Your Sales Skills

Now that you have the identity of a top performer and  you have the beliefs of a top performer you also must naturally continually develop and improve the skills of a top performer.

 

Fortunately there are a only a few key skill areas in the art of sales and persuasion that you’ll want to master in order to become a top performer.

 

What stops you from closing more sales?

 

In many cases what is holding you back is one of the key performance areas that relate to selling. No matter what the art, science or area of interest there are always key performance areas.  If you measure your skill in each area then you can implement constant and never ending improvement in each area.

 

The key performance areas for sales are:
  • Prospecting
  • Initial Contact
  • Qualifying
  • Presenting
  • Overcoming Objections
  • Negotiation
  • Closing
  • Asking for Referrals

 

 You can understand anything if you break it down into small enough chunks.  It’s the same with the sales process, you can break down the sales process into 8 main chunks that are listed above.
Wheel of Sales Activity
 

 

1) Rate your self on a scale of 1 to 10 on each of the key skill areas.
  • Prospecting
  • Initial Contact
  • Qualifying
  • Presenting
  • Overcoming Objections
  • Negotiation
  • Closing
  • Asking for Referrals

 

2) Now copy and paste the wheel of sales into a word document and print out the wheel. Take some time to fill in you ratings on the wheel.  How does your sales wheel look?

 

3) Now what if you tried to drive your car with this wheel?

 

Your strength or weakness in any of these key performance capability areas will have a major impact on your income, your life, and your development in sales.

 

If you choose to neglect any of these key performance areas you will pay the price by loosing money month in and month out.  What this means is you will continue to loose money month after month until you improve the key performance area.

 

What this really means is to be successful you’ll want to increase your skills and capabilities every single day because when you do, success is easy.  It’s easy to be successful if you are investing in yourself every single day.  This is how you get the edge in sales!

 

Now that you’ve done this exercise you’ve identified one, possibly multiple areas, that you may want to focus on improving over the next month or quarter.  I’d highly recommend you focus on improving the weakest area.  This weak skill area could be the key to doubling your income this year.

 

I’ll repeat that, the weakest key skill area could be the key to doubling your income this year!!

 

How can you constantly upgrade your capabilities or skills?
Brian Tracy has the philosophy of the golden hour.  The golden hour is your opportunity to focus on increasing your skills for 1 hour of each day by reading books or listening to audio programs on your field or profession.

 

This habit has been proven time and again to transform your abilities and your income. If you take one thing from this blog I’d recommend it be implementing the golden hour.

 

The key here is the idea of CANI or constant and never-ending improvement. This is a core belief I learned about through Tony Robbins and his study of the work of the management guru Edward Deming. Deming’s work had a great deal of influence in Japanese business circles specifically.  And I’ve been greatly influenced by Deming’s work as well.  The Japanese have a word constant and never ending improvement that perhaps you’ve heard of it, Kaizen

 

Kaizen is a belief and a value that will help you skyrocket your skill in any area. And the Golden hour is a specific behavior or habit that you can put into place to achieve Kaizen 365/24/7.

 

How can you learn new skills and techniques rapidly ?

 

I’m a big fan of Tim Ferriss, in his book the 4 Hour Chef he laid out the formula for learning any skill rapidly. 

 

Deconstruction – What are the most important blocks?  In this case we’ve broken down the entire sales process into 8 chunks.

 

Selection – – What is the 20% of the material that will get you 80% of the result?  I’d highly recommend finding someone very good in your weak skill area and asking them what books they would recommend or found valuable in this area.  I own all the books on this list for example.
 

Sequencing – What is the most effective order to learn this key skill area?  As I mentioned before I’d recommend selecting the weakest area to focus on first.

 

Stakes – What psychological and social mechanisms can you setup for not learning to hold you accountable?  A great social mechanism is to tell as many people as you know, what key skill area you are working on and how it’s your goal to improve in this area, they will naturally want to check in and this can provide some added pressure to hold you accountable.

 

Compression – Can I compress the 20% of the material into a one page cheat sheet? These are super helpful, especially if there is something you can have near your desk that reminds you of the 20% that is the most important.

 

Frequency – How often do I need to train to keep this level of skill?  If you don’t use it. You lose it.  How often do you have to train to not loose the increase in this skill area?

 

Encoding –  How do I create mental anchors and tricks to make sure I remember? –  The example DiSSC CaFE for remembering this process is an example of a mental trick or an anchor.

 

 I hope you enjoyed this exercise on how to increase your sales skills, I’d highly recommend actually DOING the EXERCISE and implementing the golden hour.  If you have please share some of your learnings in the comments section below.

 

Now the real question is, how can you implement constant and never-ending improvement or Kaizen into your sales process right now?
Share on FacebookShare on Google+Tweet about this on TwitterShare on LinkedIn

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *