Small Business - Maximizing Sales Opportunities - Colin Sprake from MYMSuccess.com
Colin Sprake argues that 85% of a sale comes down to the salesperson's personality, not the product. He emphasizes persistence in follow-up and staying focused on selling and networking instead of chasing new ideas. People make snap judgments about you, so showing up consistently matters more than perfecting your pitch.
Questions this video answers
Approximately 14 times.
Approximately 85% (with the remaining ~15% attributed to knowledge/product).
How many of you in relationships, married, dating, what have you? How do you think you got there? How do you think you got there? Don't say gunpoint. Okay, Presentation. What else? Sales and marketing. How do you think? Of course you got there with sales and marketing. If you believe it or not. Some people say to me, karl, I disagree with you. I'll go, well, I'm not going to say anything. I'll just keep quiet. But the key thing is we got there by sales and marketing. Marketing, who we are, how we speak, what we say. In fact, there's been studies done on this where human beings judge each other in the first three seconds of meeting each other. And you don't even have to meet. Someone will walk in that door, you'll see them, and you'll go, hmm, not my kind of person. And you won't even talk to them. That could be your biggest client. Our judgment takes us out of the game. It's one of the key things in human psychology and sales is if we could stop judgment in human beings, we would talk to a lot more people and we'd get a lot more success in our lives because. Because we judge people. When we walk into the room, you might see somebody at a networking event that I went to one time, there was a lady in a wheelchair, maybe in her 70s. No one spoke to her. I don't believe in judging people. You just walk up and speak to them. If they judge you, that's their choice. I still judge, but I force myself through it to say, thank you for sharing that with me. Talk to my head and walk off and just do what I have to do. I walked up to this lady in the wheelchair. She had three daughters, their own businesses. She introduced them to us. That's the difference between somebody that wants to knows what they're going to do, takes judgment out of their lives, and will meet anybody to grow their business as long as you hang out in the right places. And we'll talk about that as we get into marketing this evening as well. So let's talk a little bit about sales. Let's talk about sales, because all of you now, all of you agree you're in sales. All of us are in sales. How many of you have children? You're in extreme sales and negotiation? 707. Okay. But you can learn from our kids. As much as we say to our kids, they drive us crazy. Our kids are persistent because. Yeah, let's look at that for a second, Deborah. So our kids are persistent. How many times there was a study done recently of how many times a kid will come to you to get what they want, how many times you think they'll come to you until I get what they want? On average, there was a Study done, close 14. 14 times. How many times does an adult go to somebody to get the sale? 52% go, maybe more than once. And then what happens? What happens to us as adults? We get caught up in the whole psychology of things where we say, if I phone people too much, they'll think I'm stalking them. If I phone people too much, how much is bugging them too much? You bug people when you don't have a connection with them. If you have a relationship with somebody, you don't bug them when you contact them. That's your mindset. Your mindset is if you, if you follow up with people too, too regularly, you go and you find people. You go, people going, you're just bugging me. Then you realize maybe you don't have a good connection with them. Maybe you should be doing something differently about how you make connections with people. Does that make sense? Connections are critical. So it's not about how many I say to people. You follow up with people until you get a yes or no answer, until they write to you yes or no in an email. And no means no for today, not no forever. And yes means move on to the next stage. But most people don't follow up until they get a yes or no. Most people make the no up in their own mind and then they give up. How many of you have ever phoned a person, left a message, and they haven't phoned you back and say, oh, they can't be interested? Have you ever done that? How do you know they haven't got the message? We don't. Maybe their kid came home from school or employee that works for them got the message, hit delete, and didn't send it through to you. How do you know they even got the message? How many of you ever phoned somebody and you phoned three or four times, eventually you get hold of them. They go, I'm so sorry. I was out of town for two weeks. It's happened. But what happens after the first phone call? For most people give up. They don't like me. We add a whole bunch of stories into it about who we are. They don't like me, they don't want my product. Maybe I'm too highly priced. My mind just gets in and makes a whole bunch of stories up. But we don't go and ask the client, is this Truth. Really interesting. So that's mindset. Mindset is a huge part of sales. So what part of sales of every sale is you? What do you think? What percentage? 98. 85% of every sale is you. 85%. So what is the 15%? 15% is what I just put down as K, which is your knowledge, product, what have you, or your service, whatever it might be. So 15%, is that so? Here's understanding this. So 85% is used. So if I'm going to buy from Ray, I buy from Ray because I like Ray, not because he has the best product or service. And this is what you have to really understand. So many people want the best product or service or in terms of selling, people want to buy people. People buy from people because they like people. I buy from Christine because I like Christine. But people want to have the best product. We spend hours sitting in our office creating the next widget, the next best system, the next computer program. When you hire people in your office who are going to be in sales, hire them for personality because 85% is personality. They can be the most talented people, but if they can't build a relationship with somebody, you'll fall over. So people said to me, well, how do you hire technical people? Then it was really interesting. I was part of a program up in Port Kells where a company had, was a valve company doing water valves and they sold these water valves and they had 26 qualified engineers selling these water valves. And I said to him, the 27th engineer you hire, why don't you make it a non engineer? Why don't you make it a person who can actually do sales, who's flamboyant, what have you, let them go out and sell. They took the trust and faith in that and that's what they did. Three months later, that person was number one in the whole company. Because here's the thing. When you hire people to do a great, when you hire people for personality to build your business, they can bring in technical people. So when you go out and you meet with somebody. So I meet with Brian and Brian says to me, ask me a question that I might not know because I might not have all the K. All I have to say to him is, Brian, you know what? I don't have the answer for you right now, but let me get back to you in an hour or two. Once I get back to the office. As long as you maintain your honesty and your integrity and you follow up with what you say. If I say I'm going to follow up in an hour or two. It better be half an hour to an hour, not an hour or two. You want to always over deliver, always. So that's one of the key things. As you go out and you build your businesses, don't you know so many people? 85% is you. So that's why people say, well, how many of you go out networking? How many of you would not prefer not to network? Okay, well, here's a, here's the step though. Why do you think I'm such a big fan of networking, getting out and meeting people? Because until you meet people, they don't know who you are unless you do an online business. And that's a completely different discussion. Unless you're 100% online. Okay, but if you have a business that involves people and relationships, you have to go out and meet people. You can sit and have the best product or service and create and keep on creating and be the technician that everyone wants to be. But that doesn't grow your business. A good example was recently on Dragon's Den when they had that freezee cutter. Did anyone see it? This fancy freezee cutter. You grab your freezie out of the freezer, you put it. It's a cutter that's stuck to the refrigerator or the freezer door. You put the freezer in, you crack it on top, it chops the top off and the thing comes out. For a kid. It's safe for a kid to use. Here's the business owner who's a technician. Not a business owner, just a pure technician. And they said to this person presenting at the Dragon's Den, so what, what are you going to do next? How many of you sold? He said, I've sold zero. I've invested a quarter of a million dollars in this thing. It's a piece of plastic with a guillotine in it. You know, nothing more than cutting off the end of a cigar. It's like a long piece of plastic with a cigar cut on it, you know, but safe for kids. And he said, but the saddest part, he said, is wait till you see the next version. How many of you are guilty of that? Spending too much time in your office creating things and not getting out, selling okay, because here's the thing. Can your product or service always be better? All our stuff, all the stuff here can be better. We improve it every single year. But the thing is, I say all entrepreneurs have add another darn distraction. We're like crows. Everything that's bright, shiny, takes us off and we're off running looking for something else to do. If we stayed focused, our businesses. I can promise you this. If you have a goal and you stay focused on that goal and not allow anyone to take your focus unless they are highly profitable in that area themselves and they can give you really good advice, stay focused on that goal. Go get it. You'll be more profitable than you've ever been. Sad part is we lose focus because we do things for two or three months, then we go, well, that didn't work. I'll do something else that's staying focused will get you amazing results. Really, really key. So 85% is you in Sal.
