Skyrocket Your Sales, Part Two

Well, a ridiculous 36° in London today, and tomorrow could top the 100° day we had 3 summers ago.  With a terrific breeze this evening, I thought it’d be the best time to listen to Chris Howard’s second disc.  And I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised, as it’s better than the first.

Track 14 though is a disaster.  It’s about ten minutes, to a backtrack of elevator music which is the sordid lovechild of Manilow and Travis.  I say Manilow, as (although Copacabana is surely a classic) a suburb of Sydney today started to use his greatest hits to disperse what Bazza hmself termed teenage “hoodlums”, and I say Travis cos I just don’t like them, they’re ‘aor’ rubbish and Britain’s most successful country and western band.  Drivel.  You’re told to fly around the earth, behind the sun and ‘you are the light and the light is you’…. well, I can’t go on.  It’s clearly the hypnosis nonsense I’ve already expressed my views on.

Leave that one in its box.

The preceding sales skills are actually quite neat.  Some of the things mentioned you’ll recognise as hearing under a different guise, yet I quite liked the way he put them into a new taxonomy.  The 14 “Sleight Of Mouth” techniques do make you think about things you should be saying when you hear the same old objections.  Rather than re-categorise them all here, surely the essence of a good review is to provide overall, a nice balanced contention, and secondly, a flavour of what the vibe is, rather than reproduce the entire message.  So here are the few one-liners he came out with that I thought I’d hold on to:

• (on customer objections) “Don’t buy into their limitations”
• “Picture this, it’s 3 months from now…” (when trying to get a prospect to visualise how good their life can be with you)
• (when describing your ethos) “Not closing sales, but opening relationships – we don’t want customers, but raving fans”
• “Where you gonna be next year if you do the same as what you’re doing now?” (when someone wavers from being enthusiastic)
• (when encoutering a ditherer) “what specifically do you want from me to assist you in this decision”
• (and a cracker for when someone continues to say money’s a problem) “there ever been something you couldn’t afford to do, but was so important you had to do anyway?”