19 Secrets of Exceptional Results Selling (1 of 4)

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today's episode is a first in Magnetic Marketing history, and it's something that you should take note of. Figure out which episode this is and save this episode and the next 3 episodes to your device. Make sure to take note of which episodes these are. In this and the following 3 episodes, we're going to be revealing a training taught by Dan Kennedy. Now this course has been changing businesses and lives for almost 3 decades. And I can tell you that having listened to this multiple times, having had this transcribed and notating every single piece of it, every single secret that you will learn, every single question that Dan Kennedy will be answering, each one can change your business drastically. It already has for thousands of clients. And so as you listen, if you find value in this episode and in this series, definitely check out everything that Dan Kennedy offers in the noBSletter.com. You will see the newsletter and so much value that he provides, and we will take this to the next level for you. But while we have you here, we're gonna be giving you this 4-part series, a course created by Dan Kennedy in 1994, and that is more needed today than ever before. This is the 19 Secrets of Exceptional Results Selling, Part 1. Let's listen in.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what what small business marketing looks like.

Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

We're going to pick Dan's brain and discover his 19 most powerful, most profitable secrets for consistently achieving to truly exceptional results in selling. The sales profession seems to be overrun with quitters. I mean, many companies have gigantic turnover rates in their sales forces. Now I wonder if the answer to that is to hire only a certain type of person. Is there a personality type most likely to succeed in selling? And is predicting success that way valid? Should an individual determine whether or not to get into or stay in sales based on his personality type?

Well, in his book Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman talks at length about consulting with big insurance companies and dealing with their massive turnover problem, trying to plug the hole in the bottom of the bucket. And the industry wisdom has long been that nothing can be done about this. The new representative has some success working his warm market— friends, relatives, and neighbors— And when he runs out of those and has to start cold prospecting, the going gets much tougher and he soon quits. Here's how the MetLife executive described it to the author: Every single day, even the best agent has quite a few people say no, usually a number of them right in a row. So it's easy for the average agent to get discouraged. Once they get discouraged, they take the nos harder and harder. It takes more and more effort for them to get up and make the next call. They put off making that next call. They spend more and more time fiddling around and doing things that keep them away from the telephone and off the road. Their production falls off and they start to think about quitting. Now, the author's answer to all this was, as you suggested, to hire only optimists so that they would be much better equipped to withstand this process of getting no, no, no, no, finally a yes, then No, no, no, no all over again. The insurance industry bit, and many companies use hiring tests designed in part to measure whether an individual is optimistic or pessimistic by nature. And all this is fine, I suppose, as a Band-Aid for the insurance business, but I wonder what happens when they use up all the natural optimists. And won't this experience gradually, insidiously convert optimists to pessimists? Well, I believe in optimism, in understanding the law of averages in selling, and in being able to withstand lots of refusal. But I've also taken a very different approach to the problem. Instead of saying, "Let's hire people who are immune to agony," I've said, "Let's change the entire marketing and sales process to replace the agony with a selling experience that is more pleasant for all parties concerned, salesperson and client." You see, the insurance industry is certainly not alone with this turnover problem, although I do believe the author's diagnosis of the reason for all the turnover is correct. I think the diagnosis is right, the prescription is wrong. Every direct sales business, every telemarketing office, every sales organization and industry has a turnover problem. But let's stick with the insurance industry as our working example. We can take the author's approach and find ways to hire only those people with extraordinary immune systems. The ability to withstand enormous amounts of refusal, rejection, frustration, pain, agony, and days, even weeks, without any success. In other words, we can hire only emotional super beings, or we can continue with the industry's traditional approach of hiring anything that breathes, throwing them all out there, and largely making our living off their first 90 days productivity in their warm markets knowing most will then quit. There we run a perpetual hiring machine and just learn to live with it. Or we can try my approach, changing the entire marketing and sales process so that there is little or no cold prospecting involved, and these salespeople have a lifetime selling experience of talking with and meeting with only prospects who are already predisposed to accepting the sales agent's proposition. Think for a minute about the enormous boom in personals ads. These days, major city daily newspapers have huge personal sections, as do the weekly entertainment newspapers and even some national magazines. Newspapers that wouldn't have carried these ads 10 years ago now have page after page after page of them. The old way of meeting people and obtaining dates was not unlike the insurance agent's experience of cold calling. You go to a bar and cold prospect and suffer enormous amounts of refusal. In that case, some refusal, some real rejection. You could talk to dozens and never click. Probably without understanding all the principles behind it, more and more people began rejecting that process and instead using, although they wouldn't know to call it this, lead generation advertising. They switched from an experience of repetitive failure to one of relatively easy success. Now, instead of approaching 20 people cold in a bar, trying to find one you have something in common with to talk about, you can study 200 ads placed by people describing their preferences and interests, and then call only those you have good reason to believe you can at least have a pleasant conversation with. Or, you can place a descriptive ad describing your interests and preferences, and let people who believe they can fill that bill seek you out. Now, I'm not trying to make a case that meeting through personals is perfect, flawless, or risk or frustration-free. There are many other dynamics at work there that we're not discussing. But just think about and lift out the core concept. What if we could fix it so that the insurance agent never called anyone unless at least it was known that that person had some current expressed interest in a solution the agent had to offer? Or what if we could set it up so people with such a need and interest sought out the agent and asked him for his time, advice, and assistance?

Can you give us an actual real-life example?

Sure. I was consulting with a company that sold a certain type of industrial product. It was important to almost any and every factory. But purchased mostly when a state or a county or city passed some new or updated laws about a certain kind of pollution control. The company ran typical general image ads in all the appropriate magazines, and the reps sat around on the phone cold calling. Their experience was days and days and days of cold calling with lousy results, being screened and blocked, not getting to the right person, playing phone tag, being told not interested, hung up on, and so on. Then every once in an agonizing while, getting through to the right person, getting him interested, then FedExing him literature, then getting him back on the phone, and then maybe making a sale. Actually, at that point, the closing rate was about 1 for 3, and this is a big-ticket sale. But the task of getting there was like climbing up a mountain made of broken glass and rusty nails buck naked. So here's what we did. We switched all the ads to lead generation ads. Now, a lead generation ad has two components identical to personals. They state who should respond and who should not. You know, divorced male seeks single or divorced female, age 22 to 35, no kids, non-smoker. Who is desired and who is not. So these ads now read something like this: A timely, critically important free offer only for CEOs or vice presidents of engineering industrial companies in areas where new or updated pollution control regulations have just passed or are under discussion. If you are the CEO or VP of engineering of a manufacturing company with one or more factories at least $10 million a year in size, located in an area affected by new or pending XYZ-type pollution control regulation, it is extremely important that you get and read this new special report, 17 Facts Industrial Managers Must Know About XYZ-Type Pollution Control. This report features legal precedent case implementation, cost control, and productivity protection information, case histories, and details the 10 most commonly made costly errors in responding to these regulations. Failure to consider this little-known, thoroughly researched information could cost your company hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you fit the above description, this report is yours free of charge, no obligation, on request. Just call— and then the phone number— or fax your business card to— and the report will be sent to you on a 100% confidential, complimentary basis. Please do not respond unless regulatory activity in your area is imminent and you are the decision maker in your organization who must cope with it. Now here's what happened with this strategy. Over a 3-month period of time, the 20 sales reps' life experience changed from 100% outbound cold telephone prospecting and selling to, on the average, 70% of their time taking calls from people who answered the ad, were sent the report, read the report, and then called to ask specific questions of a representative. The closing rate on these calls was also about 1 out of 3, but the company's total sales jumped by nearly 30% because of the obvious dramatic improvement in the productivity of the salespeople. And of equal importance, the rep's entire experience of selling was transformed for the better. Now, this same strategy is explained in my book, by the way, How to Solve All Your Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Problems Fast and Forever. And if you do not If you don't have a copy and would like one, just call my office. So assume that we have this insurance agent who every Monday must make cold calls all day long just to get a few appointments for the rest of the week. He may make 10, 20, even 30 calls without getting to even one yes. Maybe he blanks for the entire day. So instead, Monday morning, he gets his cup of coffee, he sits down at his desk, and promptly at 9:01 AM His phone starts ringing. Each inbound caller, one after the other, has received and read his special report and is now calling to ask a few specific questions. How many of these conversations are going to lead easily to appointments? Well, darn near all of them should.

That's great. Let's change subjects here. Everybody talks about persistence in selling.

Valid? Well, in his book Tough Selling for Tough Times, my friend Murray Raffel quotes an executive from the Philadelphia Life Insurance Company who says when he hears salespeople complain about the economy, the weather, the competition, whatever, he answers, well, it's nothing that 2,000 interviews won't cure. Well, I'll admit this isn't my favorite answer to a slump or any kind of selling problem, but it is a truthful answer. I mean, sometimes you just have to go to work. Years ago, a friend of mine was the wonder boy in a sales force. In 90 days, he'd broken all sorts of records, lit up the world. He could do no wrong. He went on a Hawaiian vacation the company gave him, and when he came back, he made 52 consecutive presentations and struck out 52 times. It's unbelievable. I said to him, well, what are you going to do? He said 53. Sometimes speeding up the pace of failing can get you to success faster. Now, if you don't yet have a proven highly effective presentation, then you have to exhibit persistence by testing one variable after another, one change after another, until you get it to click. If you do have a proven winner, then you stick with it. So sure, persistence, I call it positive stubbornness, is important. On the other hand, you've got to be careful about this. There is a difference between positive stubbornness and stupid stubbornness. Stupid stubbornness is either insisting that you haven't changed anything but results have changed, and that's very rarely true, or it's keeping on doing the same unsuccessful things over and over and over purely out of stubbornness yet expecting different results. So you want to balance persistence with intelligence and with analysis. Last year I had a client tell me, look, I'm running the same ad, I'm sending the same sales letters, I'm saying the same things on the phone, I haven't changed a thing, but my results have gone from great to terrible. Well, it took me nearly an hour of asking questions, poking, probing, going back over the ground until he realized and admitted one change he had made. Change it back, I said, and he did, and his results promptly rebounded. You see, cause and effect rules. If the effect changes, there has to be a cause that can be found and fixed.

Now, I noticed that one of your articles you said salespeople are notorious for knowing too much about their product and products and not enough about their customers. What do you mean by that?

I think it's always interesting to ask business owners and salespeople how much they really know about their customers. Who are they? What kinds of incomes, jobs, hobbies do they have? What makes them tick? What you hope to find is a commonality or two that can somehow help your marketing. In his book Tough Selling for Tough Times, Murray talks about doing a survey of the customers of his own store in discovering that 75% of the customers all listened to the same single radio station. There were 12 radio stations in the area, so picking one to advertise on had been virtually impossible without this clue. In one business-to-business scenario, I was consulting with a company and they were advertising heavily in one of 4 trade journals, but my survey of their customers revealed it to be the least read of the 4. I like to try and determine who your best customers are, where you got them, and then go there to get more of the same. And I'll tell you something else. Very few businesses have the resources to advertise and market to everybody who could use their product or service. And even fewer salespeople have the time or the resources to contact every possible prospect when everybody is a possible prospect. It's just not going to happen. So you need to deliberately choose who you'll ignore and who you'll focus on. One of the best ways to do that is by determining who your best customers or clients are now. Let, let that be your guide. You know, most salespeople are overloaded with product knowledge, and they keep getting more and more. Of course you need to know your product, but not to the point that that's all you know. Product knowledge alone isn't going to make you successful. People knowledge will. Specifically, knowing your prospects so intimately that when you communicate with them, you hit nothing but raw nerves and hot buttons, and they say to themselves, "Has this guy been hiding under my bed or in my office?

This guy really understands what I'm going through." I think more salespeople dislike prospecting than any other aspect of selling.

Why? Well, cold prospecting is a pretty unpleasant way to make a living. I've knocked on my share of doors. I've gone business-to-business cold calling, and I've done even cold telephone soliciting. And I quickly concluded in each instance that it was a pretty stupid way to invest time. Glenn Turner, a vague memory to most these days, but a very famous and controversial multimillionaire of the 1970s with one of his companies called Dare to Be Great. Glenn came up selling sewing machines door-to-door in the Deep South. He talked about going house to house and seeing no peddler signs posted on the front porch posts. So he'd go around back, climb over the fences, and knock on the back door so when challenged he could say, hey, what sign? Well, that's a tough way to make a living. But in various cosmetically different ways, that's how most salespeople exist. They try to sneak, connive, even lie their way past receptionists and secretaries, for example. It's the same as going to the back door so you can claim you didn't see the sign. Well, I'm totally, wholeheartedly opposed to cold prospecting. Let me tell you a story. I'm home alone one weekday. I'm on the phone with a client when somebody starts banging on my front door like a crazy person. A pest. After all, the options of who's going to be at your front door uninvited on a weekday afternoon are pretty limited, and this sounded like a Jehovah's Witness on steroids. So I ignored him, confident that like most pests, if ignored, he'd go away. Which he did, only long enough to go all the way around to the rear of my property climb over a wall, get through the pool area to the rear patio doors directly behind me, and start banging on those doors. Long story short, the reason he's there— my entire backyard is in flames. We've just had our 15th straight day of 115-degree days, and everything but the water in the pool is on fire. And this good Samaritan, who thinks I'm an idiot, which is arguable, is there for that. Suddenly he He goes from being the most annoying pest to the most welcome guest because he's there at just the right time with just the right message. In this case, "I'll work the hose, you call 911." From pest to welcome guest. Well, the reason that prospecting is so arduous and unproductive is that so much time is spent being perceived as an annoying pest, not as a welcome guest. Now, if you honestly don't mind being viewed as a pest and can go through life that way without becoming neurotic, then there are lots of sales jobs out there and you don't need any sophisticated techniques. My preference is to get into the welcome guest category as quickly as possible. Now, unfortunately, we can't arrive very often at precisely the right time with the right message, so we have to use other strategies to still be perceived as the welcome guest. So what's the basic difference between pest and guest? The difference is invitation. The entire selling experience changes when you are there by invitation. Now that hopefully tells you something very important, very big, and very intriguing about what you need to do to transform your selling career. You have to figure out a way to cause prospects to seek you out, call you up, and invite you to come and sell to them. Stop arriving in person or by phone uninvited. And I suggest setting everything else aside until you figure out how to make this happen in your selling situation.

As we're recording this program, the movie The Shadow is hot. The shadow has the power to cloud men's minds. What mental powers are important to the exceptional salesperson?

Well, instead of clouding other men's minds, the top performer in selling has to learn how to strictly control his own mind. So let's look at the issues of focus and concentration. You know, for the sales pro seeking exceptional results, as it is for those seeking the same results in many other fields, the ability to totally control one's own mind set aside all extraneous thoughts and worries, and concentrate exclusively on the task at hand is remarkably important. Everybody has problems, everybody has distractions, and the temptation to let those kinds of things drift in and out of your mind is enormous. I've long been able to compartmentalize things in my mind, put each thing in a compartment of its own, and close the doors shut on all the compartments except the one I need to focus all my energies on at the moment. I believe this discipline accounts for a lot of my personal success in selling. You know, people who work at regular jobs freely wallow in all their personal, family, financial, health, and relationship troubles to the detriment of their job performance, but they get their paychecks anyway. When I step to the stage to sell to a group, I do not have a guaranteed paycheck. And I cannot afford to give even a fleeting thought to anything but selling. If you've ever worked in an office or had a group of employees around you, then you know that most of the continuing conversation has to do with everything happening in everybody's personal lives. Who has marriage problems, family problems, car problems, kid problems? The soap opera dominates. And if an employee has some kind of personal problem, he or she can dramatically suck up the aspirin, wander around in a daze, wring hands, sit at the desk head in hands getting nothing much done, and everybody understands. That's the world of the paycheck earner. Television reinforces that this is the way life is supposed to be. Sitcoms and dramas alike depict people in the work environment mostly dealing with, discussing, and sharing their personal and family problems not doing work. But that's not my world, and it's not your world either if you aspire to exceptional results in selling. I went in front of a group of people the other day and sold $56,000 of my books and cassettes in 60 minutes. The night before, I'd been informed that my mother's condition had worsened and she'd been readmitted to the hospital. I'm wrestling with a long-nagging tax problem, supposedly in good faith negotiation with the IRS, but getting lied to and stabbed in the back, and I'm questioning the competence of my tax advisor. And I could go on. I've got a plate full of problems. But as it gets within an hour of my presentation, I have to lock all that stuff away in its compartments. I have to clear my mind of all that, clear my body of all the related tension and fatigue, and focus. Now we're not alone in this need to focus. The professional athlete has to be able to do this. Those who don't, won't, or can't may have satisfactory careers, but they never achieve superstar status. Tonight, the night that I'm writing this script, is the final game in the 7-game series of the Knicks and the Rockets. They've proven to be evenly matched, equally physical, well-coached teams. Houston's Olajuwon may have a bit more physical strength and youth than Patrick Ewing, but Ewing has more experience and playoff savvy. What tonight will come down to is this: which team, which coach, which key players are more clearly and totally focused on the task at hand versus which are even fleetingly distracted by pain, fatigue, the crowd, the media, personal problems, whatever.

Can all this be broken down into steps, a 1, 2, and 3 strategy?

Yeah, I think so. Step 1 is, I think, the acceptance of this responsibility. The acceptance of the fact that you are different than many in having this responsibility. And not everyone in your life is going to understand this. You'll probably be criticized for it. Some may try to make you feel guilty or insensitive or inhuman for it. And yes, you're going to pay a price for it. It's all easier said than done. Many people who say they want to be exceptional performers are not really willing to do this thing that is so necessary. You are different. You have a very different opportunity than most, and you have a very different performance requirement than most. Step 2 was described by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, the author of Psycho-Cybernetics, as clearing the calculator. He drew the analogy at the time when the handheld portable calculator was brand new and that before you could use the calculator to solve a particular problem, you had to first clear it of all previous calculations, data, and problems. Now with a little calculator, that's easy. You just push the clear button. Regrettably, we don't have a nifty little clear button behind our ears. But as Dr. Maltz pointed out, you may be able to benefit from the repetitively used visualization of clearing the calculator. Seeing the screen cluttered with your concerns and worries, pushing a button behind your ear, and instantly seeing the screen clear. Personally, I sometimes use this little visualization, as well as several others that make the same point, to remind myself of the necessity of clearing my mind. I also go through a little focusing exercise right before every presentation, every selling situation, situation. For the group presentations, I find a quiet place backstage in an empty meeting room in a hallway and pace. I pace, counting the number of steps to match the number of units of product I intend to sell in that particular situation. I give myself a little pep talk, recalling past successes and statistics, and I sell myself on being able to achieve the goal I've set for that presentation. I bounce up and down on the balls of my I do a little exercise to get tension out of the base of my neck, and I ask for energy, confidence, power, control, and concentration. Now all of the details of what I do are not especially important because I do not think you can simply copy what I or what anybody else does. I don't think there is a regimen that works for everybody. I think you have to find your own way, put together your own collection of mental and physical things that combined clear your mind of extraneous thoughts so you can focus on the selling task at hand. Now that I've said all of that, I suppose it sounds silly to some people. Maybe psychobabble-ish or mysticism, and I can understand that. I can hear the grizzled sales veteran saying, "Crap, I don't need to do any of that stuff. If you sell, you sell, and that's it." Well, maybe, but I can assure you that the better a job I do at this clearing of the mind, the better my results are in each selling presentation. You see, selling requires a very high level of mental alertness, remembering every most effective nuance of your presentation, using the best possible voice inflections and body language, sensing and interpreting and responding to the prospect's or audience's reactions. I don't believe you could perform at that level while simultaneously letting distracting thoughts flit in and out of your mind any more than you can achieve peak performance as a mountain climber with a big sack full of rocks, noisy tin cans, and melting ice tied to and dangling from one of your ankles. Step 3 is then immersing yourself into the performance, into the selling, with total concentration. I know one sales pro who gets so into the selling process he is actually oblivious to anything and everything going on around him. He was in a meeting selling to two executives in an office building in Burbank, California this year when an earthquake aftershock hit, severe enough that the other people in that office building quickly rushed out, but he never noticed it, and he so completely held the attention of the two executives that although they later said they had felt it, they gave it only a brief thought and they ignored it too. When the rest of the building employees filed back in about half an hour later, they found the 3 still at work in the conference room. You've got to revel in the art of the sale. You have to be totally involved in the making of the sale. This means, by the way, that if you are selling something you are not really confident of, sold on yourself, interested in and sincerely enthusiastic about, or selling in an environment that you're glad to be a part of, you will not be able to achieve peak performance. And frankly, you should probably think about changing company, product, or clientele. I was asked the other day if I didn't get burnt out with my speaking and platform selling. Well, there are certainly days when I wake up and do not automatically feel like getting it together, getting to the event, and delivering a presentation. And there are certainly days when I think I'd rather be lying on a beach, enjoying lunch in a clubhouse at the racetrack, or doing any number of other things. But all that gets cleared away, and then when I get into the actual selling, believe me, I'm totally 100% there. I'm not on the beach or at the track or anywhere else.

What about neurolinguistic programming? Now that's hot right now, isn't it?

Largely thanks to to the Tony Robbins infomercials that my client, the Guthrie Ranker Corporation, has produced and aired for the past several years, selling over $80 million of Tony's personal power tapes. NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming, has become a huge fad. And the best place to read about it is in Tony's first book, Unlimited Power. But I have to tell you, this is not the brand new technology it's made out to be. One of the all-time best one of the bluntest books ever published on closing sales titled "The Closers" from 1980 talks about mirroring, one of the key NLP techniques. By the way, that book, "The Closers," is very hard to find but worth hunting for. I think it's out of print, so libraries and used bookstores are your best bets. Anyway, there's some of the NLP technique that frankly for me is more distracting than helpful in selling. And some of it I'm not even sure I agree with at all, but the information on mirroring is sound. I think you have to be careful of falling prey to each new fad or idea that comes along, each presenting itself as a miracle breakthrough for salespeople. Keep in mind that in many cases, it's just as Cavett Roberts says, old wine in a new bottle. My own observation is that very few sales professionals have achieved such mastery of the fundamentals that they need to move on to esoteric techniques. I'm told that Vince Lombardi started each season at the first team meeting by holding up a football and saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is a football." This is how he would launch into a pitch for concentration on the fundamentals. You know, we all want the magic pill, and that's worth remembering when you're selling, but something to watch out for in your own behavior. Maker, because there isn't one. A few years ago in football, a new kind of offense called run and shoot was seen by some as the magic pill that could elevate a dog team from the basement to the playoffs. Detroit bought into it more than any other team, but 4 or 5 used it a lot, and none of them got to the big show. Lombardi would have whipped them all with blocking and tackling, blocking and tackling. Several years ago, when Chuck Daly and Brendan Sur were still the coaches at the NBA Detroit Pistons, I sat in on a practice. Now, this is a practice with top pros. They played basketball in high school, college, and in the pros all their lives. And I heard Chuck Daly yelling over and over again, 'Follow your shot! Follow your shot!' Now, that's a basketball fundamental. You don't take a shot and then stand there waiting to see if it goes in or not. Depending on your team's game plan, you either follow the shot in order to get the ball on the rebound if it doesn't go in, or you move into position for defense, but you don't just stand there. But this year, every time I watched an NBA playoff game, I saw guys forgetting this fundamental and costing their teams points. And again, it's my observation that very few sales professionals have achieved such mastery of the fundamentals that they need to look for new, more sophisticated, esoteric ideas or fads for improving their performance.

Now what about the role of positive thinking in selling?

In 1994, the great Dr. Norman Vincent Peale passed away after a long, very productive, contributive life that earned him international respect and the love and admiration of millions of people. Mrs. Peale still occasionally comes and speaks briefly at the large public seminar events where I speak with Zig Ziglar, Peter Loew, and others, and the crowds demonstrate their enormous affection for the Peale's without exception. I share their respect and do not want that misunderstood when I also say that I find that people's confusion about positive thinking leads to a lot of frustration, failure, and unhappiness. These are the people who want to jump down the throat of anybody who acknowledges any law in a plan as, hey, don't talk negative. Well, let me tell you about the positive power of negative preparation. Any smart strategist, a military tactician, a professional coach, a negotiation specialist will tell you that acknowledging and planning for problems and obstacles and having an overall positive attitude is possible and practical. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. I don't know of a more positive, enthusiastic, vibrant guy than my speaking colleague Charlie Tremendous Jones. Nicknamed because whenever anybody asks him how things are, Charlie says, "Tremendous." But Charlie also says, "Plan on your plan going wrong so you have another plan. That's my plan." Well, is he a negative thinker? Can you believe in Murphy's Law and still be a positive thinker? Here's how the sales strategist and tactician answers that. The true positive thinker acknowledges potential and existing negative circumstances and reactions and engineers a plan to overcome them in order to achieve positive results. You see, there's a path to a sale, and along the path there are obstacles— rocks, fallen trees, quicksand, the logical reasons, the fears and doubts, the emotional responses that may prevent a person from buying. Now you can just charge ahead on that path and rely on your wits and your status as a positive thinker to get to the pot of gold at the end. But my preference is to get a scouting report and then prepare. If there's a possibility of a fallen tree being there, it'll be great to have my pocket saw size chainsaw with me. So in structuring a sales presentation, I want to honestly understand and acknowledge the arguable and the actual flaws in our product or service so I can devise the best possible answers and can emphasize the best possible offsetting or compensating advantages. After all, everything in life involves trade-off. There is no perfect person, no perfect No perfect place, no perfect food, no perfect product, no perfect proposition, at least none created by humans. So in planning a sales presentation, I want to anticipate the questions, doubts, fears, objections, and stalls these particular prospects may raise so I'm competently and confidently prepared to respond. Now that doesn't mean you get all worked up over an anticipated knock-down, drag-out battle. If things go well, you want to be able to graciously accept them. But you should have less anxiety, not more, by being prepared for every possible eventuality. Once that's done, once you are so prepared, I then advocate setting it all aside and mentally practicing the perfect presentation. For my speaking engagements, I have what I call my million-dollar sales presentation. Presentation. It's called that because in 1993 and again in 1994, it has sold over $1 million of my products, specifically this year my magnetic marketing system. In developing this presentation, I determined that the main reasons someone who listened would not buy are: number 1, they think it's not for them, for their business; number 2, they think my product is just a book of letters because I show letters in an example. Number 3, they think it's too complicated. Number 4, they think it's too expensive. And number 5, they don't believe the guarantee. So during the presentation, I directly raise and respond to every one of those possible reasons not to buy. This isn't new. The very first group sales presentation I ever used in this field back in 1975 ended with shtick on the blackboard that said, "The only 3 reasons people don't join." I would write each reason on the blackboard, then answer it, including humor to diminish its importance, and as I killed each one, I would boldly cross it out on the blackboard. And after I killed the last one, I erased them all. I don't think you should ever fear their reasons for not buying and never play ostrich. If I stick my head in the sand, I won't see it. If I close my eyes real tight, the boogeyman will go away. Never let your ego tell you there's no good reason to say no to your offer. Use their probable objections as building blocks, not as stumbling blocks.

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