QUICK TIP:

Your competitor is a person who spends days and often nights, dreaming up ways to give your clients better service.

The best in any profession work efficiently and effectively. It's been said that the best carpenters make the fewest chips. Time and motion studies of world-class soccer players reveal that the top-rated players run far shorter distances and score more goals during a game than their less successful colleagues.

Basketball star Michael Jordan always gives 100 percent of himself in every play, yet he always has a little power reserve that he accumulates by playing efficiently. While poor performers turn part of their energy into waste, top performers save up energy and invest it effectively in a last-minute, victory-saving burst of performance.

Management experts will tell you that it is better to be effective than efficient. According to Daniel Stamp, the founder of Priority Management Systems, effectiveness is doing the right thing, whereas efficiency is doing things right. To improve our sales results, we need to improve both: efficiency and effectiveness.

Here are three simple principles to remember when you meet your next customer:

	Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is not other route to success. Stephen A. Brennan

First, an effective listener sells more than an efficient talker.

The better you listen to your prospect, the less time it will take you to pinpoint the essence of your prospect's needs. Remember the soccer player who runs less, but scores more goals? As you listen more effectively, you won't chase the sale, you'll allow the sale to come to you. As an effective listener you won't answer questions that were never asked, or present solutions that don't fit the customer's problem.

Second, your customers' most erroneous beliefs weigh more in their minds than a prize bull at the state fair.

Psychologist Robert Abelson once proposed the idea that we humans treat beliefs like material possessions. Customers form their beliefs with great care and they don't want you to shatter them. What do top performers do when they face erroneous beliefs such as "the competitor's product is better"? They don't challenge their customer's beliefs. A more effective strategy is to shift the focus back from the solution to the original problem. Instead of proving to the customer that they don't have the right solution, they lead their customers to carefully review the true nature of their problem. When customers review and restate their problem, it will often change in their minds. Once the problem definition changes, chances are that the competitive solution will no longer fit and the effective salesperson can introduce a far better solution.

Third, it is more effective to pull the toughest problems out of a prospect's mind than to push the best solution.

The toughest job in selling is to find, isolate and clearly define your prospect's real problem. Chances are that your prospect has not had the time to clearly define the problem at hand. Top performers know that an inefficient analysis of a problem will lead to an inefficient solution. If you spend more time agreeing with the customer on the problem you will spend less time selling the solution. Why? Because a clearly stated problem takes away the customer's confusion - and as a result, the customer will think of you as the more effective salesperson and buy from you. Isn't it more efficient to be effective?