Every salesperson struggles with it, and it costs some of us our commissions, our careers and even our families. It keeps us up at night or wakes us at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat. It’s what our sales leaders say we must improve if we want to succeed, and it’s the thing we hate the most. What is this awful, but critical task that every salesperson wrestles with? It’s different salesperson to salesperson, but it does share one trait: It’s the thing we want to do the least, and the thing that we tend to avoid the most. For…

It’s tough to engage prospects in conversations, and even tougher to convince them they need what we’re selling.Yet there are salespeople who seem to have long conversations with every prospect they speak with, and who drive meetings and sales faster than anyone else.After listening to the results of more than 30,000 sales calls, we discovered that the very best salespeople position themselves not as salespeople, but as solution providers. They show up with solutions to problems and ideas to help their prospects reach goals faster.So how do we develop solutions like that for ourselves, without having to spend decades in…

Convincing someone to part with their money is a tough job, but it doesn’t have to be.What makes calling prospects difficult isn’t having a conversation – something each of us do multiple times a day with friends and family – rather, it’s trying to have a conversation while convincing someone to buy something.The best salespeople don’t approach their conversations that way, and neither should you. Instead of focusing on the features of what they sell, top salespeople focus almost entirely on their prospect. This type of prospect-focused outreach creates the types of relationships every salesperson wants and creates the sales…

Getting ahold of decision makers is hard enough, but what’s even harder is having a conversation you thought was going well suddenly go off the rails.There are a lot of reasons a sales conversation can go south, and Bulletproof salespeople don’t ‘hope’ they’ll know what to do when it inevitably happens.Instead of hoping, the very best have a system they know to execute to get the sales call back on track or make the tough decision to end the call themselves. To learn how to nudge a sales call back in the right direction, we sat down with Kevin Vear,…

Salespeople spend a lot of time working towards a prospect saying ‘yes’ to the sale. However, the top sales performers in any industry use a different strategy: They’re always looking for reasons to say ‘no’ to a prospect, and to hear ‘no’ as well. Why would a salesperson purposely elicit the word ‘no’ in a sales conversation? First, it helps eliminate prospects who aren’t a great fit for what you sell. Second, it eliminates good prospects who aren’t ready to buy. Third, and perhaps most powerfully, it reveals the gaps in your sales process that may have been costing you…

We all know it’s easier to sell to someone who’s already a customer, but how many of us are systemizing a sales process that keeps customers for a lifetime? Certain industries like insurance, auto sales and realty depend on customers coming back to them again and again – yet they’re still hoping that they convert customers for a lifetime. No matter what industry you’re selling in or how many products or services you have available, you should be systemizing what you can do throughout the lifecycle of a customer to ensure they see you as a trusted advisor and not…