Steve Clark's Profitable Persuasion Podcast

About 15% of the salespeople in North America are responsible for selling 65% of everything that is sold. So to say that another way, 65% of every dollar that is generated in sales in North America is generated from approximately 15% of the salespeople.

That means the other 85% of the salespeople are scrambling around selling 35% of everything else and what I want to address is how you can become one of that 15% if you’re...

This year sixty-five cents of every dollar that is sold to purchase goods and services are sold by 15% of the salespeople. What is it that distinguishes these top 15% salespeople from the other 85%?

There’s a reason that sixty-five cents of every dollar’s worth of goods and services that were sold this year were sold by fifteen percent of the salespeople. The reason for that is those fifteen percent don’t possess these we...

If you're gonna maintain focus and achieve what it is that you want to achieve, do more do better, have more time off, growing your business, improve your life, etc., - it all comes back to number one: habits.

Habits have made us who we are and where we are in life because of the habits that we are engaged in. Every single thing in terms of the external circumstances of our lives is a result of our habits.

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It is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to say that with the things that we are going to talk about today if you will implement them, there is no reason why you can’t become 25 to 50% more productive than you are without working one single minute more than you are currently.

I am not a great believer in working more hours. I am a believer in working fewer hours and making more and in order to do that you have g...

Today, we’re going to be talking about the future of prospecting. How to position yourself as the ultimate expert and keep your pipeline full of high-quality prospects. So, that’s a mouthful. We’ve got a lot to go over and we’re going to spend that time going through that and when we finish today, what you’re going to discover in this session as you tune in here today, you’re really going to discover four things about this whole ne...

Let’s talk about this whole idea of the real reason people buy anything. For you guys, this isn’t going to be totally new, but what we’re going to do is I think we’re going to dig down a little bit deeper today into this whole concept and it is my hope that you will gain a deeper appreciation for the answer to this question about why people buy. So, here is sort of what you will come away with today as a result of this session, wha...

Probably the most frustrating thing for a sales professional is to give a presentation or a proposal and then receive a stall, a put-off, or a think it over and then waste countless hours following up and chasing after prospects that never make a decision. Sales pros can live with yeses and they can live with nos. But what is a killer are the think-it-overs, stalls, and put-offs.

Today we will be learning how to maintain c...

Let's start with this whole concept of why aren't people more personally productive and why aren't they more profitable or in a nutshell why don't they make more money than they currently make. And probably the second biggest issue that I encounter when I'm coaching or training, be it individual sales people or entrepreneurs, business owners, other consultants. The biggest issue that comes up over and over ...

Let’s start with this whole idea about what is mastery. I went to the dictionary and I looked up mastery and it had a couple of different definitions. One was the possession of a body of knowledge and the other was a complete acquisition of skill; it did not use the word “mastery” in either one of those, but it talked about mastery either being someone who possesses a certain body of knowledge or a certain skill set.

Now,...

We're going to talk this morning about having your best year ever going forward. And I don’t know if you want to have your best year ever. It kind of makes commonsense to why wouldn’t someone want to have their best year ever but I'm not going to make any assumptions that everyone on this call does in fact want to have their best year ever.

You may have had your best year ever this year and if so congratulations...

 The reason the top performers make so much money is that it is extremely important to them to make a lot of money. When someone says to me, money is not that important, I don’t really care that much about making money, I can promise that an individual has a very small bank account. And I’m not putting any judgment on the desire to make money, or the ambition to make money.

I’ll leave that up to you to decide whether or no...

 We’re going to talk today about how to develop an effective marketing plan that will bring you more customers, clients, or patients at will. And I think the key thing here is the plan. We are talking about developing a plan. And what I would say, since we are coming up here towards the end of the year, it would be a really good idea between now and the end of the year for you to sit down and take a blank sheet of paper or a big pa...

 We look at 20% and we say, “Wow if I am only productive 20% of my time and I am not productive 80% of my time, what is a real increase in productivity that I can expect?” And what I would say is, no one is 100% effective all the time. In fact, Dan Kennedy talks about being productive. If you can be productive 50% of your time, that is a heroic effort – to be 50% productive. If half of your day is productive, you have done a tremen...

 We are going to be talking about Focus, the Hidden Driver of Excellence. And as we talk about this whole idea of excellence and we take a look at that, it is really important to have a little background information. And to do that, we need to spend a little bit of time really talking about the brain and brain function. And it is important that you understand that, to have a little bit of background, frame of reference for this who...

There are a number of reasons for that. But before I give you the reasons, I’d like to hear maybe what your opinion of that is. Why do you think salespeople talk too much? And I’m going to make an assumption here, which is dangerous, that everybody on here agrees that salespeople probably talk too much. And you have probably been guilty of that yourself.

But let’s assume that we’re all in agreement here that salespeople ta...

 So hence the title Break the Rules because essentially in a nutshell, if you want the 30 second version of today’s session, I will tell you this: take everything that is being taught in your industry and do exactly the opposite. And we can hang up right now and everybody go about doing the rest of their day. That is essentially in a nutshell. For most of you, you are going to have a hard time wrapping your head around that because...

Today, what I’m going to do is I’m going to share with you how you can double that really without a whole lot of effort. It is not really difficult if you are closing 28%, 30%. It is not really hard to double that number. So that is what we are going to work on here today. To frame this, I want to really talk about what I consider to be a sales myth or a marketing myth that really is perpetuated by the marketing people.

A...

 Let's start with the whole idea of productivity and talk a few minutes about that. If you want to know what productivity is, I guess everybody has their own definition of productivity. But essentially, the way I like to think about productivity is that we're actually getting the results that we want to get in our life and if we're getting the results that we want to get in our life then we can be said to be producti...

You can find plenty of evidence that all the stuff that we were previously taught about goal setting is actually counterproductive to our success for any number of reasons.

And I think the biggest one is that it produces within us these expectations that when the expectations are not really met then we are very disappointed and as a result of that start to have all kinds of negative feelings and it just kind of spirals do...