Our first course was all about how to Master The Sales Process by setting up simple Groups and Plans to make sure that you are focusing on the important activities and not getting bogged down in administration. Check out the recorded webinar at the link below and please let us know your feedback in the comments.

https://www.fuzemeeting.com/replay_meeting/3a21281b/2284853
(We apoloize, but this was the first time we were using this screencasting software, and made a little mistake on the recording. There are 16 minutes of silence in the recording before we actually start, so once it loads, fast forward to about 16min20sec and you’ll be at the start of the webinar.)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTHuY7pQKKU

Studies have shown that people need to hear from you 5-9 times on average before making a purchasing decision. 

But, how many of us actually connect with people that many times before we get frustrated, give up, or lose track?

Email is a great way to warm people up to the idea of your offer, but you can’t hammer them over the head with it. Let’s imagine that you’re selling paperclips, and somebody signs up on your website to get your e-book or request more information. Chances are that you’re going to put them on a follow-up autoresponder. That’s great — Step 1 is complete, and you’re on the way to making sure that this lead doesn’t slip through the cracks.

There are two common mistakes, however:

1) You set up your autoresponder to tell them about your amazing 2 for 1 paperclip offer, and you tell them about it in every single email, sent every two days over a two week period. This strategy will undoubdtedly fail. If all you do is tell them about your offer and nothing else, they’ll stop reading your emails after two or three, and you’ll never connect with them enough times to get to the purchase decision.

2) They receive and read all your emails, but then you don’t do anything else. Let’s imagine they’ve received all your emails and like what they’ve read. You’ve included information about how paperclips can change lives, some anecdotes about funny things to do with paperclips, and peppered the emails with a few mentions of your amazing 2 for 1 offer. Now what? The next step to getting to a purchase decision is probably a phone call. In your last email, try some wording like this: “I can’t wait to connect with you on the phone to find out more about what your paperclip needs are. I’ll call you sometime tomorrow. If tomorrow isn’t good for you, just email me back and let me know when you’d like to connect.” Doing this gives them the opportunity to reach out to you, and also lets them know you’ll be calling. It’s a win-win.

We know that the fortune is in the follow-up, but that follow-up needs to be varied. Email is great, but it’s a one-way street most of the time. You can use any autoresponder tool to set up your emails to go out, but make sure you monitor where people are, and mix in other activities like sending cards, calling them, or posting on their Facebook wall. You can use the Relationship Builder in Oprius to automate those tasks, and make sure that none of those customers slip through the cracks. If you can automate a few of those 5-9 contacts, you’ll have more time to focus on the two most important ones of discovering your prospects needs and closing the sale.

Free Expert Autoresponder Review

Fill out the form below and an expert Oprius team member will review your Autoresponder or plan and provide you with written suggestions that will improve your sales results. Your email and information will not be shared with anyone.

For the last three years at Oprius, I’ve talked to people time and time again who have just found that they lost their momentum over the Holidays, and it took them a little while to pick things back up again.

I’m going to throw this question out to you guys — what do you do to stay focused and balance everything that’s happening in your personal life and with your home based business over the holidays?

Please comment below and let’s share ideas

The major thing that sets the winners apart is that they persevere through those times. Don’t believe what you may have heard about success in MLM — it does not come quickly. Getting rich quick is only possible through the lottery. For the rest of us, you need to work hard and persevere. The only way to do this is to Love What You Do. I think that Steve Jobs summed it up best in this short clip.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRoHtUjIkmY

Everything he says here is directly applicable to Network Marketing.

1. You need to love what you’re doing. Otherwise, you aren’t going to be able to endure the tough times and all the people putting you down.
2. Get good at scouting talent. When you talk with a prospect, you’ll need to identify quickly, without knowing them well, if they will be a good fit for your team, or if you’d be best to just land them as a customer and make them as happy as possible in that role. If you’re going to need to spend more time on training them because you know that they aren’t leadership or entrepreneur material, then maybe you shouldn’t pursue them for your team. The faster you can do this, the quicker you can move on to the next lead.

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Well, it basically means that you need to define as much as you possibly can about the people who you want to do business with. Within a target market, there are several “target audiences” that you should always try and define as well. By in large, in Network Marketing, everybody has at least two main target audiences.

1. People who are going to buy your product/service.
2. People who are going to join your team.

It’s really important that you spend some time to make sure that you’ve got those groups well defined. To do that, grab a pen and paper (or open up a document on the computer) and write down everything that you can think about them. Here are some examples that you may want to start with.

• Where do they live?
• How much money do they make?
• Are they married?
• Do they have kids?
• Do they have post-secondary education?
• Are they currently employed?
• What activities/interests do they pursue?
• Are they good with computers?
• How old are they?
• Are they predominantly male or female?
• Are they trend setters or followers?
• How big are their social circles?
• What are their media habits? (what magazines or blogs do they read)
• How will they use your product or service?

… Continued from Part 1

The bottom line is:

When a prospect gives you the “silent treatment,” it doesn’t mean you’ve lost the sale. It just means you don’t know the truth yet.

What you need to do is call and learn the truth.

Why is learning the truth so important?

Here are 4 important reasons:

1. You stop losing confidence in your selling ability. The “silent treatment” threatens our “hopeium.” We start blaming ourselves. We don’t know where we stand — a painful state of limbo. Our self-talk is negative and full of self-blame, and we’re on pins and needles wondering whether the sale will still come through somehow.

2. You increase your selling efficiency and decrease your stress level. Once you learn the truth about your prospect’s situation, you can either stay involved with the prospect or move on. I often say, “A ‘no’ is almost as valuable as a ‘yes.’” Why? Because it frees up your time to find prospects who are a better fit with your solution. This lets you work much more efficiently because you can quickly weed out prospects who aren’t going to buy. Knowing the prospect’s truth lets you walk away without that guilt-laden voice whispering, “If you give up, you don’t have what it takes.”

Learning your prospect’s truth translates into tangible results that equal real dollars. You’ll also put an end to the self-sabotaging stress that comes from living in “silent treatment” limbo.

3. Sales pressure pushes prospects away. When you respond to the “silent treatment” with calls and e-mails, you’re really telling them that you’re determined to move the sales process forward — which means you’re looking out for your needs, not theirs. This makes them mistrust you and run the other way.

4. The “silent treatment” — totally breaking off communication — is how prospects protect themselves from sales pressure when they don’t feel comfortable telling us their truth. The more we press, the more they run.

But the opposite is true, too. The more we relax and invite the truth, the more straightforward they’ll be with us. Prospects feel okay sharing what’s going on with them when they know we’re okay with hearing it.

How to Reopen Communication

After Anthony and I had talked about some of these issues, he said, “This all makes a lot of sense, Ari, but I’m still not sure what to say when I make that call.”

It’s simpler than you might think.

* First, simply give your prospect a call. (E-mail and voicemail are very impersonal, so use them only as last resorts if you can’t reach your prospect after several phone calls.)

* Second, take responsibility and apologize for having caused the “silent treatment”. Here’s some language I suggested to Anthony that will make prospects feel safe enough to open up and tell you the truth about their situation:

“Hi, Jim, it’s Anthony. I just wanted, first of all, to call and apologize that we ended up not being able to connect. I feel like somewhere along the way maybe I dropped the ball, or I didn’t give you the information you needed. I’m not calling to move things forward because I’m assuming you’ve probably gone ahead with someone else, and that’s perfectly okay. I’m just checking to see if you may have some feedback as to where I can improve for next time.”

When you respond to the “silent treatment” this way, the results will probably surprise you. You may even learn that the prospect has legitimate reasons for not having gotten back to you.

You’ll also find yourself more productive and less frustrated. It’ll make a world of difference in your productivity level, your stress level, your income, and how much you enjoy what you’re doing.

Remember…

You haven’t lost the sale. You just don’t know the truth yet.

Ari Galper is the World’s #1 Authority on Trust-Based Selling and the creator of Unlock The Game®, a new sales mindset that overturns the notion of selling as we know it today. Unlock The Game has been available for over 10 years and has made sales breakthroughs for business owners and entrepreneurs in over 38 countries. You can take a Free Test Drive of Unlock The Game by downloading Ari’s free audio seminar “7 Sales Secrets Even The Sales Gurus Don’t Know!” atwww.UnlockTheGame.com.

If you’ve been selling for a while, you’ve probably had at least one experience in which your prospect suddenly started giving you the “silent treatment.”

Anthony described this dilemma very poignantly when he called me a few weeks ago:

“Ari, I don’t know what to do when I get hit with the ‘silent treatment’ — you know, when I’ve worked with a prospect for quite a while, and we’ve had great conversations, and they’ve expressed interest in our solution — and then all of a sudden everything stops. I try calling them back once or twice. I even send a follow-up e-mail, but nothing. They just disappear. And I figure I’ve lost the sale, and I don’t know what I did wrong, or what to do next. It makes selling feel like such a painful and arduous process.”
If this has happened to you, you may have felt anxious and confused. You may have told yourself, “It’s not as if I’m the one who did anything wrong. I put everything into the relationship. How can I rescue the sale if I can’t even get them to talk to me?”

The “Hopeium” Trap

There is a pressure-free way to reestablish communication when your prospect starts giving you the “silent treatment.” But first, it’s important to understand why the situation happened in the first place.
Most of us who sell get caught up in “hopeium,” a comical term that means we focus our hopes and desires on making the sale. But hopeium can be a trap, because it’s impossible for you to keep in mind your most important goal: to learn your prospect’s truth.

When we fix our minds on the outcome — making the sale — we automatically begin anticipating how the process will go, and we also begin expecting that things will happen as we hope they will.
But if we’re in that mindset and our prospect suddenly breaks off communication, we feel lost, anxious, frustrated, discouraged, and confused. We become preoccupied with what went wrong.

We may even feel betrayed.

Is there any way to clear up the mystery?

Yes, by giving up your agenda and learning the truth about where you stand with your prospect –and being ok with whatever the truth may be. “But how can I learn the truth when they’re avoiding me?” you may ask. “And why do I need to let go of the sale?”

Let’s take the second question first. If you approach your prospect while you still hope the sale will happen, you’ll introduce sales pressure into the relationship. This will push your prospect away from you and destroy any trust you have developed with them. Instead, you can eliminate sales pressure by telling them that you’re okay with their decision if they’ve decided not to move forward.

In other words, you take a step back instead of trying to chase and follow up with calls because you’re focused on getting a “yes.”

… Check back at 12 noon Eastern Time for Part 2 and learn the steps on how to avoid the Silent Treatment

Ari Galper is the World’s #1 Authority on Trust-Based Selling and the creator of Unlock The Game®, a new sales mindset that overturns the notion of selling as we know it today. Unlock The Game has been available for over 10 years and has made sales breakthroughs for business owners and entrepreneurs in over 38 countries. You can take a Free Test Drive of Unlock The Game by downloading Ari’s free audio seminar “7 Sales Secrets Even The Sales Gurus Don’t Know!” at www.UnlockTheGame.com.

At the bottom right of the screen, you’ll see a new bar like the one below. When you click it, you can enter your question and jump straight into a conversation with somebody from our team. If you don’t see the chat bar at the bottom of your account, LiveChat is offline.

After fewer than 24 hours, the feedback has been great. Offering support this way allows our team to know what page a visitor is on while they are having problems, and quickly and easily give them links to appropriate articles or support videos in the Support Lounge. At the end of a conversation, users can request to have the chat transcript emailed to them for future reference. As always, if your problem requires is, somebody from our team will be happy to get on the phone with you.

As this has just been rolled out, we will be experimenting with how to manage it best as we get feedback from our users. Right now, the chat bar (just above) is always visible at the bottom right of your account. There is no way to remove this bar, but once you’ve clicked it to initiate a chat, you can close that chat by clicking the “_” at the top right of the chat box.

We would love to hear your feedback about this new feature. Please feel free to message us through the new feature, or comment below.

To Your Success!

-The Oprius Team