Holy smokes! Its 2011!

Whoo-hoo! I hope you are as fired up about this year as I am. And if you’re not, let’s see what we can do to start your engines! The big question is:

What do you need to do to double your joy, or your income in 2011? Please shoot me an email with your thoughts! I really want to know!

This week, we’re excited to be hosting a private Presentation Gravity workshop a few select clients. So I wanted to give you one of the tips I’ll be sharing to help you power up your sales this year! If you have found that not enough people say “yes!” to meeting with you, or that they say “yes”, and then later cancel, then you’ll want to keep reading. You’ll find this to be quite helpful (and probably quite profitable) in 2011!

One of the most common problems I see happening with my coaching clients is that they have no true sales process or system in place. They book a meeting but they don’t “prepare it” for success. I have found in my own personal experince that preparing your prospect properly (or not) can mean the difference of thousands in rewards (or loss).

So a typical “sales process” might be:

1) call a prospect

2) book a sales presentation or speaking engagement

3) go deliver it

If this is what you are doing, and you are not “rolling” in results, then pay close attention to what I am about to reveal because it is simple AND a game changer.

Booking an opportunity / appointment / speech is not “winning the game” just gets you “IN the game”. So consider that the beginning of the event, not THE MAIN EVENT. Now your job begins. So what happens next? Shift your thinking to a three step process. 1) Focus on what you do prior to your presentation. 2) what do you do during the presentation. 3) how to do follow up afterward.

1) Prior to the presentation your #1 goal is to build three critical things: trust, rapport, and excitement. These are three things that will help book more meetings and keep more meeting on your calendar. Remember that once your prospect says yes to meeting with you and hangs up the phone, they are sent back into the big bad world, and anything can happen. So protect your investment!

Review the way you approach your appointment confirmation, your pre-appointment research, and your appointment reminders. (if these things aren’t in your sales process yet, stay tuned as we share more information in the coming weeks) and look for ways to solidify your expert status, create connection, and build their anticipation for your meeting.

2) During the presentation your #1 goal is to educate, engage, and enlighten your audience (of one or many). Educate your prospect on your area of expertise. Engage and entertain so that they can fully absorb your message. Finally, your job is to enlighten your prospect about what they still need to know or gain. What is still missing? This provides the opportunity for you serve them even further through your products or services.

3) After the presentation your goal is to continue the relationship. You can do this through follow up calls, customer service, additional offers, newsletter, articles and other educational pieces.

One of the best follow up’s I have ever seen is CD’s baby order thank you email. I won’t reprint it all here but it starts like this:
“Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.”

The GREATEST ever. Love it. Its makes me want to raise my game, and I hope it does the same for you!

I am so excited to see what you accomplish in 2011! Its your year to power up your results and step your business into the spotlight!