The Sales Upgrade by Hans J. Van Order

Hello, Book Thinkers family! Today's book tip is going to come from The Sales Upgrade by Hans J. Van Order. The subtitle of this book is Mastering the 7 Rs of Selling. As you can see by this stack of books right here, I've read a ton of sales books over the last 4 or 5 years. I work in a full-time sales position, and I know that the ability to effectively communicate with other people in any area is going to benefit you in the long run. So if you're not a salesperson, I would say stick around check out these lessons. You may be able to implement them into your life. But if you do work in sales, whether you're an entrepreneur, a business owner, or whether you work for somebody else, these lessons are going to apply to your life. So I definitely recommend checking out this book. I know that over the last few years I've learned a lot of very important lessons, but this book right here from the inside cover says that based on the patterns and behaviors of the best-performing professionals, Hans Van Order has modeled, packaged, and explained a successful strategy that can be implemented immediately in any sales environment. And I think that that stands true. Part of what's made me successful in my full-time job over the last handful of years is that I'll read a book like this, which has a lot of very practical things that you can implement immediately, just like it says, and I'll test them out. Auditing your sales process means breaking down each and every area of your sales process and then finding ways to make improvements. Every single little lever that you can tweak or button that you can push that will optimize your sales process will lead you to selling more. And a book like this is fantastic for that. So about halfway through the book, Hans has this great paragraph where he says, step forward. Once you decide to make the transition from being reactive to being more intentional about leading your client through the sales process, You will quickly realize that it's not as easy as it sounds, which is totally true. In order to help you master this concept, I created the STEP model. STEP stands for strategic, timely, explicit, and purposeful. Let me break these down for you. And what I'd like to talk about in detail today is the timely aspect of that. When I read this book, like I said, there were a lot of things that I thought, oh geez, I should be making improvements here or there, or that's a great reframe, I'd love to be more Consultative, or however that word's pronounced. But this part about being timely is something that I didn't even think about before. So, the opening paragraph for timely says, each move you make must be timely. In my experience, timeliness is most frequently violated when we move too soon, which I'm very guilty of. This happens extremely often, which it does. Fortunately, it's usually easy to spot. Here are a few examples. Number 1, we give a recommendation without a reason. Do your research to find reasons and then make your recommendation. It's like shooting yourself in the foot if you don't fully understand your prospect's situation and you're here making recommendations to them. There's nothing worse than not fully understanding the situation and making recommendations blindly. Number 2 says we give a recommendation without a reason. But there are— we give a recommendation with a reason, but the reason was assumed rather than stated by the customer. This is something that people do all of the time. They violate this rule. You make an assumption based on what your prospect has said without fully understanding it, and then you make a recommendation. That's another example of shooting yourself in the foot. The prospect all of a sudden looks at you and says, geez, this is a little bit of a sleazy sales guy. He didn't even ask me this question, yet he assumed that that was my issue. And then shot me a recommendation. He doesn't understand it. He's not credible and he's impatient, and then they're going to walk away. So that's another great lesson there. Number 3 says, we give a great recommendation prior to establishing rapport. Your customers will be much more likely to follow your advice if there is an element of trust. Ask questions that allow you to share and establish your humanity. We all need to show that we can build rapport as a salesperson, because otherwise you're ineffective. People buy from people they like. People buy from people they trust. We all know these lessons. And oftentimes we get really excited when we see a problem, and then we just throw out a recommendation. And maybe that recommendation is great, but if you haven't shown to that prospect that you're a real human sitting behind the telephone or sitting across from them, then you're giving yourself an opportunity to fail as opposed to an opportunity to strengthen that relationship. So that's a really good lesson. Number 4 says we unnecessarily discuss pricing too early in the conversation. I don't know about you, but if you're sticking around at this point, you're probably a salesperson. And for me, I discuss price too early all the time. When I receive an inbound lead and I pick up the phone and answer it, I'll go through qualification questions. But before I get off that call, all of the time people say to me, hey, by the way, what's the price? If you haven't gone through the process of building value, demonstrating your product, talking about your service, and you're willing to throw a price out there, you're doing yourself injustice. It's wrong. You're again, you're shooting yourself in the foot because you need to build value. The value of your product and the price that people are willing to pay for it are very fluid, and they're going to change as you continue throughout the conversation. So hold off as long as you can. Wait to deliver the price and make sure that you've established an incredible amount of value prior to doing so. That's a great lesson and something that I've violated for years and years and years. And then number 5, we skip single or multiple steps in the sales process. And this happens all the time when your prospect looks qualified. They come in, they're asking the right questions, they have a great background, maybe they've used your product or service in the past, and we just, okay, we assume that they don't need anything else. They don't need any of that normal handholding. Holding. This is an opportunity to sell and make some money. So we skip everything, we throw all of our basics to the side, and we forget about all of the fundamentals. And then we go try to close them. We go and try to close them, and that never works out. So Hans writes right here, this jeopardizes the forward momentum of the sales process, creates discomfort, and often feels awkward to the customer. It can also lead to prematurely discussing price before value which is something that we've talked about in this video. So this right here is one detailed example that, that step process with the word timely, that's one detailed example of the many different things that you can learn in this book. There's a lot of wisdom in here. So if you're a salesperson, add this book to your arsenal of weapons. Add this book because it will help you reframe and it will make you more consultative in your sales process. Again, this is another good representation of a solid sales book written by a trooper. Professional, and it's not something that you're going to see as like a 10x rule Grant Cardone buzzword trending everywhere, but it will make drastic improvements to your sales process if you take the time to implement the things that you learn here. So like I said, if you've made it this far, thank you very much. You're probably a seasoned salesperson. You understand a good sales book when you see one. This is one of those. Go out there, read something like this book. If you've read it, let me know what you think. If you haven't, I think you should give it a shot. Let me know in the comment section is something that resonated with you. This is a little bit of a longer review than I typically give, so let me know what you think of that as well. All right, take care. Bye.