Schiffman - The ultimate book of sales techniques : 75 ways to master cold calling, sharpen your unique selling proposition, and close the sale

Your biggest competitor is the status quo.

This book contains my top tips for salespeople, honed and refined over the years. In many ways its the ultimate product of more than three decades in this business. Its the result of training more than half-a-million salespeople, of going on thousands of sales calls, and of making hundreds of thousands of phone calls.

Yet in this book, I can tell you nothingnothingthats more important than this: Your biggest competitor is the status quo. Thats what you have to overcome.

I mean this in two senses. The first, which Ive drummed into salespeople for a long time is simple. The prospect to whom youre talking during your sales appointment or your cold call is happy with what hes got. He has no defined need. If he did, if he wasnt happy, hed have called you.

Salespeople are often taught to look for problems, or even create them. Thats bunk. For the most part, if a customer has a problem, she or he will resolve it themselves.

Instead of this problem-centric approach, look at things this way: What youre fighting against is whatever way the customers accustomed to doing things, whatever service hes using, whatever product hes employing. From his point of view, the status quo seems to be working; your job is to help him understand why it isnt. You have to change him from what hes doing (even if it appears to be nothing) to what you want him to do. You have to change him.

Ill talk a great deal about this problem of the status quo and how to overcome it. Its key to creating an effective cold call and a killer sales pitch.

These days, when Im addressing groups of salespeople a lot of what I talk about focuses on innovationa key word. Innovation, after all, is what separates you from the rest of the pack. Its what makes the difference between good and great. Ninety-nine percent of us these days are selling a commodity product! What will get you the sale in the face of this is the degree of your creativity. If you look the same as the other salespeople who are trying to sell essentially the same thing as you, youll get nowhere.

To spark that creativity, youve got to have insight into the customer: what they do, how they do it, when they do it, whom they do it with, and perhaps most importantly, why they do it that way. Once you understand that, you can find innovative ways of showing them how you can help them do it better.

People buy because they believe that what youre selling is better than what they currently have. Your challenge is to demonstrate that fact to them. And how can you possibly do that unless you understand what theyre doing with the product or service theyre currently using? The answer is, you cant. Hence the value of insight.

Keep these words in mind as you read through the chapters that follow: insight creativity innovation different.

Today theres a second sense in which the status quo is your competitor.

The business landscape is changing, and its changing forever. We saw dramatic indications of this when the U.S. economy (and much of the world economy) crashed in 2008. The stock market plunged, sometimes 800 to 1,000 points in a single day. Home prices plummeted as the housing bubble burst. Unemployment soared above 10 percent, and the financial structure of the country teetered on the brink of apocalypse.

Fortunately, we pulled back, and things improved slowly. But even though this was the most dramatic sign that the business landscape had been altered, the signs of fundamental change were there much earlier for anyone who cared to read them. Beginning in the 1980s with the growth of computing power, we entered an age in which communication and information exchange increased exponentially. When I was younger, there were computers at Yale and MIT that took up whole buildings. They were, on the whole, a bit less powerful than the laptop computer with which Im writing these words.

Changes in information exchange led, almost inexorably, to the development of the World Wide Web and the Internet. Thanks to e-mail, we now had instant communication with remote corners of the globe. Documents, including text and images, could be sent at the speed of light. Informationand misinformationproliferated. We found ourselves swimming in an alphabet soup of strange acronyms: VoIP, ICANN, TCP/IP, and so on.

Gradually, even the most technologically conservative (among whom I number myself) had to admit that our old way of doing business was gone forever. With this, there came a new realization: for salespeople to be successful in the twenty-first century, we must engage in a process of continual reinvention. Its not enough to say, Well, I use e-mail instead of sending a letter now, and I keep files on my computer instead of in a filing cabinet. We have to constantly question the whole way in which we sell.

Anything short of that, and you risk being left behind. The speed at which technology and the landscape it influences are changing continues to accelerate. This means its not enough to change once; you have to continually change. You have to reinvent and rethink.

Reinvention means examining what you do, how you do it, when you do it, and why you do it. Its in many ways parallel to the process I outlined above about gaining insight into your customersonly this time youre gaining that insight into yourself. The goals that you had five, ten, or fifteen years ago probably sounded great back then, but how do they sound now? Has the new sales landscape made them outdated or stale? Are you still living in the past decade, trying to sell in ways that belong in a museum? Time doesnt stand still, and neither should you.

Does that mean that Im advocating throwing away all the techniques Ive developed over the years? The ones Ive taught to tens of thousands of salespeople? Of course not. This book is a testimony to the timeless nature of many of my sales principles:

• You have to ask questions.
• You have to let the prospect talk.
• The object of the cold call is to get the appointment.
• You have to keep track of your numbers.
• An objection is an opportunity.
• You must know the personality type of the person with whom youre dealing.

All of these things remain true. Whats changed is the context in which you apply these techniques. The key to selling today is insight and innovation. Youve got to be willing to try different things. If some of them dont work, fine! Who cares? You tried themthats the main thing. As someone once said, success depends on your ability to fail early and often.