4 Best Tips to become the Best Salesperson

Hey all you Future 4X’ers…thanks for joining me for another episode.  I’m Kelly Johnston the founder of the 4X Formula Real Estate training program.  Today we are going to talk about the 4 BEST TIPS to become the absolute best SALESPERSON!!!

Now before we get into these 4 Tips, which I know will surprise you once you learn what they are…I think it may be a good idea for you to learn a little about my background.  Here are some little snapshots of me growing up.  I grew up on a Farm in a small town in Western British Columbia, Canada.  We were a first generation farm so there was a lot of financial struggle.  I was the oldest child, so a little more responsibility was put on me to help out on the farm.  I had chores before and after school.  We had a chicken farm and we sold eggs to a grocery chain.  The name of our farm was called – wait for it.  “Scrambled Acres”.  I always thought that was a pretty good name.  We also sold eggs out of the house, so, at the age of 8, I was dealing with customers, when they stopped by to buy eggs, and I actually made change for people.  I didn’t have an electronic till telling me how much change to give back.  I knew how to “count back” change to people and wish them a good day afterwards.  Actually, counting back change is a lost art now.  Some of you have no idea what I’m talking about.  Here’s a quick explanation.  If I sold a dozen eggs for $1.50.  And someone gave me a $5 bill.  I would count it back.  “Ok so $1.50 here is 50 cents which makes 2, and 3, 4, 5.  Thank you very much have a nice day”.  We would call that “counting back change”.  So, I became very comfortable with dealing with customers coming in and have them leave with a smile on their face.  This was my first experience with the transactional part of things and understanding that in order to build trust it was important to ensure that the customer knew they were being treated fairly.  Counting back change was part of that.

Then, as I got older, I gravitated to the service industry.  I remember working at a gas station and we had a lot of regular customers.  At the time, a lot of people were still smoking cigarettes and gas stations were the place to buy them.  After a while, I started to memorize, the brand of cigarettes that people would want to buy and when they walked into the shop, I would already have them on the counter and I would welcome them by name and ring it up on the till.  That always made them smile.  It was a small wow factor.  But it was a wow factor.  There are people who still remember me from those days.  Why do you think that they remember me?  I think it was because of that.  It was a “mini wow factor”.  This is the late 80’s and early 90’s remember.  Then, I remember, one day, the General Manager of the car dealership across the road from the gas station, came in one day to fill up his car and I just simply said to him; “Hey Bob, I should be selling cars like you instead of walking around in this monkey suit”  I had to wear overalls back then.  We were a full service gas station.  We had to “jump to the pump”.  He looked at me, and said, “Why don’t you? I’ll hire you.”  I told him I had no idea how to sell cars.  He told me to put on a nice shirt and come see him the next day.  He said, I’ll teach you.  So, I did.  I put on my grey suit jacket and pink tie and went to see Bob.  He hired me on the spot.  I gave my two weeks notice and started in Car Sales at the local Chrysler Dealership which was literally located across the street from the gas station.  My 3^rd month, I was top salesperson for that month.  I delivered 12 cars that month…I eventually moved on after about a year, because I didn’t like the idea of waiting for people to come in the door and the whole “up system” and stuff so I moved on.  The way the car sales business was, at the time, also kind of bothered me.  But that was my first experience with getting that little rush from the sale.

That idea of making more money if you did a little bit more.  That feeling of independence and that swagger that happens when you make an achievement.  This is where the lessons started.  I had no understanding of money.  The difference between “making a living” and “success”.  The thought or idea, of being “successful” had never really entered my mind.  I just never considered it.  That was for other people with more advantages than me.  Does that make sense?  But I think that is when the seed was planted.  I earned more money than I had ever earned in my life in that month.  That General Manager of that car dealership, Bob was his name, has no idea what he did for me.  I am thankful for that opportunity that he gave me.  So that’s a little bit about me.  Whatever past you come from….remember there are always lessons there to draw upon.  Ok, let’s get to it.  The 4 Best Tips to become the BEST Salesperson.  The First thing that is the foundation to it all.

This is where it all starts, and that is, your definition of success.  #1 thing that needs to occur immediately so that you establish a platform to create success in your life is to DEFINE SUCCESS.  What is success to you?  You need to get clear on what you need to financially “Survive” and then you need to get really clear on what “Thrive” is.  You need to get out of Survive and get to Thrive.  The greatest thing about sales is that if you work harder, if you get more creative, if you learn and apply, if you serve well, if you create loyal customers and clients, if you learn to find ways to be better than your competition, you will enjoy successes, and if you enjoy some successes you can stretch your brain…you will start to see possibilities…you can become incredibly empowered by that.  Think of this for a second.  Once you blow up a balloon and then deflate the balloon the rubber is now stretched.  It doesn’t go back to the same shape.  That’s what happens to your brain.  So Define Success.  Make sure you understand what success means to you and it better be more than survival.  Set the bar to a place that is more than that…ok?  Stretch your brain.  By the way…this is your definition and nobody else’s.  This is personal to you.  Your plan.  Engage other people that you trust and love by sharing the plan.  That’s ok.  Consider this quote:  “If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much. ~ Jim Rohn”  –Its your plan.  If you don’t make the plan and take control of that, then you will just float around and not feel any sense of control.  We as humans are meant to strive for things.  That is how we are built.  If we submit to the job mentality, then we submit all other things, including what we are worth per hour, and other rules get applied to our lives.  If we are in sales, we make the rules, and we control the design of our lives.  Does that get you fired up? 

Ok.  Next-#2 – TRACK Success – Define LEAD Measures and LAG Measures.  What the heck does that mean?  Well I think that once you define what success is to you then you need to break it down to a plan to achieve that success.  This the Goal Setting aspect of things.

“The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don’t define them, or ever seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them.” ~Denis Waitley  

Until you have put it down in writing, or committed the thought pattern, to define what success is…its a dream.  It’s a “wouldn’t it be nice”.  It’s a “that would be great”.  Its outside of you.  Its not attached to you.  There’s no accountability there.  It’s called Wishing & Dreaming.   Its not tangible.  Does that make sense?  So, it has to become real.  It becomes Real, when, you first define what success is for you to thrive.  This will change by the way.  Over time, it will change and that is ok.  But commit to the destination.  It may be just your first destination…and then you set another one.  Make sense?  The journey of discovery along the way is the greatest thing about this….so you have to embark on the journey.  Get into Momentum.  But you have to Track things along the way.  This is where the LEAD and LAG measures come in.  You must measure along the way.  You need to know the benchmarks, and measuring sticks to keep you in your lane.  This is non-negotiable.  You gotta keep score.  You have to know the mini goals along the way, to know whether or not you are on track.  You need to know when you are staying somewhere too long.  Getting too comfortable.  You need to be aware of when its time to rev things up. Right?

Part of your week has to be devoted to recording the stats.  You need to know when you are off track or going down a path that is less fruitful for your business.  The LAG Measures are easy.  The Lag measures are the end of the month or end of the year totals from the mini successes that you enjoyed along the way.  The Commission Cheques.  The amount of deals that complete and payout on a monthly basis.  The Gross Commission Goal…those are all lag measures and they are easy to measure.  The LEAD measures are the things that need to be accomplished, in order to get the LAG measures to happen.  Does that make sense?  Ok.  So, what are LEAD Measures.  Well, in our business, of Real Estate, the first thing is… – LEADS.  What is a LEAD?  A lead is your target market of people that you want to help.  People that have contacted you in some way.  OR someone that you have made contact with.  Something has happened.  Some sort of interaction has taken place.  Record all leads.  Next, what does it take for someone to move from LEAD to CLIENT?  You have to define that.

What is the process?  What are your conversion rates?  Do you know how many leads it takes to convert to a Client?  Where do your LEADS come from?  What activities are the best for you to you put your time and energy, in order to attract those leads?  What is the best use of your resources?  What is the follow up sequence?  How do you define, the NOW, SOON, FUTURE clients and how should you nurture your PAST Clients to get more LEADs?  What activities bear the most fruit?  Keep track of everything so that you know your business.  You know where to spend your time, energy, and money in order to meet your LEAD measure goals and eventually your LAG measure goals.  Ok?  Make sense?  Great Sales People know this about their businesses.  Great Salespeople are clear with who they serve.  Great Salespeople measure everything.  You cannot change or improve what you don’t measure.  Right?  Ok #3 – LEAD ALIGNMENT.  Align with your Customer or Client.  Ok before I go any further…I have to tell you something else about myself.  There is something that I hear other Real Estate people say….or even other Real Estate Trainers and Coaches say, and it is makes me cringe every time.

I hear it all the time and it is like the sound of this.  –> a Dentist Drill.  OR Nails on a Chalkboard  OR…or the sound of this person’s laugh… That’s actually kind of funny. Its, the WORD Customer.  AAAH!  I can’t stand it when people refer to our Clients as Customers.  Why would we ever refer to people that we serve as Customers?  That is horrible.  By the way – I simply added the word “Customer” in there so that anyone in Sales can watch this video and get value, but if you are in Real Estate and you refer to the people that you help as Customers, respectfully…can you stop it please?

So for the rest of this Video I will use only the word -Clients.  Align with your Client.  Every Client is different.  Every single one.  This is why the Real Estate professional will always be relevant.  Always.  This is where you take the time to get everything in order.  You gather information.  You create understanding. You set the standards.  In some cases, you train your client to how you operate. How you are different? Treat people as Valued Clients and Inadvertently what happens is, you create a solid foundation of trust.  You set expectations.  You become predictable to them.  You bring Clarity to the situation. And that gives them comfort.  This is what I mean by aligning with your Client.  You drive the bus.  You have a system.  You are in control.  You are worthy of their trust.  You are competent.  You are the one who will get them what they want.  Whether it is NOW – SOON – or sometime in the FUTURE.  You will be the one who they will contact.  You are part of their life and you are part of their eventual plan.  When you invest the time and energy to do that, you create a solid foundation for Relationship, and you will create a raving fan client who refers business to you no matter what stage they are at in the process.

This is where you win.  Sales People always want the NOW business.  But they don’t understand that NOW is not always the best time for people to make a major life change.  Its totally true.  These people need to trust in your advice.  This is what those salesy people miss.  They miss out on, all of the business that comes from those people.  Does that make sense?  Here is a quote from Kelly Johnston…the inventor of the 4X Formula…you may have heard of him.  He’s kind of a big deal.

“A LEAD or a CLIENT is worth more than 1 DEAL to you.  The Lifetime Value of that contact is something that is hard to quantify…but imagine if you treated every person like they were worth 10 Deals to you.  How important are they to you now?”

Alright let’s move on to #4 – LEAD SEQUENCE.  DESIGN the Client Sequence – The Ultimate LAG Measure or Our Annual Gross Income is in direct proportion to the amount of people that we serve.  Contacts made.  Leads Geneated.  Clients Served.  So, I think that you would agree that if we serve more, then, we earn more.  But here is where the confusion sets in:  When we get into the more, more, more, mode of thinking we end up losing sight of the fact that we are dealing with people.  These people all have lives.  They all have stresses.  They all have a whole pile of complications and variations and considerations that effect their decisions.  After we have taken the time to understand them by aligning ourselves with their needs, wants and desires…we design a process that is custom tailored to them.  This is how you systematically help people at the level that they need your help.  You build value into their lives.  You introduce them to people that are part of your team to help them.  You create and suggest solutions to their challenges and you stay top of mind.  You are of great importance to them throughout the whole process.  You are more than a Real Estate Agent now, aren’t you?  You become THEIR Real Estate Agent.  You gravitate from THE Real Estate Agent or THAT Real Estate Agent to THEIR Real Estate Agent. So, this is the cool part…When you understand the sequence, you begin to experience more people naturally gravitating to the NOW category naturally.  The SOON people and the FUTURE people and the PAST people all move to the NOW category at some point if you know how to focus your daily, weekly, monthly activities, and this is the magic.

This is the differentiator.  The MORE, MORE, MORE  – NOW, NOW, NOW mentality creates casualties.  IT actually creates loss.  You lose more than you can gain.  It’s like a bathtub with a hole in it.  The faucet (you time, money and energy) has to be on full blast to keep up with the water leaving the tub.  The SOON and FUTURE and PAST clients are all leaving through the hole in the bottom and the NOW business is barely keep up.  Its really simple actually.  We just have to plug up the hole and then turn on the tap when we need to.  Does that make sense?  That’s you LEAD SEQUENCING plan.  See how important that is?  Alright so now let’s summarize.  The 4 Best Strategies for the Salesperson in any business are to employ these strategies with the end goal of plugging the hole in the tub.  IS #1 – First DEFINE SUCCESS and then #2 – TRACK SUCCESS  #3 – LEAD ALIGNMENT  and #4 – LEAD SEQUENCE.  The old school way of the Sales Process for the Master Sales-Person was – Get Leads – Get them to Buy.  Get Leads – Get them to Buy.  Overcome objections…get them to talk themselves into it.  Use tricky sales scripts to fool them into the YES.   The new way is simply this. Apply these questions and get you create the answers.

WHY ARE YOU RELEVANT TO THEM?  WHAT IS YOUR VALUE TO THEM?  HOW ARE YOU DIFFERENT?  WHY SHOULD THEY TRUST YOU?  WHAT CAN YOU PROVIDE TO THEM TO HELP THEM THROUGH THE PROCESS? – There are so many messages out there now.  People are being bombarded by so much marketing and they are having to discern all the time, what is real.  Who can they trust?  Who can they open up to, and allow into their circle?  There is a process that everyone goes through and we have to be there to help them through it.  This is our job.  This is what we do.  Showing homes and writing deals….Listing properties and processing deals and negotiating offers is the easy part.  That’s expected of us.  That’s the minimum expectation…  The WOW factor for them is the WOW factor for them.  Not what we think should be the WOW factor for them. They determine the wow factor.  Find out what that is for them and then do it.  Make it happen. Does that make sense?

Successful people are not worried about the business coming to them.  Successful people are more concerned about how they structure their days and hours in their calendar to get the most out of their day and effect the most people they can in a positive way.  Imagine if that was your focus was every single day.  Imagine if you had a constant funnel of people contacting you to help them out.  Never-ending streams of referrals coming to you on a weekly basis…imagine that.  You can have it.  You can.  Any one of you watching or listening right now can have that.  I want that for you.

Go to 4X formula.com to learn more.  Take the free training and see if we are a good fit for you.  If you haven’t already please hit the subscribe button below and make sure you hit the little bell so that you get notified when a new video drops.  If you take the time to comment below, I promise I will comment back.  Your feedback is really important.  I appreciate you watching and listening.  Make a great day!