Hi everybody, thanks for tuning in. This is AJ and I am a Sales and Leadership coach here at Emerge Sales Training, and for those of you who are new to this podcast, this is a podcast for network marketers that want to up-level their sales and sales leadership skills while being a good human. We published new episodes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. We also have free training on how to make closing, recruiting and leadership a more enjoyable process for you, your team members and your customers, and you can register for one of those free trainings emergesalestraining.com/freetraining. Or you can contact me at AJ@emergesalestraining.com because we want to make sure you have the training that will really help you get much better results. So in today’s podcast, this is Episode 221 and I’m doing Three Things that Will Make more Sales for You and Your Team.
I’m going to go over some key things that you need to do in order to help you and your team gain more confidence and make more sales. I’m also going to start off by saying I was inspired by seeing my son’s shirt the other day. He has this cute little phrase on it and many of you probably have heard of this phrase, but it says “show up, skill up and never give up” and don’t worry. Those aren’t the three things, the concepts that I’m going to talk about, but they are tied to what I want to really dive into and what I want to help you out with today.
So you see this weekend a few things dawned on me and let me back up because it was the past weekend I went rock climbing. OK. I know when to. It was a rock climbing. There were many other outdoor activities, all of which I was totally uncomfortable with. You see I had rock climbed in my early twenties, but at that time my husband title the knots and did all the ropes and I never did something called a lead climb. And he just showed me the basics and we did stuff. We rock climbed and we went to different places. We didn’t even wear helmets. And needless to say, what happened, I got hurt at one point and got scared and then I had babies. Then I just focused on other things like my career and much easier outdoor activities. Ones that didn’t take quite as much skill as rock climbing. So a lot of time has passed since I’ve done any actual climbing. And besides that, I mean it wasn’t like I did it consistently or ever was at a really high level of skill. So I had never invested in actual training and time.
So when I went rock climbing this time, I decided to do it a little differently. I signed up for professional training from a professional rock climber who was really a north face athlete. In fact, this person has dedicated their lives to their sport and they actually go out and teach people how to climb. They take people on adventures and, something magical happened. I learned, do things for myself. I learned verbiage, I learned climbing nomenclature. And what I also implemented. So many times when you learn something new and it’s scary and you want to stay in that place of training, you might know what I’m talking about. Or might be thinking of somebody else on your team that might be in that place. It’s that place where you think, oh, this is awesome. I love this training. I love all this stuff, but I’m scared to death to actually do the stuff. I don’t really want to take that jump and actually get on that wall. But this is where professional trainers were keyed in and it was perfect. You have the basics of the actual knowledge and what you need to do. They showed us how to do it and they said, enough said, let’s get you up there. We need to get some climbs in because they know that’s how you build confidence.
So the first day was really rough. The second day was magical. I went up a sixty or about 70 feet wall. And having a professional train me is was what made all the difference. She could see things in my form or spots to actually step on that only an expert would see. She actually showed me this one place and then she said, oh, this is the good spot, like you wanna you want to angle your foot this way and you want to put your weight on it this way, and I actually could stand in this place that literally to me, looked like a flat wall. I was like, really? I’m actually going to put my foot on that and OK, and she’s like, now stand up. And I did. I have no doubt that climbing with her was really the best decision that I could have made for myself because even though I could have had my husband show me what he had learned from professionals and, and actually go through and just tell me what he had learned. This would have actually sheltered me from the genuine experience of being trained directly from a pro and all the nuances that a pro can anticipate, recognize and proactively help with. And this might sound familiar if you’re a team member that’s been trying to learn from someone you know, your upline or somebody above you, or if you’re a leader thinking, oh yeah, that’s totally what I’ve been doing.
I’ve been totally sheltering them from the genuine experience of being trained by a professional. So in referencing the book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, by Chet Holmes is a great book. He states that this word of mouth training is called tribal training. Like, go watch me, and then you go out and do it. Watch me do what I do. This doesn’t work in most cases. It’s totally limiting to somebody’s bad habits. Somebody is a mood that day. He calls it tribal. So I’m also for someone to even master a skill or something. I think back to a book by Malcolm Gladwell and it’s called the Outliers. If any of you have read this book, it’s pretty. It’s a pretty cool book, but research shows that to actually achieve an expert level of any particular topic, you need to put in about 10,000 hours. Now for a professional that’s about a decade of full time focused work, right? If you’re putting in about 30, 40, 50 hours a week.
Step one in your business is to make sure you have professional training as part of your business model and part of your recruiting model. So it’s not just a quick day seminar because studies show that, when there’s not consistent follow-up and consistent review of a skill, then it’s very, very difficult to actually achieve mastery. In most cases, people are pumped and excited but fail to actually implement after just a one-day training. That’s one of the reasons why in our training we have everything available forever and it’s recommended even after going through our basic programs are basic. We have eight-week programs that you go back and revisit because it literally takes a while to actually go back, practice, role-play, and revisit that content to actually really master that skill.
Then the second thing I want to talk about, and I just mentioned it was practice. When I rock climbed this weekend, it was, I was actually really incredibly scared, the opposite of confident as I mentioned, and I honestly, I didn’t have a first-grade day and I thought things were going to come back to me. It’s quite funny because I went up a few different walls and I just kept trying different things, thinking, OK, this one I’m going to go with this one. I’m going to go with this one and thinking that I was going to build confidence that way. But I realized that practice is practice, no matter what you’re doing. And so one thing we teach here at emerge as you need to practice something three times to start building confidence.
I practice what I teach. And so the second day I went up the same darn wall three times. So that same route, I decided I’m going to do this three times in a row, not a different wall because in order to build confidence, I needed to do the same thing. Well three times. And you know what, it worked, I felt amazing. I built confidence in that climb and in my skills from doing that climb. So practice your sales conversation three times before you meet with your first customer. Practice. Or if you’re learning something new and you want to go try it out with the customer, I would recommend doing things a little bit easier to just put a little planning ahead of time and actually practice something new that you learn three times before you actually do it live. Now on the next climb on as we’re building up that confidence after a practice, I needed to develop some more critical thinking skills. So the coach, she had each one of us do a mock lead climb and a mock ballet. And just to tie this in briefly, it’s just, it’s basically clipping in and out of these holes that are bolted into a wall and, but there’s a lot of things you need to consider. And so it’s, what angle are you clipping in? Are you doing it the right way? If you clip in a certain way, you can fall and actually get unclipped and so you also need to figure out like how much rope you need, like how much slack in the rope. That’s not pertinent to sales, but what it is actually role-playing because basically when, when I was doing that developing these extra critical thinking skills, it was actually quite scary because I had just barely built my confidence up 50 feet up and you have to take your hand and sometimes you’re only holding with one hand, one foot to actually clip into something, so that was scary and so to tie this to what you’re doing, you’re doing with sales have you role play. it’s the close and asking for the sale and asking for referrals is most of the times the scariest thing to do for someone new. If you’re not used to actually going through and asking for the sale at the end of that sales conversation, that is very scary. Maybe not as scary as being very high up, but still scary. So role-playing that with somebody where you get different answers like yes or not right now, or it’s too expensive. Different common objections, it can help your person or help you really practice ahead of time and practice well and critically think around those. Roleplaying is something that should be mandatory in your organization and set as an expectation right from the get go. So having that fail safe is key. So climbing I had, I was tied into a top rope when I was practicing through this first mock lead and I was very lucky to have had that fail safe because I did fall off and it would have been very painful.
Think of it like this. Do you want to do things the easy way or the hard way? Setting up consistent role-play where you practice with actual responses from a customer and develop good comebacks in to common objections that might come up is super important. You practice the role play through the end of your sales conversation, through the end of a referral, asking for referrals. Or the hard you get caught like a deer in headlights and then you think through the things that you could’ve said afterwards. If you’re meeting with a real customer and not practicing and role-playing ahead of time and if you’ve done things the hard way, you’ll burn through that war market and and then get the hang of it right? Get the hang of it after you do it about three or four times and, and have regrets.
So we don’t want that. So the three keys, the three things to do to make more sales for you and your team members is invest in professional training, practice well, so perfect practice, makes perfect implementation, and role-play like any other professional company does. Then you will be prepared for your customers and you’ll be able to capitalize on those opportunities to serve people well. So thanks for listening to the podcast and remember if you want to sign up for one of our free trainings on sales, recruiting or leadership, good to emergesalestraining.com/freetraining. Or if you want to set up one for your team, contact me AJ@emergesalestraining.com. I hope you have a great day.