conversation [kon-ver-sey-shuhn]  -noun 1. informal interchange of thoughts, information; 2. The spoken exchange of thoughts, opinions and feelings; 3. An informal discussion of a matter.

I once read an old-school definition of selling that went a little something like this: Selling is convincing your customer to buy something they do not want and then making them feel good that they did. This style may have worked years ago, but try it today and you might just get slapped! Well, you might not get slapped, but I bet your prospect would seriously think about doing it!

The opposite definition is to thoroughly uncover your customer’s needs and dilemmas in order to provide them with a profitable solution. You can do this through conversational selling and it is far more effective for you and for your customer .This week we will break down this definition, examine how and why it is effective and how using conversational selling can achieve the result you both want.

First, we need to consider that today’s consumer is being bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands, of selling messages from the time they wake up until the time they finally fall asleep. The last thing they want is for some sales stiff to walk through their door and bully their way in to their pocketbook. Considering the first, old-school sales method, there are a few reasons why this it is no longer effective.

The first reason is today’s consumer is becoming more and more self-educated on the products and services that they need and that are available to them. Customers from 5 to 105 are researching their options on-line and learning the benefits of your product or service before you even show up. They also have the benefit of reading on-line the reviews and testimonials from others that may have used your product or service.

Another reason the old-school methodology is obsolete is our customers have a very short leash with their time and their expenses. Whether you have an appointment, or just stop in on a cold call, try yapping about something your customer doesn’t want, doesn’t need or doesn’t understand and you’ll quickly see the other side of the door you just came in through.

Now imagine that same appointment or sales call where you sincerely engage your prospect in a conversation. The conversation will build a relationship with your prospects and strengthen your relationships with your customers. When you use conversation you will do more listening, ask more questions and discover what your customer really needs. When you discover their problem, you can then provide your solution rather than sell your product or service.

Taken a step further, if you’ve really been a good listener, asked some excellent questions and engaged in great conversation, you can also quantify your solution so your prospect can really see the value in it as well as how your solution can actually be profitable for him.

Our customers today want listeners, not talkers. And they don’t want to be convinced, they want to be understood. Listen to your customer, understand what they need and provide them with a solution. If you can do these things through good conversation, you’ll never have to worry about “making a sale!”

confidence [kon-fi-duhns]  -noun  1. belief in oneself and one’s powers or abilities. 2. The state of mind characterized by one’s reliance on himself, or his circumstances; a feeling of self-sufficiency; such assurance as leads to a feeling of security; self-reliance

Successful sales people share many of the various sales traits; however there is one that you will find in every successful sales person – Confidence. This week we will look at this key characteristic in its various forms and stages and how confidence, if developed effectively, will help you to continually grow and become more and more successful. This article may be more applicable for someone getting started, but may also have an A-ha or two for anyone.

Confidence comes in many forms; confidence in product, confidence in service, confidence in delivery, confidence in performance, confidence in warranty. But the confidence that propels someone from just being in sales to succeeding in sales is confidence in self.

It’s been my experience that the confidence cycle grows through four stages: foundational, passionate, creative and altruistic. Let’s take a closer look at each of these stages.

Whether you just got started as a commissioned sales rep, are a small business owner that also wears a sales hat, or an entrepreneur that is an expert in your field, no one gets paid until a sale is made. Getting started requires a lot of time studying your product, your service, your market and several other items that will build the confidence foundation you will need for your ability to make a sale.

While you are building your confidence foundation, you will encounter some challenges and road blocks that will try to crush your confidence. The biggest is rejection. Realize that as you are growing in your confidence, you will be rejected. However, that rejection is vital in building a strong, solid confidence. Going through the rejection gives you a basis to look back on and see that in spite of it, you were able to grow. Don’t welcome rejection, but embrace it as something that is typical at this stage and is helping you get to the next level.

This foundational type of confidence is needed to talk intelligently about your product or service. Without it, your prospects will not develop confidence in you, let alone your product or service. Once you have this foundational confidence, you begin landing a few sales here and there. As a result, you build momentum, your confidence grows and you land more and more sales.

Now that the foundation of your confidence is built and is strong, you no longer speak intelligently about your product or service. Instead, you begin to speak passionately about your product or service.

Your prospect senses your passion and the manner in which you speak about your product or service and the absolute belief that what you have is the best solution available. Your passion is transferred to your prospect and his desire to work with you and buy your product is significantly increased. As a result, you now begin to close more sales more frequently.

Now comes the fun part. Wait a minute! You’re making sales hand over fist and that isn’t the fun part!? Nope. Now you’re brimming with confidence and ready to go to the next level. This is where your creativity kicks in. Not creative? Baloney! You know your product or service inside and out, you’ve spent the last several months or years building and strengthening not only your confidence but the relationships you’ve made along the way, and you’ve worked through countless scenarios that have built the experience capital that you can draw upon.

With your creative confidence in place, you now begin creating more sales rather than making new sales. Your experiences and relationships present opportunities that you were never aware of before. You use those experiences and relationships to manufacture creative ways and opportunities to sell more and more.

The final stage of your sales confidence is altruistic, where your concern is no longer how or when you will make your next sale, but whom and how many people you can truly help by providing the best product or service. The rush you get is no longer from blowing away your monthly sales goal by the end of the second week. In this stage, the rush you get is from knowing your customer is truly better off because of what you provided.

In this final confidence stage, you also not only look for opportunities to provide to your customers, but also look for opportunities to help others in your field. The experiences and opportunities you’ve had over the years is something that you look to share with others that are growing through their own confidence cycle. The joy you get here is in seeing others coming up behind you grow, succeed and eventually join you in your confidence.

Here is the exciting part – the confidence journey is there for anyone willing to take that first step. It’s not as easy as just taking a first step, you need to commit to the journey and work your tail off along the way. But the end is definitely worth the means. The journey does not discriminate and there is plenty of room for as many people that want to go. So what do you say? Want to take a trip with me? If so, shoot me an e-mail and let me know – the more the merrier!

can-dor [kan-der] -noun 1. The state or quality of being frank, open and sincere in speech or expression; candidness: The candor of the speech impressed the audience.  2. freedom from bias; fairness; impartiality: To consider an issue with candor.  synonyms: openness, frankness, honesty, truthfulness.

transparent [trans-pair-uhnt] -adjective  1. easily seen through, recognized, or detected. 2. open, frank, candid: The man’s transparent earnestness.

Candor in sales unfortunately seems to have all but disappeared. Transparency has been eschewed out along with it. (Maybe not by you, but just in general.) Bring them back and watch your prospects become loyal customers and a huge source of repeat sales and referrals!

Do a Google search on “sales techniques” and it will return about 23,300,000 website results. Now start clicking on each site to absorb as much as you can on the various sales tips, tricks and techniques “that work.” Go ahead. I’ll wait. What? You don’t have time to click through them all? Yeah, me neither. Heck, I didn’t even click on the first one.

Now, I’m not saying that there isn’t merit to learning various techniques to assist you with your sales efforts. I study sales through books, blogs and websites like many others. However, I don’t rely on strategies or techniques as a crutch to sell for me. I would say most people know when they are being “sold.” You can see the slick salester coming from a mile away that relies on, if not depends on slick tricks and techniques.

Instead, my sales approach is a little more old fashion, if you will. It is a combination of candor and transparency. It’s from back in the day when your word was your contract and a handshake was your purchase order. Back before pushing the up-sell and filling quotas ruled the roost. You have a prospect with a need or dilemma. Provide them with a solution and give some options to consider, but focus on the true need at hand. We’ll look at how doing so will naturally up-sell for you later in this article.

Unless your prospect is totally clueless about what they need – and most never are – too much up-selling will insult their intelligence and drive their right away. With the internet, our customers are very savvy and many times know most of what they need to know to make a buying decision. All they need from you now is a few ideas as to the various options and a price.

(I’m tempted to go off on a tangent here and discuss the importance of adding value to the service and information you provide your customer. But I’ve done that in previous articles -visit the Archived Newsletter page at my website – and will do so again in the future. Just know that for the purpose of this article, we are focusing purely on sales approach.)

Start out asking great questions so you are clear on what their need or dilemma is. Confirm with your prospect that you do in fact have full understanding of what they need. Then, with full candor, provide your solution. Be descriptive with the benefits and paint the picture for them of how the features of your product or service will produce their desired outcome. At the same time, be forthright with potential drawbacks, if there are any. It is very rare that there isn’t at least one Con to go along with all of the Pro’s. We all know this and your prospect will appreciate the heads up.

Sharing the potential drawbacks of a product or service, not matter how insignificant, is selling with transparency and is another thing your customers will appreciate. Transparency tears down the walls of skepticism and builds a foundation of trust. With that foundation in place, you now can build a long-term sales relationship.

Let me share with you a story of a meeting I had very recently. I was meeting with a potential client when a competitor showed up early – a day early – for his consultation. Before he showed up, I had already assessed my prospect’s dilemma, concerns, budget restrictions and what kind of bells and whistles would be acceptable as well as which would be frivolous to him. I had gone over a few options and candidly explained the benefits of each. I had also explained a few of the drawbacks or reasons why someone may not consider that feature to be important.

When the other guy showed up, I introduced myself to him and gave him an opportunity ask his great questions to uncover the prospect’s need. Instead, he skipped right to his “pitch” and began bombarding the client with feature after feature. Upon seeing his approach and the confused looked on the client’s face, I sat back and just let this guy finish. He then left as quickly as he came, and I continued to work with the client towards the solution that best fit his need.

I never once mentioned some of the bells and whistles the other guy was trying to up-sell because I knew they didn’t fit with what the client was looking for, nor did they make sense with the budget he was working with. He did ask me about them, so I candidly explained why I didn’t bring them up. I shared with him the benefits they could provide, but also why the benefit was offset by the additional cost, lack of return on his investment or the potential drawbacks.

The last thing he said to me as we wrapped up the visit is how much he appreciated my candor and how up front I was with everything we talked about. As I was about to leave, he chased down a bicycle ice cream vendor that was going by and bought me the best watermelon popsicle I’ve ever had. Yeah, I think he appreciated the candor!

Most every service profession has a set of tools they use to do their job. Building contractors have hammers, saws and other power tools. Mechanics have their wrenches and diagnostic devices. Painters have their brushes, rollers and sprayers. You get the picture. We all have a set of tools we use to do our job or to do our job better. This is especially true for people in sales.

Sales people have a different kind of tool set they use. Some of these tools include marketing materials like brochures and samples, a Blackberry and their Customer Relationship Management software. However, perhaps the most powerful tool a salesperson can use is a testimonial. And not just one testimonial, but several.

If you are not using testimonials, you are probably walking away from sales that may otherwise have been in your pocket! If you do not have any written testimonials, go get them. Identify ten of your best customers and maybe a couple others that you had a unique sale or situation with that would provide a great testimonial. Call them or stop by and ask them for a written testimonial. Your customers know the value in having testimonials themselves, so they should be more than happy to help you out with one from them.

Now there may be as many reasons to use testimonials as you have testimonials to use, but let’s take a look at five of the more powerful reasons to use them: Believability, Credibility, Examples, Outcomes and Reduced Anxiety.

Believability - Pictures may be worth 1000 words, but a testimonial is 1000% more believable than your word. This isn’t a personal knock on you, your character or integrity. But let’s face it, when dealing with a new prospect, it seems salespeople already have two strikes against them when they walk in the door. This is probably due to many prospects having been burned at one time or another by someone in sales.

However, if your prospect hears what you have to say, and then you back it up with a stack of testimonials from several other customers that are saying the same thing, your prospect will be much more apt to believe what you are saying. With testimonials, you aren’t “selling,” you are providing.

Credibility – Many people see their experience with a salesperson as a “me-vs.-them” relationship where they are on one side of a line and you are on the other. When you provide your prospect with a stack of testimonials, they can then see themselves standing with your other customers over on your side of the line and will feel comfortable crossing over to work with you, rather than against you.

An even more powerful way to add credibility is by providing testimonials to your prospect from customers you have in the same or a similar industry. If your prospect is a contractor and you provide a few testimonials from other contractors, he will feel even more confidence in you since you’ve already worked with one of his peers.

Examples – A powerful aspect of using testimonials is they typically provide examples of not only your product or service, but also of your previous customer’s experience in working with you. This factor alone can be huge! Many new prospects may have the same questions about the details involved regarding everything from the product/service itself to the ordering and delivery process. Having a picture painted through testimonials can provide just the type details they may be looking for.

Outcomes – This is similar to “examples” in its benefit through testimonials. Where examples will set them up, outcomes will knock ‘em down! Providing your prospect with a handful of testimonials that illustrate how your product or service benefited your other customers allows your prospect to visualize that same outcome helping their company.

This benefit of using testimonials may just be the most powerful of them all. A fundamental practice of sales is to not focus on the features of your product/service, but to show your prospect what the outcome will be because of the features of the product/service that you provide. In this light, not only will you now have believability and credibility, but you will also have a heightened level of trust from your prospect.

Reduced Anxiety – The final powerful benefit of using testimonials we will look at is a little more personal. Many times a big reason why some people do not buy is anxiety that they are not making a good decision. You may have done an excellent job of explaining your product/service and painted a vibrant picture of how it will benefit your prospect (outcome). However, since all they have to go on is your word – which may be no different than the word of one or many salespeople that they may have been burned by in the past – a stack of testimonials is just what they may need to eliminate their anxiety and sign on the line that is dotted.

Want to blow your prospect away with your testimonials? Rather than give them a stack of written testimonials, give them a CD with half a dozen video testimonials! These don’t have to be anything that is commercially produced with fancy graphics. Just grab your cam-corder, maybe a tri-pod to keep it steady, and get some 30- to 60-second testimonials. Burn each file to disc and voila! Better yet, find any 13-year old and have them put those files together like a pro!

This week I am excited to write about one of my favorite topics – Attitude! Not just attitude, but positive, nothing’s-gonna-stop-me attitude. The type of attitude that does not settle to just see the glass half full. Rather, it is the type of attitude that sees the half-full glass as an opportunity to fill it up! It is an attitude that blasts past “can-do” to “WILL-do.” In short, it’s what happens when attitude meets commitment.

Before going on, I must warn you, I am very passionate about attitude and may come across a little over-the-top. But I do so to emphasize the importance and power of your attitude. I have not mastered it by any means, but I work towards it every day. These are the thoughts and mantras that drive me to sharpen my attitude. I have way more thoughts, opinions and philosophies on attitude to fit in one newsletter, so this will just be the scratch on the attitude surface. So consider this the Cliff Notes on Attitude according to Scott. Buckle up, here we go!

The foundation of the will-do attitude is to live your life on purpose. The will-do attitude wakes up in the morning and is proactive throughout the day, not reactive. The will-do attitude is a mental edge that is ready to handle any circumstance. The will-do attitude anticipates change and is on point to not just deal with change, but embrace it for the opportunities it brings!

I heard a clip from the movie Star Wars over the weekend. In it, the little green Jedi Master named Yoda says “Do, or do not. There is no try!”

Wow! Right there in eight words is the epitome of attitude and commitment coming together. It forces you to make a choice. You are either going to do something or you are not going to do something. There is no alternative. You have a goal and you go get it. You don’t get deterred by obstacles, walls or road blocks. You persevere through them, using or finding the resources needed to obtain your goal.

Trying is a black hole that lives somewhere in between “do” and “do not” that sucks the life out of the will-do attitude. Converse to the will-do attitude, the “try” attitude is effort without commitment. Trying is sticking your toe in the water to see if it’s comfortable. Trying gives up when things get tough. Trying makes accomplishment a possibility rather than a certainty.

Another great example of the will-do attitude appeared in something a friend of mine and I were talking about last week. A group of us are working on a very large community project and with only a couple weeks to go, everything is coming together great! We stopped for two seconds to reflect on where we started and the class event that is upon us and commented on how huge this event will be! It was then that I said that with most things we all do, it usually takes just as much effort to go small as it does to go big, so why not go big!?

For this week, I am going to wrap up with my favorite quote on Attitude by Charles Swindoll. The actual quote is much longer than this, but paraphrased it is “The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day…I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.”

So there you have it. What choice are you going to make today. Are you going to do? Or are you going to do not? (I really hope you do!)