The country’s leading sales trainer invites you to sharpen your selling skills, increase your motivation and enhance your personal success.

Memo from Tom Hopkins:

Before you read on, please try to answer these five tough questions:

1) What are the seven fundamental selling skills that always lead to sales success no matter what the economy?

2) Do you have a tendency to move away from the fundamentals?

3) Think of your selling career. When you’ve been successful, were you able to build and expand on your success, or did you slip back?

4) What are the three key challenges that salespeople have to master to survive and thrive in the ’90s?

5) Do you use positive affirmations to influence your subconscious mind to stay focused on your goals?

PSP: Are there new fundamental skills or techniques that salespeople can use to reach sales success?

Hopkins: There are no new fundamentals. There are only proven fundamentals, adapted to the prevailing times.

Unfortunately, most companies don’t always teach salespeople these fundamentals. They teach product knowledge and basic people skills, but they don’t teach fundamental selling skills.

What are the fundamentals?

Hopkins: The seven fundamental selling skills are: prospecting, building rapport, qualifying the client, effective presentations, handling objections, closing the sale and getting referrals. These seven skills will always be the backbone of professional selling.

When you master these fundamentals and stick to them, will you then hold the keys to success in your hands?

Hopkins: Yes. Every time you get into trouble it is because you have gotten away from basics that work. Salespeople often try to cut corners in order to shorten the selling cycle. As a result, they get into bad habits and stop honing the fundamentals.

What are the top three reasons salespeople move away from the fundamentals?

Hopkins: In my opinion, they are the inability to deal with stress, to deal with success and to say “no” to opportunities that sound too good to be true.

How does stress prevent salespeople from practicing the fundamentals?

Hopkins: Salespeople who are unable to cope with cumulative, daily stress tend to suffer economically, physically and psychologically. Continued stress reduces salespeople’s ability to practice the most fundamental skills.

THE STRESS OF SELLING IN THE ’90S

What are the key stress factors for salespeople?

Hopkins: Customers are becoming more cynical. Why? Because they are more bombarded by advertising than ever before.

In addition, the media exposure of the recent financial scandals that involved people like Michael Milken or such institutions as savings and loans have led people to become more suspicious. These events create more pressure on salespeople facing customers who have become more cynical about being sold.

How can salespeople overcome this problem?

Hopkins: Our goal is to help salespeople create a new image that is exactly the opposite of the negative image that the public has come to expect. Salespeople have to become sincere and sensitive. To win in the ’90s, we have to put integrity first. We have to be sincere about our willingness to serve. Instead of aggressively pushing products, we have to become more sensitive to customers’ needs.

Should salespeople work harder at earning the customer’s trust?

Hopkins: Exactly. Salespeople have to assume more the role of a consultant who offers expertise without obligation. This often creates an atmosphere where trust and mutual sincerity can grow. Soon, both the salesperson and the customer will be able to arrive at a decision that will be good for both parties.

TIME PRESSURES DEMAND CHANGE

What would be another stress factor that erodes fundamental skills?

Hopkins: There are more demands made on the customer’s time today than ever before. As a result, the value of time has increased dramatically. Top sales producers are very conscious of their time and their customers’ time. They come to the point sooner, they communicate their message faster and respond to a customer’s demand quicker. Sales champions know that today it is even more important to be punctual. There are many salespeople who don’t think it is a problem to be 10 minutes late for an appointment. To some decision makers, being 10 minutes late is really rude. Great salespeople often underline the fact that they are punctual with a subtle glance at their watch while they say, “Mr. Jones, we had an appointment at two.” This tells the prospect that you are keeping your promises and that you value your client’s time. It is also a good idea to ask your customers how much time they have, so you won’t impose on their schedule and you can adjust your presentation to fit into that time slot.

It seems that as the value of time increases, the margins of error decrease proportionally.

Hopkins: That’s right. There are no more safety nets. Customers are becoming less loyal. Today, customers switch suppliers for the slightest reason like a trivial mistake on a service call or a small price advantage. That’s why good salespeople leave nothing to chance. They spend more time with follow-up service even though it may not be part of their job description. They keep in close touch with their customers and monitor the vital signs of the relationship. They send follow-up letters, birthday greetings or thank-you cards to keep their customers happy.

So your best strategy is to deliver more value.

Hopkins: Yes. We all have to keep pace with the increased value that is dictated by the rapid advances of technology. Innovation drives technology and technology offers new values, new choices and it drives change. What doesn’t change is that customers demand more value in return for deciding to make a change. That’s why sales champions add more value to every step of the sale.

But the average salesperson often thinks that price is the key issue.

Hopkins: Professionally trained salespeople take the time to show their prospect the dollar value of a quality product and of quality service. Good salespeople know that they represent a valuable asset to their customers because of their follow-up, their responsiveness and their service. The key to winning in today’s fast changing world is to become a reliable, dependable and steady partner to the customer, a partner who is committed to a long-term relationship.

It’s not easy to balance these long-term relationships with the steady demands of pursuing new business.

Hopkins: Sales champions work hard at achieving this balance.

A good way of looking at this is to see the existing accounts as your capital that has to be protected from the competition and to view your prospects as the interest earned on your extra efforts.

What makes selling so challenging is that salespeople have to develop a good strategy for developing their territory and at the same time they have to master the inner game of selling.

DEALING WITH THE STRESS OF SELLING

What can salespeople do to manage their stress more effectively, so they can master the inner game of selling?

Hopkins: Most books that deal with managing stress only deal with single traumatic events in people’s lives such as divorce, losing a job or the death of a loved one. Most salespeople don’t suffer from these isolated events, but from the accumulated, daily stress that comes with the job of selling. When we are under a high degree of stress, we have two basic ways to release it. The first response to stress is to flee from it; the second is to fight. Some salespeople simply flee from the source of stress and avoid difficult clients, ignore new leads or quit following up on tough prospects. Others quit their jobs when the going gets tough. There are many “musical chair salespeople” who move from job to job and never learn how to overcome their stress problems. There are a few salespeople who flee from stress through self-destructive habits like drinking or taking drugs.

What about the fight response to stress?

Hopkins: Some salespeople may literally fight their clients and lose their tempers. After a stressful day, some salespeople often carry the stress home and start fights with their spouse or their children. Unmanaged stress often leads to marriage problems. In many instances, salespeople get hostile with people in their own company, they complain about the company’s advertising, the price or their territories.

Which one of these two stress responses is more damaging?

Hopkins: We have found that the major reason for failing in selling is not caused by the flight or fight response. The most common response to stress overload in selling is immobilization — when salespeople begin to hang around in the office, sitting, waiting, talking to each other more than to their clients. They often fill their day with nonessential activities; they play games with management to show minimum activity levels just to keep their jobs. But in reality, stress has driven them to hide from reality. These salespeople have adopted self-destructive ways to cope with stress.

How should sales managers deal with this problem?

Hopkins: The first thing to do is to sit down with your salespeople and honestly appraise the situation, reduce their fears, rebuild their skills and refocus their attention on their goals and aspirations.

THE INABILITY TO HANDLE SUCCESS

You said earlier that another reason for moving away from the fundamentals in selling is the inability to handle success. Can you explain why?

Hopkins: Many salespeople’s egos get out of balance. After they reach a certain level of success, they win a few awards, they get a few trophies and they begin to think that they are really hot stuff. As a result, they may change their attitudes towards people, they may look down their noses at their colleagues or they may act arrogantly towards management and claim to be completely responsible for their company’s success. The more they get successful, the more they lose their humility. With increased success they lose their perspective which makes them lose their focus. That’s why I tell people when you experience success, go ahead and enjoy it, but never forget where you came from.

When salespeople are successful and they make more money than ever before, they often experience a new set of problems.

Hopkins: That’s right. There are only two times people have a problem with money: when they have none or when they have a lot. When you have no money, you can’t take advantage of opportunities; when you have a lot of money, you have the means to take advantage of opportunities, but you can make mistakes if you are not very careful.

TOM HOPKINS’ SEVEN RULES FOR HANDLING MONEY

You have developed seven rules for handling your money when you become successful. Can you share them?

Hopkins: I’ll be glad to.

1Don’t put your money into a business venture that you don’t know very well. The less you know about a business, the greater your chances for losing your money.

2Make sure that you always have at least 51 percent control of any venture you invest in. Minority positions have a tendency to turn into major disappointments.

3Never make personal guarantees on your indebtedness. When you operate a business, always form a corporation to protect your personal assets. Should your business venture fail, you won’t be personally liable.

4Whenever you invest money, be more concerned with the return of your investment than with the interest returned on the investment.

5Whenever someone comes to you with an investment idea, check their financial track record first. If their financial statement is not solid, then it is not likely that their investment idea is solid.

6When you have become financially successful, resist the temptation to become a banker for your friends and relatives. Tell them that you have no plans of becoming a lending institution because it is the quickest way to destroy a good relationship.

7When you become financially successful, don’t spend your money on any toy that you don’t have time to enjoy. Have you ever invested your money foolishly?

Hopkins: Of course I have. That’s how I learned most of my rules for success.

Can you give us an example?

Hopkins: I went through an expensive learning period a few years ago. We bought a beautiful cabin in Arrowhead as a vacation property and I bought a Learjet to fly to my seminars. But soon we realized that we had to spend more time managing these toys than we spent time enjoying them.

The Learjet sounds like a big ego trip.

Hopkins: Of course. It was one of my 10-year goals. I had a picture of it on my refrigerator. I got the exact color I wanted and I had a ball.

How much was the plane?

Hopkins: It was just under two million, but when we added up the bills for the crew, the fuel and the maintenance, I realized that it was foolish to spend $30,000 a month on a toy that we used only a few hours a week. My wife came up with the right idea when she said, “From now on, we don’t buy anything that we have to take more care of than it takes of us.”

Do you use that lesson in your seminars?

Hopkins: Of course, I tell people to be flexible about goal setting. I say, “You must be willing to rewrite your goals, if you find out after you’ve reached your goals that they don’t make sense.”

DON’T PLAY THE MUSICAL-CHAIR JOB GAME

You said that another reason why salespeople fail to hang on to their success is that they can’t say “no” to opportunities that sound too good to be true.

Hopkins: When you have become a top producer, you have to be careful about the many job opportunities that will be offered to you. As soon as you have reached a certain level of success, people will whisper into your ear, “You can do better with our company. You can earn more money. You will have more opportunities. Leave your company and join us!” Many times, the job offer turns out to be a step down instead of the advancement you hoped for.

So you are saying it is better to bloom where you are planted.

Hopkins: Sales champions stay on course. Remember what got you successful in the first place and keep building on your past successes. If you keep focused on doing your job, the people who have helped you become successful will help you to stay successful.

Many times the prospective employer will exaggerate your income potential and minimize the price you’ll have to pay to reach success.

Hopkins: That’s right. Remember that the easiest person to sell to is another salesperson. Musical chair salespeople often can’t say “no” because they enjoy being the center of attention during the courtship ritual of the hiring process. They also tend to forget that when you change jobs, you will lose a significant percentage of your client base, you will have to rebuild a sales support network and go through a new learning curve that can lower your income.

That’s why it is important for sales managers to sell their people on the benefits of staying on course.

Hopkins: Yes, many sales managers spend too much time working with the salespeople who fail than with those who succeed. They forget that their top producers need lots of recognition every week. When they begin to leave their winners alone and spend most of their time with the losers, the winners will feel neglected and begin to think that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

How do you keep yourself motivated and growing?

Hopkins: One of the most important lessons in life is to keep on changing, growing and transforming. As a teacher, I have to practice what I preach. If the students do not think, “If he can do it, then I can do it,” then they don’t follow through. If you lose that connection with the audience, then people won’t learn. I had many failures in my life. I suffered personal tragedy when my first wife became an alcoholic. I raised my three children alone for a short time until I met my second wife. Most people have more experience with failure than with success, but you can never be a success unless you learn how to overcome failure.

We’ve talked about the problems that come with success. What do you think is the most difficult, personal challenge when you reach success?

Hopkins: When people become successful, they often lose their humility. When I was a teenager, I was a very fortunate kid, I was captain of our football team and I became very smart alecky and my ego got a bit overinflated. One night my dad let me know that people don’t like anyone whose ego grows out of proportion. He told me that people like someone who has got humility, someone who is a nice person. So I started changing.

Humility helps you to keep things in perspective. There is always someone who is more successful than you are.

Hopkins: That’s right. If you ever lose sight of that, you will lose that specialness as a human being. I tell salespeople that to become successful it is important to become an interested introvert instead of an interesting extrovert. Good sales managers avoid the loud-mouth, aggressive salesperson. That’s the interesting extrovert. The interested introvert puts customer needs in first place and personal needs in second place.

Today’s marketplace has become more competitive than ever. How can salespeople sharpen their competitive edge?

Hopkins: In this tight economy, you better learn how to analyze your market and develop a winning game plan to outsell your competition. To me a good competitor is someone who is willing to practice the self-denial and sacrifice that creates the foundation for winning the big game. I spent my first three years in selling working from eight a.m. until 10 or 11 p.m. I planned to have an appointment every night. That’s the sacrifice I’ve chosen to build the foundation that supported my dream. Sometimes it will take 15- or 16-hour days to build the momentum.

Beat your competition with quality service. Hopkins: Beat your competition, but never knock your competitor. Throwing a temper tantrum is not going to help you win the game.

People who lose their professionalism in the heat of competition act like the football player in the Super Bowl who threw his helmet to the ground.

You have to maintain grace under pressure.

Hopkins: Transform the pressure into something positive. Use the energies to outwork, out-think and out-service your competition. Follow up like never before, write thank-you notes, return phone calls, show up on time. Work on your image, your weight, your appearance, your smile, your handshake, your eye-contact and your professional skills. These are all the things that make you a person people want to do business with.