Selling All-in-One For Dummies^®

Selling All-in-One For Dummies®

by Tom Hopkins, Dirk Zeller, Ralph R. Roberts with Joe Kraynak, and Michael C. Donaldson, with Meg Schneider

Selling All-in-One For Dummies®

Published by
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Copyright © 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2011945564

ISBN 978-1-118-06593-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-22237-9 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-23629-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-24669-6 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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About the Authors

Tom Hopkins: Tom Hopkins is the epitome of sales success. After starting out as a failure in sales at age 19, he achieved millionaire status by the age of 27. This was accomplished through study, perseverance, and a lot of trial and error. Tom is now chairman of Tom Hopkins International, one of the most prestigious sales-training organizations in the world. Tom’s selling strategies have been proven effective in hundreds of cultures, in all types of economic cycles, and for products ranging from A to Z. Tom has written 15 books, including Selling For Dummies, Sales Prospecting For Dummies, and Sales Closing For Dummies (all published by Wiley), as well as the best-selling How to Master the Art of Selling (Business Plus), which has sold more than 1.6 million copies.

Dirk Zeller: Dirk Zeller, CEO of Sales Champions and Real Estate Champions, is one of the world’s most published authors on success, time management, sales, and productivity. As a speaker and lecturer, he has presented before large audiences on five different continents. His tools, systems, and strategies for success are used in more than 97 different countries worldwide.

Ralph R. Roberts: Ralph R. Roberts’s sales success is legendary. He has been profiled by the Associated Press, CNN, and Time magazine, and was once dubbed by Time “the best selling Realtor® in America.” In addition to being one of the most successful salespeople in America, Ralph is also an experienced mentor, coach, consultant, and author. He has penned several successful books, including Flipping Houses For Dummies and Foreclosure Investing For Dummies (both published by Wiley), Sell It Yourself: Sell Your Home Faster and for More Money Without Using a Broker (Adams Media Corporation), Walk Like a Giant, Sell Like a Madman: America’s #1 Salesman Shows You How To Sell Anything (Collins), 52 Weeks of Sales Success: America’s #1 Salesman Shows You How To Close Every Deal! (Collins), REAL WEALTH by Investing in REAL ESTATE (Prentice Hall), and Protect Yourself from Real Estate and Mortgage Fraud (Kaplan). Although Ralph has many varied skills and interests, his true passion is selling . . . and showing other salespeople how to boost their sales and profits. In Selling All-in-One For Dummies, Ralph reveals the practical sales tips and tricks he’s gathered over the course of his more than 30-year career and challenges you to put them to work for you. To find out more about Ralph Roberts, visit www.ralphroberts.com.

Joe Kraynak: Joe Kraynak is a freelance author who has written and coauthored dozens of books on topics ranging from slam poetry to computer basics. Joe teamed up with Dr. Candida Fink to write his first book in the For Dummies series, Bipolar Disorder For Dummies (Wiley), in which he showcased his talent for translating the complexities of a topic into plain-spoken practical advice. He then teamed up with Ralph R. Roberts to write the ultimate guide to flipping houses, Flipping Houses For Dummies, and delivered an encore performance in Foreclosure Investing For Dummies (both published by Wiley). His other For Dummies titles include Food Allergies For Dummies, Clarinet For Dummies, and Financing Real Estate For Dummies (all published by Wiley). To find out more, visit www.joekraynak.com.

Michael C. Donaldson: Michael C. Donaldson is a founding partner of Berton & Donaldson, a Beverly Hills, California, firm specializing in entertainment and copyright law, with an emphasis on the representation of independent film producers. He is the author of Do It Yourself! Trademarks & Copyrights and Clearance & Copyright — Everything the Filmmaker Needs to Know; he also wrote the introduction to Conversations with Michael Landon. Donaldson earned his law degree in 1967 at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of the Beverly Hills Bar Association (where he was once co-chairman of the Entertainment Section), the Los Angeles County Bar Association, the State Bar of California, and the American Bar Association. He is listed in the current edition of Who’s Who in American Law. He is also a member of the Los Angeles Copyright Society.

Meg Schneider: Meg is an award-winning writer with more than two decades of experience in journalism and public relations. She has authored or coauthored several books, including Stem Cells For Dummies and Business Ethics For Dummies (both published by Wiley). Meg’s journalism honors include awards from the Iowa Associated Press Managing Editors, Women in Communications, the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, Gannett, the New York State Associated Press, and the William Randolph Hearst Foundation. She recently returned to her native Iowa after 16 years on the East Coast.

Dedication

We dedicate this book to you, the reader. May your career in sales be long and fruitful!

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

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Introduction

Welcome to Selling All-in-One For Dummies, your one-stop guide for everything you need to know about selling products and services to businesses and consumers. Because selling is both a science and an art, we don’t stop with the simple nuts-and-bolts information, like how many prospects you need to call to generate the right number of follow-throughs, or what resources you can tap into to gather the information you need, or what kinds of things your sales presentation needs to cover. This book also delves into the art of selling, which is the key difference between good (or even very good) salespeople and great ones.

So, what is the art of selling? It’s people skills. After all, knowing how to get along well with others is a vital skill — especially if your career involves persuading them toward ownership of your ideas, concepts, products, or services. To be successful in sales, you must be able to cooperate, have good listening skills, and be willing to put others’ needs before your own.

If you have in your arsenal the selling skills covered in this book, you’ll have more happiness and satisfaction in all areas of your life, not just in your selling career (although your selling will certainly benefit, too).

About This Book

Selling All-in-One For Dummies can help you get more happiness and contentment out of your life right now by helping you gain more respect, more money, more recognition for the job you do, more agreement from your friends and family, more control in negotiations, and, of course, more sales. Above all, this book is a reference tool, so you don’t have to read it from beginning to end. Instead, you can turn to whatever chapter contains the information you need when you need it.

Each book focuses on a particular topic and is divided into chapters that deal with the various aspects related to that topic. For example,

If you struggle with prospecting in general, you can read any of the chapters in Book II.

If you have a presentation coming up and want to make sure it goes smoothly, head to Book III, Chapter 3.

If you’re looking for a variety of closing techniques, head to Book IV, which is devoted to that topic.

If you have a negotiation coming up and want to bone up on your negotiating skills, look no further than Book V.

If you sell in an industry like biotech or financial services, you can find chapters specific to those, as well as other specialized industries, in Book VI.

To find out how to tap into social media as a way to beef up sales, go to Book VII, Chapter 7.

The point is, you can keep coming back to this book over and over as you need to throughout your selling career.

Conventions Used in This Book

To help you navigate this book, we use the following conventions:

Boldface highlights key words in bulleted lists and key instructions in a numbered list.

New terms and emphasized words appear in italic.

Web addresses appear in monofont. If a web address breaks across two lines of text, no extra spaces or hyphens have been added. Just type in exactly what you see as though the line break doesn’t exist.

We tried to alternate the genders of pronouns used to refer to both salespeople and customers, but we didn’t take out a calculator and tally them up, so rest assured that if you notice an imbalance, it wasn’t intentional.

What You’re Not to Read

Because this book is a reference, you really need to read only what you want to read, which means that you can skip everything else. If you’re in a hurry or are a “just the facts, ma’am” type of person, you can easily identify information that, although interesting and helpful or enlightening, isn’t strictly necessary in order to understand the discussion at hand:

Anything marked by the Anecdote icon

Sidebars, those shaded boxes that you see sprinkled throughout the book

Foolish Assumptions

In putting this book together, we made some assumptions about you:

You’re either already in sales or considering going into sales. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling corporate jets or cookies, the basic selling strategies apply simply because you’re selling to people.

You like people in general and enjoy working with them. In other words, you’re not a hermit or a recluse, you don’t have an extreme case of anthropophobia (fear of people), and you aren’t painfully shy.

You want to be a better salesperson. Whether you’re brand-new to sales and find yourself struggling or you’re an experienced salesperson who already makes a decent living, you’re committed to becoming even better.

You’re interested in learning and willing to experiment and apply the strategies in this book. If you’re not serious about at least trying something new to get different results than you’re getting now, you might as well give this book to someone else. This book contains answers, strategies, and tactics for successfully selling products and services, but they won’t work unless you put them to work.

How This Book Is Organized

Selling All-in-One For Dummies is organized into eight books, each dealing with a particular sales-related topic. Each book is divided into chapters that deal with specific subjects related to that topic. Here’s a quick preview of what to expect from each book in this All-in-One so that you can turn to the one that interests you the most.

Book I: Laying the Foundation for Selling Success

Every industry or business requires that its professionals have a solid foundation. If you want to be a physician, for example, your foundation would be in the anatomy of the human body and its processes. The foundation for electricians is built on the general properties of electricity, wiring, and circuitry.

A solid foundation in sales means understanding the selling cycle and knowing what you need to know about your product or service. Read this book to bone up on (or review) the basics.

Book II: Prospecting for Gold

Very few sales professionals will tell you that prospecting (finding the right buyers for the product or service and selling them on their need for your product or service) is their favorite part of the job. And it may never be your favorite part of the job. But it’s a vital part of the selling cycle, and it’s why we’ve devoted an entire book to it.

To prospect well, you need to know where to look for potential customers and how to approach them. Perhaps even more important, you need to remember that prospecting isn’t about waylaying some poor unsuspecting Joe or Josephine and talking that person into buying whatever you’re selling (an all-too-common perception). Prospecting is all about finding someone who has an actual need that your product or service can really, truly, honestly meet. In this book, you find all the strategies and advice you need to prospect with confidence.

Book III: Turning Prospects into Customers and Clients

Prospecting is just the beginning of a selling cycle. Now you have quite a job in front of you: turning that person into an actual customer or client. Doing so requires a series of steps: qualifying that person (making sure he has a real need for what you’re offering and the authority and resources to make the buying decision), presenting your product or service to him, and addressing any concerns he may have. This book tells you everything you need to know to accomplish each of these tasks in a way that leads you closer to your ultimate goal: the closing.

Book IV: Closing Like a Champ and Getting Referrals

“So, you ready to sign your life away?” is not a good closing strategy. Nor is “Let’s get this thing done” or “That’s all I got. Whadaya think?”

In fact, no matter how beautifully you execute all the other steps in the selling cycle up to this point, if you handle the close poorly or too quickly, you can lose the sale in a heartbeat. Even if you approach the close well, the potential client may still be resistant to making that final decision to invest in your product or service. So, not only do you need to know the best time and the best way to approach a close, but you also need to know multiple closing strategies.

In this book, you find out how to determine the best time to approach the close, specific closing strategies to use depending on the particular scenario, and how to avoid the traps that too many salespeople fall into. This book also includes information on getting referrals, because one of the best times to ask for referrals is at the conclusion of a successful close.

Book V: Negotiating Skills Every Salesperson Should Have

Face it: As a salesperson, you often find yourself in situations where you have to negotiate. But the truth is, many people lack the negotiating skills that could help them be more successful when trying to close a deal. Most people assume that they know a great deal about negotiating because they’ve done it so often, but that isn’t the case. For this reason, this entire book is dedicated to the fundamental skills, the key strategies, and the good advice every person in a negotiation situation should know.

The mission of this book is to help you negotiate from strength. Understanding the structure of every negotiation in which you’re involved transforms you into a confident and successful negotiator. After you’ve mastered the basic skills of negotiating and achieved this position of strength, every tough situation you encounter becomes easier to analyze and conquer.

Book VI: Selling in Specialized and Growing Fields

No matter what you sell, the information, instructions, and advice shared throughout this All-in-One are applicable, but in certain industries, you may need to adapt or refine your approach. If you sell pharmaceuticals, for example, your prospect pool is more targeted than if you sell washing machines. Selling in the biotech industry requires that you be aware of any controversies that may impact your products.

This book provides targeted information for selling in several specialized and growing industries.

Book VII: Becoming a Power Seller

Inside every great salesperson is a power seller just waiting to come out. A power seller is a great salesperson who is a money-generating machine. Becoming that salesperson requires not only having mastered all the components of your profession, but going beyond and thinking creatively about how you can maximize your impact and reach.

This book shows you how to reach the pinnacle of your career. We cover how to exploit change to your advantage; how to expand your influence through self-promotion, personal partnering, and branding; how to use the latest technologies and social media to expand your reach; and more.

Book VIII: The Book of Tens

The short chapters in this book are packed with quick ideas and advice that can help you avoid common mistakes, boost your skills, break your slumps, and more. Go to this book when you need a quick recharge or refresher.

Icons Used in This Book

This book uses icons (those little pictures you see in the margins throughout this book) to draw your attention to specific kinds of helpful and interesting information. Here’s a list of the icons used in this book and what they signify.

This icon points you to stories from top salespeople who’ve been in your shoes and who encountered challenges you’re likely to encounter. Although interesting and illuminating, these personal anecdotes are not strictly necessary reading. Feel free to skip them if you’re in a rush or on a mission.

When you see this icon in the margin, the paragraph next to it contains valuable information on making the sales process easier or faster.

Some things are so important that they bear repeating. So, this icon — like a string tied around your finger — is a friendly reminder of crucial pieces of information and skills you’ll want to commit to memory and use throughout your sales career.

An important part of achieving success is simply eliminating the mistakes. And the information marked by this icon — which highlights those things you want to avoid — helps you do just that.

We live in a global world, and knowing how to accommodate the expectations and traditions in cultures other than your own can help you meet the needs of a broader customer base. To find information that gives you insight and strategies to use when you’re in a culturally diverse environment, look for this icon.

Despite all the more-advanced technology that lets people communicate remotely (think video conferences, social-media platforms, even the no-longer-newfangled capabilities of e-mail), many sales tasks still involve the good old-fashioned telephone. This icon highlights advice on how to make your business calls effective (and keep them legal).

Where to Go from Here

Because this is a reference book, you get to decide where you want to go. If you’re looking for general topics, glance through the table of contents or the index. Or you can simply flip the pages until something catches your eye.

To make the most effective use of the material in this All-in-One, do a little self-analysis to see where you’re the weakest and then go to those areas first. Doing so will bring you the greatest amount of success in the shortest amount of time. Not sure what your weakest area is and don’t want to take any time figuring it out yourself? Then think about this: Studies by Tom Hopkins International have shown that most traditional salespeople lack qualification skills. They waste a lot of time presenting to people who can’t truly make decisions on what they’re selling. So, why not try that topic first? You can find it in Book III, Chapter 2.

Still not sure? Then start at the beginning and read through to the end. We promise you’ll find lots of good information from the very first page to the very last.