Ari Galper - Unlock The Sales Game: New Trust-Based Selling Strategies To Finally Create Your Sales Breakthrough

FOR BUSINESS OWNERS WHO ARE TIRED OF
CHASING THE NEXT SALE

UNLOCK THE SALES GAME

NEW TRUST-BASED SELLING STRATEGIES TO
FINALLY CREATE YOUR SALES BREAKTHROUGH

ARI GALPER
The Worlds #1 Authority On Trust-Based Selling
CEO of Unlock The Game & Trusted Authority

Copyright Unlock The Game 2018

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Unlock The Game

Address: Suite 223, 30 Denison Street Bondi Junction, NSW 2022, Australia
Email:
Website: www.UnlockTheGame.com

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

If you flick through the pages of business magazines and traditional sales training material, you will find a constant flow of messages like, Focus on closing the sale, Overcome objections, Be relentless, Accept rejection as a normal part of selling, Use persuasion to get useful information about your prospects and Chase the sale.

In most cases, it becomes about getting the sale at the expense of the human relationship. For the customer, this approach is transparent and all too familiar. Crossing social boundaries and adding pressure to the sales process makes it a gut-wrenching and painful process for both the seller and the buyer.

In this new economy, there is a much better way for business owners to succeed in creating new highly paid consulting clients. But its not for everyone. Youll need to be open-minded because it may contradict everything youve been taught about selling.

It begins with moving away from the hidden agenda of focusing on making the sale. When you do this, a new world opens up for you. In other words, when you stop selling and start building authentic relationships based on trust, authenticity and integrity, the possibilities become endless. Its a whole new mindset in selling, which I call Unlock The Sales Game.

The vast majority of traditional sales techniques contradict everything we know about what it takes to build relationships. But shouldnt selling be about creating new relationships with potential new clients? No one likes to be pushed and no one wants to talk to someone whose only agenda is to get what they want. By not focusing on the end goal of the sale, but on building trust instead with your potential clients, you can eliminate angst, negativity and frustration, and watch your consulting business grow to levels you never thought were possible.

Have you ever landed a sale without really trying to? You know what I mean; it just happened naturally without you having to force it. That unconscious process is the same as the process that I have created at the conscious level, giving you a system you can follow that makes the sales process effortless.

The sales wake up call that changed the sales game

About fifteen years ago, after spending many years studying the great sales gurus, designing sales training for major companies and completing my Masters degree in Training and Development, I had the most important sales call of my life.

At the time, I was the Sales Manager of a team of 18 at a fast-growing software company. One afternoon, I was on the phone doing an online demonstration with the top executives of an account we had been working on for nine months.

The call was going well, extremely well. Everything was going to script they were interested and asking me tons of questions, and I had all the answers at my fingertips. At the end of the call they thanked me profusely for my time. I still remember the Vice-Presidents final words: Well definitely be getting back to you.

I was so proud of how well things had gone that I could almost feel my head swell as I started to hang up the phone, but I accidentally hit the phones mute button instead. They had not hung up, but obviously thought I had, and I could listen to the Vice-President talk to the other executives about our oh-so-promising phone conversation. Heres what they said, word for word: Okay, so were definitely not going to go with him. But keep stringing him along, so we can get more information and strike a better deal with another company.

I was devastated!

My first feeling was outrage they had lied to me! I felt hurt and used, but the waves of rejection that swept over me were even worse. Im a good guy, I told myself. I did everything right. Ive studied all the best sales programs in the world. I didnt cut any corners. Why are they treating me this way?

Then I remembered all the other times that I had got a gut feeling that something was off about how a potential client was reacting to me. I could never put my finger on it, yet at some level I knew that everything I had learned was incomplete. Id ignored that nagging discomfort and kept on doing what I had been doing, until that wake-up call.

A lot of todays sales gurus would analyse that call and conclude that if a prospect lies to you, then its okay to lie back. If theyre aggressive to you, its okay to be aggressive in return (because thats how you control the situation).

If they try to box you in, its okay to force them into a commitment. But this buyer and seller conflict, battle or whatever else you want to call it, just felt so wrong to me. It took me a long time to figure out one basic truth that none of those fight back sales programs ever talked about my sales approach at the time was all wrong!

There was something fundamentally wrong with how I was approaching selling. I needed to change. It was at this point that I was finally able to let go of the outrage and rejection and take responsibility for having tried to sell the wrong way. I realised that the old ways of selling had everything backwards, and this freed me to create a new sales approach with a primary focus on creating trust and removing sales pressure from the process.

Ironically, when your mindset is focused on creating trust with your potential consulting clients, sales happen naturally, without resistance.

When I think about that life-changing sales call above, I realise that the executives knew I had an agenda for that call to encourage them to buy what I had to sell. I did it by the book, dealt with their objections and pushed subtly to move things forward you know the drill.

As it turned out, they were playing along. While at first I took the rejection personally, I later realised that the problem wasnt me; it was the whole dynamic of trying to make the sale.

Did it ever occur to me to think about the ways I could develop a relationship of trust with them so that we could explore what issues and problems they were trying to solve? No. Did I ever contemplate that by not knowing more about their issues and problems, I didnt know whether I could help them? No. Did it ever occur to me to ask them, Where do you want to go from here?

No. I was on that call to make a sale, and the sales pressure I was exerting with every word made them feel it was okay to lead me on and even lie to me. Think about it: would they have lied to me if they had trusted that I wouldnt try and chase them, regardless of their decision? Probably not.

A big lesson learned: selling is all about trust. People can sense when you are more concerned about getting the consulting engagement than focusing 100 per cent on their best interests. When you treat people as people, not as prospects, and reveal your trustworthiness, they will start to trust you. They will see you as a problem solver, focused solely on their needs. From there you have the basis of a long-term relationship the true competitive advantage in this new economy.

Your new focus is to take the pressure out of the sales process to help both parties get to the truth of whether youre a fit or not together ironically, that creates more high-quality sales!

Thats why this book is called Unlock The Sales Game , based on my core trust-based selling program Unlock The Game , which is now the worlds most successful trust-based selling system.