Do you want to sell more successfully using an honorable and straightforward approach? Read these thirteen sales tips to help you be perceived as a trusted sales professional by buyers. Incorporating these sales tips into your selling process will differentiate you from the rest and help you sell more successfully.

1. Attitude can be everything. It is important to remember that your attitudes drive all actions and these actions are perceived by buyers as trust-building or trust-breaking. The most important change you can make to sell more successfully is to adopt and reinforce attitudes that will lead to actions resulting in greater levels of trust. Conversely, it is just as important to “lose the attitudes” that result in actions that are trust-breaking.
2. Truly believe in the product or service and company for which you sell. This is a really difficult hurdle for most sellers who strongly believe in straightforward selling. If you don’t believe your products or services will benefit your buyers, then you will constantly be in conflict with yourself during the sales process. If selling using a straightforward platform is truly important to you, it might be necessary for you to find another product or service you will better represent to truly be successful using this approach.
3. Intimately know the product or service and environment in which you sell. Do you need to be an expert? Maybe not. But it can only benefit your customer to know as much as possible so you can identify if your product or service can best meet their needs. A significant aspect of building trust with your buying counterparts is quickly establishing credibility. First and foremost, you should know much more about your products and services – as well as your competitors’ products and services – than your prospects. Secondly, you should know your customers’ organization and industry and the unique challenges and issues they face better than any of your competitors. Lastly, “I don’t know” is a very appropriate answer when that is, indeed, the case. If you’re new to a market, letting your potential customers know that up-front will help lower their expectations and make you feel more comfortable when giving “I don’t know” as an answer. When you use this response, however, make sure you offer to find out the answer in a specified timeframe, and then be sure to keep that promise.
4. Live within your means. It’s simple. Don’t force yourself into a position where you “have to make the sale” or you lose something. For one, prospects don’t like to feel like you are desperate for business. Secondly, if you want to sell using an honorable approach, it’s important to reduce the risk/reward for a given sales situation. If you typically make only three to five sales per year and find yourself in serious debt, don’t you think there’s a definite likelihood that you might “stretch your value structure” a bit to make sure you win the sale so that your debt can be reduced?
5. Focus on helping the prospect rather than making the sale. If all you’re thinking about is making the sale, this will be perceived negatively by your prospect through your actions. It doesn’t mean you should never think about the sale, it simply means that you need to focus on the prospect’s needs first and foremost.
6. View yourself as an advisor. This is a different mindset that may be foreign to a lot of salespeople. If you adopt the mindset that you’re an advisor with the primary goal of identifying and fulfilling your potential customers needs, your attitudes and actions will be perceived very differently by your counterpart(s) than if your view yourself as a sales rep needing to “overcome the obstacles” and “close the sale.”
7. Focus on the long-term. Admittedly, this is difficult. Most salespeople are used to the frequent calls from sales managers reminding them that “we’ve got to make our monthly or quarterly targets.” If you can adopt this attitude, though, you will likely see higher sales, both short-term and long-term. Buyers hate to be “closed.” If you take a short-term mentality, there’s a high likelihood that buyers will perceive you as trying to close them – this is trust-breaking and your sales will likely suffer in the short AND long-term.
8. Some business is not worth pursuing. Most sales managers probably hate this one. It’s important, though, to be realistic about each sales opportunity. You’re not going to win every sale, so why work under the assumption that you will? Oftentimes, there are many early indicators that will lead you to believe that there’s a low probability for making the sale. If that’s the case, move on and spend your limited time and energy on opportunities where there’s a higher probability for success.
9. Tell the prospect if your product or service will not meet their needs. Once you’ve had a reasonable opportunity to ask the appropriate questions, you must be willing to let the prospect know, as soon as possible, if your product or service will not meet their needs. This will result in a more efficient buy/sell process and save both you and the prospect valuable time that could be better spent elsewhere. The prospect will respect and probably trust you more for selling in this manner, and very well may purchase or recommend someone else to purchase from you in the future.
10. Ask questions, listen, and take notes. Entire books have been written on this subject. Prior to every prospect meeting, you should already have a list of at least one dozen questions to ask. The prospect’s response to each of these questions should oftentimes be followed by one to three additional questions to drill down to the true issues and needs. Always take notes. This will show the prospect that you’re truly listening. Also, send your typed notes to the prospect and ask them to review to ensure that you did indeed “get it right.”
11. Follow the 80/20 Rule. When meeting with a potential buyer, you should try to talk 20% of the time and allow them to talk 80% of the time – a lot of salespeople and sales managers get this one confused.
12. Be direct. Answer buyer questions directly. Why do you think there is such a loss in the public’s trust with politicians? How often do they provide a direct answer to a question? Rarely. Just because most politicians set a poor example, doesn’t mean you should.
13. No “closing.” One of the worst things you can do as a salesperson is to spend a lot of time and effort building trust with a prospect, only to destroy your “trust factor” towards the end of a complex sales process. No buyer likes to feel they’re being manipulated or “closed.” Make a recommendation, preferably with several options for the prospect to consider, and ask them to identify the next steps with a timeline. Tell them you’d really appreciate their business and ask what next steps you can take that will be helpful to them.

Robert Reed is a consultant, speaker and president of TrustBuild. TrustBuild offers the Trust Seal Program to identify and differentiate trustworthy sales professionals from traditional competitors. Sealholders are provided with easy-to-use tools and information to help them break through the buyer “trust barrier” to gain a competitive edge and win more sales. Visit TrustBuild.com to learn more about the Trust Seal Program for trustworthy sales professionals.

All right one is looking for a different method to relish in your snow holidays? One is fed up of the the routine, the skiing lift then snowboard down the red run that every one is doing? You need to try out heli-skiing. You are able to snowboard untouched skiing areas that barely any other people have an opportunity to snowboard.

But what is heliskiing? Heli-skiing is skiing, simply instead of catching a ski lift to climb up to the top of the mountain, you catch a chopper. Heli boarding offers fresh fresh fields for your skiing fun.

Normally heli skiing trips demand a little grouping of adventurers steered by a knowledgeable ski guide who has first hand experience of the terrain. Skiers are ferried to the summit of the mountain to be At the top they get out of the helicopter and snowboard to the end of the slope. On reaching the bottom they’re greeted by the whirlybird to make another descent. You might enjoy four trips during the day. It is a fun and invigorating trip during which you will see view vistas and experience ventures few others can just aspire to. Heli skiing is not without dangers. Since you are skiing away from normal ski pistes there can sometimes be unknown risks. You will likewise encounter a bigger chance of avalanches. Luckily a lot of these dangers can be decreased when one goes heli boarding with a seasoned ski guide who recognises the mountain extremely well. If you are booking a luxury catered chalet then the chalet staff should be able to arrange heliboarding for you.

We’ve all heard the saying that “talk is cheap.” In fact we’ve heard it so often it’s become a cliché. Like most cliché’s the law of familiarity has set in and keeps us from actually absorbing the true meaning of the phrase. We’ve grown so tired of hearing it that we don’t really listen to it anymore. The fact remains that talk is cheap. It is easy to talk about things and most people do. In fact most people “talk a great game” on a regular basis. The difference in people, however, is not in what they say they will do but in what they actually do.

We don’t really judge people by what they say but rather by what they do. We judge people by their behaviour and by their actions. The reason for this is that deep down inside we all know that words have no real power to create anything in itself. It is only when the words are backed up by action that you have the power to create any real results. The ironic thing is that although most of us know this we get caught up in accumulating knowledge. We learn something and get really interested in the results we think the information can produce for us. In pursuing the results, we often confuse it with getting more information so we end up gathering and accumulation tons of information and knowledge without producing the result we wanted in the first place.

The proper fruit of knowledge is action. It is true that gaining knowledge can make us feel more capable but knowledge in itself will not produce the results we really desire. One of the biggest myths that is prevalent in the information age is the notion that knowledge is power. Knowledge is not power. It is only potential power. What you do with what you know is where the real power is. The difference in people comes in what they have done differently from someone else with the same information. The reality of the world we live in is that information on almost anything is freely available to anyone, quite literally at the push of a button.

Even though you have all the information at your fingertips, still, the most valuable resource you have to create results in your life is your ability to take action. An action always produces a result. When you take action you bring an idea into effect and you use your will to do something to achieve a specific purpose. When you do this you actually create in the true sense of the word as you turn an idea into reality; you express something that was internal on the outside. Every action is a cause set in motion and for every cause there is an effect and it is the effects or results that we are all really interested in. You don’t want to know that you can be wealthy. You want to experience it by seeing and touching it and the real satisfaction comes from turning your ideas into reality.

There is a big difference between knowing what to do and doing what you know. Most people know what to do to be able to make their lives work but knowing just isn’t enough – we must act and use what we know. Something intangible happens when you take action on an idea. You set in motion a series of events, events that you don’t always know the full consequences of. Like throwing a stone in a pond, the ripple effect of the water affects the whole pond and moves everything that is in or on the pond. This illustrates how a single action can have a significant impact even if you aren’t always aware of it. On a more practical and tangible level you start getting feedback from your actions and you learn things that you can only learn as a result of your actions. These are things you simply cannot learn from merely listening to others or reading books.

Think of your knowledge and ideas as an elastic band. It has the ability to be stretched, but until and unless you stretch it you are not using it for its real purpose. Information is usually something external. When you learn it you transform it into knowledge and when you act on it, it becomes part of your life. To truly experience anything in life you must take action. Knowing simply isn’t enough. We all want to feel and this only comes from engaging “all of you” – by engaging all of your senses to experience the fullness of life in all its abundance.

It doesn’t take many ideas to change something in your life. Neither does it take a complicated idea. It takes ideas that you can use and act upon to give you what you really want. Rarely is it the information or ideas that you really want as it is almost always only the means to an end. What you truly want is results and this will only come from using what you know. Don’t get caught in the flood of information and knowledge. Start to focus your mind on action and on applying ideas instead of accumulating them. Slowly feed yourself more information and knowledge, but let your actions be your ultimate guide. After all it is not what you say you will do but what you actually do that will determine the quality of your life and what you achieve or fail to achieve.

Deon Du Plessis is the creator of A Course of Action, a FREE e-Course designed to empower you to break through your limitations, Take Action and transform your ideas into reality. Visit The Self Improvement Gym for more self improvement and personal development insights and resources.

I have a small plaque on my desk that has three words in tall bold black letters: NEVER TOLERATE EXCUSES. It’s an angry looking sign, and it should be – because once you allow yourself to get in the habit of tolerating excuses, it’s all over.

I’m not talking about the excuses other people give us. You can’t control their behavior, so don’t even worry about it. I’m talking about you and me, and the excuses we give ourselves for why we aren’t taking the actions we know we should be. We even have a special name for these excuses, so we’ll feel better about making them: we call them “reasons.”

Let me give you a few examples of common “reasons” we use when faced with challenging situations:

“I don’t have the time for that …”

“I don’t have the money for that …”

“I don’t have the skills for that …”

“I don’t have enough willpower for that …”

We use reasons like these all the time to explain why we’re not making the changes in our lives that we need to. They sound valid enough – we’re all pressed for time and money, and there’s only so much talent to go around, right?

Wrong. These reasons have one major thing in common – they are all conspicuously missing the statement that puts the responsibility on us. Our excuses avoid dealing with the fact that we have the power to change things (and neatly absolves us of any guilty feelings for not stepping up and demanding more from ourselves).

Let’s see what these “reasons” would look like if we really told the whole truth:

“I don’t have the time for that because I haven’t been willing to make a priority of making better use of my time.”

“I don’t have the money for that because I haven’t been willing to make a priority of making better use of my money.”

“I don’t have the skills for that because I haven’t been willing to make a priority of working hard to increase my skills.”

“I don’t have enough willpower for that because I haven’t been willing to make a priority of developing real discipline.”

Ouch! When you put it that way, it stings, doesn’t it? It sure does when I have to talk that way to myself! The truth is that we use excuses to get ourselves out of the hard work of self-discipline or of thinking hard enough to find an answer to our problem.

If you want to get all you can out of your life, you have to decide to NEVER TOLERATE EXCUSES from yourself. You have to decide to develop the discipline. You have to decide to think hard enough to find the answer. And unless you’re willing to do this, you’re going to live out the rest of your days bellyaching about how tough you have it and how much the deck is stacked against you.

Only you can take control of your life. And only you can stop tolerating the excuses that you’ve been letting hold you back from the life you dream of.

Do This Now!

1. Get a pen and paper and write down three things you really want to do but you feel like you don’t have the time/money/talent/whatever to pull it off.
2. Identify Your Excuse – What are you doing (or not doing) that is allowing this problem to exist in the first place?
3. Plan and Strike – What are you going to do to blow these excuses out of the water? Figure it out and get to it – NOW!

Dave Navarro is the Rapid Results Coach who can help you get unstuck from the problems that put limits on your business wealth. Check out the Results Right Now newsletter at http://tips.resultsrightnow.net to get a free 30 minute coaching session and a Crash Course in Creating Instant Momentum! Do it now, before this month’s free coaching slots are used up

When faced with your own personal or business failures, just consider this man. He tried his hand at business and he failed – big time! So he thought, “Well, maybe I belong in politics.” He ran for the political office of State Legislature and guess what? He lost. Failed again.

OK, maybe he really did belong in business! After all, one business failure doesn’t mean he can’t do it. Does it? He went back to another business venture. Again he failed – for the third time. Isn’t the third time supposed to be a charm? But this was beginning to look like a bad luck charm.

The man really did like politics. He wanted to make a difference. So he ran for office once again. And this time he made it. He was elected to the State Legislature. But, when he ran for Speaker of the House, he lost. Rack up another failure.

Congress? Maybe he could be a Congressman. Ahh, he succeeded – for one term. But then when he ran for the second term, he lost. Some people thought only a real loser could lose on a rerun. However, that notion didn’t stop this man. Several years later, he ran for the U.S. Senate. He failed to win.

Lost again? Can’t the man take a hint? Obviously not! He actually even upped the anti and ran for Vice President of the United States. Whoops – lost again. Two years later he tried for the U.S. Senate only to lose once more.

Was this man crazy? Didn’t he realize that he was a failure? Couldn’t he understand out-and-out rejection? The reality was clear – the people did not want the man in office. Nobody was interested in him. He was a failure. Why couldn’t he get it?

But the man refused to accept the “reality.” He turned his back on rejection. He ignored failure. Nothing was going to stop him. He hung on to his dream, his strong intention and his expectations of success. He persisted.

Two years after his last defeat, he ran for office once more. And this time he won, and he won big! He became the sixteenth President of the United States and one of the most famous and influential people in the history of the world.

So, when you’re feeling discouraged, consider this man – Abraham Lincoln – and never, never give up on your dreams. Be persistent!

Katie Byrd will take you by the hand and teach you the skills she’s used to journey from a financially strapped, bad credit nightmare to debt free abundant living. To find out more visit: http://abundanceandwealth.bellaonline.com

Are you amongst those who are sincerely happy to be alive? Those who enjoy all the pleasures that life has to offer the human endeavor? Feeling the wind, the cold, the sun and water running by your feet. The birds and the trees and the whispers of critters and varmints as they make wake in the breeze.

Do you enjoy the pain and sorrow, while embracing the joy and laughter of all that is in this realm from now until the ever after? Do not miss out on all there is and get caught up in the meaningless fury and shrills all about. Live life to the fullest every day; let the energy flow thru you and invite it to stay.

When you see someone who is upset at life, perhaps you will share this outlook of yours and they can see the other side of their internal based argument. If they are upset with their lives, one has to ask why? What is causing this? This is where you can help with your perpetual positive outlook on life. Explain to them these points in your own words and see if they get it?

Perhaps they may not right away, it takes some people a little while to come around to this line of thinking. But if you make an impression and others do the same eventually they will adopt this view of the world and see that there is more to it and they should be happy. The more people you can enlighten in this way, the more people who will tell others and in this way you have made an even greater difference to all, as sometimes big ideas start out very small. Think on this.

“Lance Winslow” – Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

It’s happening more and more each year as businesses grow and discover where they need to be. Seattle has been a hub of technological business since before the internet even became a common tool. Amazon, Microsoft, and Starbucks are all based there, all companies most people could recognize. If you are thinking of starting up a new company, you might want to consider moving to Seattle. It is a great city to live in and explore, with plenty to see and do throughout the year. It is also a great place to host your company’s headquarters.

Of course, with so many companies picking up and moving there, the population has been growing. You will need to set your company apart in some way. For example, you can’t just call yourself the best Seattle divorce lawyer; you need to make it special. Consider a quirky and unique company name, even if it’s just you. People tend to respond well to fun company names, rather than people’s names, as well as interesting logos and well-maintained websites.

Seattle is a great location for any business, but it’s a wonderful place to live in general. There is a buzz around the city with great live music, art galleries, fantastic restaurants, and spectacular shopping. The different neighborhoods within the city are all winners. But the best view of all has to be Mount Rainier. It turns pink during sunset and is absolutely breathtaking. You can also spend a day driving to the mountain and doing a vigorous hike.

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