8 Core Sales Beliefs of Truly Great Wholesalers with Tony Hughes

What are your core sales beliefs?

How do your beliefs align with those in other industries or other countries?

Tony Hughes has thirty years of sales leadership experience and holds personal and team sales records that have never been broken. He is ranked by Top Sales Magazine as the most influential person in professional selling in Asia-Pacific and teaches modernized selling within the MBA program at the University of Technology, Sydney.

He is an award winning blogger and the most read LinkedIn Author globally on the topic of sales leadership. He has more than 180,000 followers of his blog and Tony’s first book is a business bestseller. His next book, COMBO Prospecting, is set for publication by AMACOM New York in January 2018. Tony sits on a number of boards and speaks at conferences internationally. His clients include Salesforce, Oracle, TAL Life, LinkedIn, Red Hat and New Zealand Government. He speaks at conferences internationally in London, the USA and for Salesforce World Tour on 2017.

To inquire about booking Tony Hughes for your next event through Wholesaler Masterminds Speakers Bureau contact us at info@wholesalermasterminds.com

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8 Core Beliefs of True Sales Professionals

Mindset and competence are the foundations on which success is built. Yet beyond belief in the value we offer and behaving with positive intent in how we execute, we need a core set of beliefs that drive us. Sales leadership is defined by helping the customer achieve a far better state of affairs and here are 8 traits of sales people who thrive in competitive markets.

• The belief of an evangelist. Selling is first and foremost the transference of belief. We must truly believe in the our company, products and the difference we can make in the lives of those we serve.
• The passion of a lover. We must be driven with positive emotion and a desire to make it all about the other person. We do this by being curious rather than dominant; by giving rather than taking.
• The courage of a warrior. Don’t treat the phone like it’s covered in spiders. Face your fear and intelligently call someone after doing pragmatic research. Your success is far more important that your fear of rejection.
• The rigor of an engineer. Beyond being a warrior of persuasion, seek to be an engineer of value through research and truly understanding your advisors and their customers. Find content for engagement with new people through ‘trigger events’ or even better through referrals which are the fastest path and highest probability of revenue.
• The thoroughness of a forensic accountant. There is enormous opportunity hidden within the numbers. Analyze your territory, accounts and relationships; and encourage your advisors to do the same. Time is real constraint, which is why we must invest it where we can make the biggest difference and provide the highest yield.
• The diplomacy of a politician. Every organization is political in nature. Stay positive and align with winning agenda and the people inside the ‘power base’ who drive change and make the important decisions.
• The determination of a marathon runner. Sustained success requires more than skill, it demands disciplined persistence amidst pain and disappointment. Difficulty excludes the uncommitted. Keep going because it is what creates scarcity and makes you more valuable.
• The discipline of a world champion martial artist. Mastery is achieved by years of intentional repetition where we create the right habits to become instinctively competent in every aspect of engagement.

All of these can be summarized in one word – mindset.

Here’s the bottom line in what it takes to succeed in professional sales today. If you’ve got the right mindset you then need the right ‘narrative’ and provide value in the initial conversation rather than seek to sell them your product or service. This is at the heart of ‘insight selling’ and ‘value selling’, because you provide something of value well before asking them to consider becoming an advisor within your network.

Embrace Technology by Using LinkedIn for Personal Brand, Sales Navigator for Building Sales Pipeline, and CRM

Next, you must embrace technology by using LinkedIn for personal brand, Sales Navigator for building sales pipeline, and CRM for managing the sales process.

The people we are trying to reach and help are themselves facing a barrage of messages every day they come to work. Their inbox is clogged, their calendar is packed, everyone wants their time and their boss wants results without excuses.

Consider:

• An average buyer receives 100+ emails a day, opens just 23%, and clicks on just 2% of them [source: Tellwise].
• LinkedIn InMails are increasingly regarded as spam. Office phones usually go to voicemail as people race from one meeting to another.
• 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting [source: The B2B Lead].
• A team of 50 salespeople leave about 1,277 hours of voicemails per month [source: RingDNA].
• 40% of emails are opened on mobile first where the average mobile screen can only fit 4-7 words max [source: ContactMonkey].
• Subject lines with more than 3 words experience a drop in open rate by over 60% [source: ContactMonkey].

This is why it is essential to find the right channels to gain buyer attention and secure engagement. But there is a strange inertia to being human. Most fear public speaking, probably a bit more than death. Somehow, somewhere along the track, cold calling became high up on the list of loathing. Let’s review general fears in descending order of magnitude: Cold calling, public speaking, disappointing your lover, being fired, death, falling.

The phone is important because it’s an act of courage that inertia is battling or assisting. The more you do it, the warmer it gets, the faster the pre-call research, and the more confident in every area of your life; not just sales.

Facing your fears is a beautiful thing. Overcoming your fears and your ego is the biggest breakthrough you need to make if you are to truly succeed in sales. There is an amazing liberation that comes from not caring anymore about what people think.

Friending everyone and seeking to be a people-pleaser will not make you a trusted advisor. You can instead earn credibility by doing what’s assertive, hard, and courageous. Fortune will literally always favor the bold. As Lee Bartlett says: “If you can pick the phone up to 10 C-level execs and chew the fat, nobody is firing you and everyone wants to hire you.”

Written by Tony Hughes