to kind of bypass the learning curve because I'm tired of getting my teeth kicked in. Well, I'm going to be sharing answers to this right after a quick welcome. And if you're new here, my name is Adam Bensman, the roof strategist. And everything I do here in these videos and on the podcast are designed to help you develop personal sales strategies to smash your income goals. And strategies are great and effective and needed, but to do it, you need strong sales skills. So click that subscribe button the bell so you don't miss a thing. And now let's jump back into answering this question, which is what is the best way to develop and improve your sales skills as fast as humanly possible? It is role play. Yep. I'm not talking about this. That stays in the bedroom. Okay. I am talking about a staged environment that allows you to repeat practice not only on your own with a group. Excuse me, on your own and with a group, but to get feedback. Because the problem. When you're out selling on your own, you only have your two eyes observing what's going on. And it is greatly affected by your own emotions. Your fear, your nervousness, your discomfort, the emotional response of being rejected, and the direct feedback that you're interpreting from your homeowners. So when you have all of this proper feedback, amazing things happen. Just like they did for Bob. Bob was a sales rep who was selling for me and our company. And Bob came from hardwood floor sales. He was one of the kindest, nicest, and most incredibly supportive customer oriented people I have ever worked with. But Bob's sales were very low. So I sat down with Bob and I said, bob, tell me what you're doing in the field, which, by the way, this was one of the biggest mistakes I made in my role as a sales leader in IS I asked him what he was doing. Yeah, you heard me right. Because you know what Bob did? Bob told me all the right things. He says, adam, I'm sitting down. I knocked the door, and we talked with the homeowner. And I said, listen, we're in the neighborhood. We're helping out with storm damage, and if your roof's approved, we'll help file a claim, and we'll get it done for what the insurance says. So I'm sitting there, I'm like, huh? Well, he sounds like he's doing all the right things. And then a few weeks later, I decided to start doing role play with my sales team. And at this point, we had 20 to 30 people, and I wanted to help give them the skills they needed to succeed. So we start this role play. I was miserably uncomfortable. I didn't like it. And I bring them in in Bob's first. So we're in our sales war room, and then our door to supplementing was there. So I get behind that, and he knocks. So it was like real role play. Which, by the way, you don't need the whole door thing. But it was cool. So Bob shows up, does it, and then now I'm Bob. Bob goes, oh, hey there. My name's Bob with so and so contracting. And the reason I'm here is we just are helping folks in the neighborhood get their roof replaced after the big storm. And we'll help you file a claim and then do it for what the insurance says. And my face went white as a ghost because this was nothing like what Bob told me he was saying. In his mind, that's what he was saying. But what I needed to know is how he was saying it. There's what and how the what was right the how way off. And I'm like, okay, this explains some things. So what did it lead to? It led to a very deep, rich conversation to give Bob direct, helpful, and supportive feedback. And what was the result? He had more fun at work. He was more confident, which meant he knocked more doors, which meant he started more conversations, which meant Bob brought home more sales. And it was all through this process of role play. So the important key note to think about is that sales is a miserable state of discomfort until it becomes comfortable. And your job is to get comfortable with discomfort when you are caught your heels and you don't know what to say or you don't Know what to do. And then you bet. And then you. All of a sudden you lost a sale and the homeowner reads your face. This discomfort we need to settle into. We need to be able to settle in to this discomfort with a comfortable confidence, to just be and to know that the silence that we experience is processing as if it's eternity. But in the customer, it's a fraction of a second. It also allows us to develop what I view as the single most important and valuable sales skill, which is your think fast ability. This think fast ability, no one can teach you. No one in fact teaches it. This think fast ability is why you witness certain salespeople be great. It's like they have all of the things already figured out. They're like four or five, six steps ahead of a customer. They're predicting with experience what they could say, what they might say, or what they commonly will say. You've got a series of responses lined up. When you're asked a question you don't know how to answer, you can start to answer it and formulate your thoughts as you're speaking. This think fast ability is a skill set that no book, no training is going to just magically give you. You do it through experience. And that's why role play is so valuable. Because with role play, we get repetition. And I'm not joking, in a matter of weeks or months, you can excel to a level of sales that would take someone an average of two to five years to get to without it because of repetition and feedback and in this video and be teaching you the exact steps to implement role play and some feedback loops to help with learning what you need to learn. So how do we do it? There's a couple options here. Owner sales managers, pay attention. Individual sales reps. You can do it as a team or one on one. If you are doing it one on one, that's a. Okay. Just find someone that you're selling with. Like, if you don't have a big team, you don't have a lot of support. Your husband, your wife, your girlfriend, your partner, your mom, your dad, it doesn't matter. Anyone can do it. And yeah, it's going to be uncomfortable, but that's the whole point is settling into this comfort. So let's talk feedback real quick. And then I'm going to dive into kind of the doing part of the role play. It's very important that when you do this role play, whether you're doing it as a team and there's observers in the field or it's one on one, because it's just you and your partner, you and a sales friend. The first thing you do after end scene is turn to the person who's in the role play, which is you, and say, what did you do great. I want you to tell me. Then you say, oh, what I really like that I did is this, this and this. And then I'm going to ask, what could you have done better? Before we turn, this isn't about beating people down. It's about building you up. Before you get feedback, before I share, before the observers share, I. I want you to tell me, what could you have done better? This is how we develop self awareness and self reflection where we can say, oh, you know what? I realized I couldn't. I didn't have my hands in my pocket. I could have made better eye contact. I should have bladed my stance. I came in too hot with this. I forgot to mention the company name all these things. When you are asked this question, it prompts self reflection. So it becomes habit when you're in the field and that way you're out there, you're like, oh, that's okay. That door didn't go well. Or that sales appointment didn't go well. What could I have done better? This. All right, I'll do it better on the next one. Fresh shot. Door next door. Number two. The next one. So we always ask, what did you do Great. What could you have done better? Then and only then should the observing party be the first to respond. And then should witnesses be there, the other salespeople, they can then speak up. Okay, so it's about building up and developing self awareness to help us in our sales skills. So the first way to do it is to set the stage. So here's some tips. Set the stage. What I mean by set the stage is this. We don't want to jump into like judo black level role play. We want to create a controlled environment. Same thing as if you're a professional athlete or elite military or law enforcement. There's a stage, a scenario that we're going to train for. So how do we apply this to roofing sales? Example. Hey, you're knocking my door. It's nine weeks into the storm and I'm tired of roofers. Stage set. Go. That's the scenario. Here's another one. It's the day of install. You're installing Peggy's roof four doors down. I'm the neighbor. Go. So this is setting the stage. We're giving an environment to help what's going to happen. And this is the best way to dip your toe in the water by developing your roleplay and sales skills abilities. So another tip to do is it's okay to even let them know, like I'll give you this objection, get your feet wet and make it easy so you can get comfortable with it. It's okay, it's practice. That's why we're going to start there. So we want to always start by setting the stage and then we move into the top objections. These objections can be handled for both door to door sales or in a sales appointment. In your closing or presenting. Now, Jeff commented on a video he put together, which was a great idea I'd like to share with you. For his wife to play with roleplay, not in a roleplay, sales, role play 4x6 business cards or note cards rather with all the top objections. So he'd set the stage and then have her shuffle the deck and then pull one out and then that's how she was going to respond so he could practice. So at this point we can get targeted practice overcoming these objections and because every homeowner handles them differently and remember my ARO formula, acknowledge, reassure, overcome. So after that, then we move in to what I'd call the judo black belt level of role play, which is to improvise. Now, when we improvise, we will not tell them what's coming. We will want some parameters. Like this is, you know, you're not going to do our on install day or whatever. You can even leave it up to the salesperson to pick the scenario. But the point is now they're having to literally improvise and adapt on the fly. And then they develop or you will develop your think fast ability because you don't know what's going to happen. You as the person participating in the role play, don't know what me, the dummy homeowner is going to. Sorry, when I say dummy, I don't mean stupid. I mean like practice dummy, get that out of the way. Is going to throw as an Objection. You're the 10th roofie here. Not interested. My insurance was out. So when we learn to improvise, that's where we have fun and we develop the ability. And the main goal from doing this is to practice, practice, practice until it becomes easy. Okay, yes, there's a lot of the words practice here and yes, I promise you it will become easy. Because anytime that you repeat things over and over again, it becomes second nature. And if you can role play in an uncomfortable situation, it feels like acting. If you have a sales Team observing you and giving you feedback, that's some discomfort. You have witnesses. And when you get to a point which happens very quickly, by the way, with practice, where you feel confident in front of that and you're not nervous, no scenario, and I mean this, no scenario in the real world will even remotely come close to the tension that you'll feel in role play. That will be a piece of cake. And that is why role play is the fastest and best way to develop your sales skills and your think fast ability. Now, the other thing I want to give you is this really powerful and inspirational quote, and I wish I remembered who said it, but it's this. You will not rise to the occasion. You will sink to the level of your training. I'm going to repeat, you will not rise to the occasion when you're out in the field selling, knocking the door, saying, I'm going to perform at my best. No, what's going to happen is you're going to sink to that level of your training. So when you practice role play over and over, you develop your think fast ability, your level of training increases and you will knock doors with confidence. You will win more business, you will make more sales, you won't take it personal. And you, you're going to have more fun. And when you're having fun, you're going to bring in more deals. Everybody wins. So now you know exactly what you need to do. Owners, managers, get that weekly sales meeting set. Practice, role play. If you want more and you want to give your team the formula for success, if you want them following my complete closing strategy and my complete sales strategy, they can access all of this and you can access all of it with my sales team plan. There's a link in the video description to learn more. Individual sales reps, don't you worry. You have the skills you need to role play with your company. Bring this to them, show them this video or share it with your partner, your husband, your wife, your girlfriend, another salesperson. The key takeaway is practice makes perfect. And practice, practice, practice until it becomes easy, because it actually will. And you can start doing this right away. Follow the tips in this video and you will close even more. And if you want more. Speaking of more, click here for a free copy of my pitch like a pro roofing sales training video library. And click here to subscribe to the channel so you don't miss a thing. We'll see you soon.