To become a high achieving sales professional, you must first become an expert communicator. Ask any sales person if they would like to make $250,000 a year and they universally say “yes.” But then look at the tool kit they use to pursue clients, and more than likely you will find that the sales tools are dull.

After 19 years of working with sales organizations in general, and high achieving sales professionals specifically, I’ve found that there are many tools that are prerequisite to advancing your income. These five that I will cover here are words and phrases that will create an environment with your prospect where they are telling you the truth. And since your most precious commodity is time, you can’t afford to waste it with people who lie to you.

1. “What would you like to accomplish today?”

I get called on by many sales organizations (some of them household names) and rarely, if ever, does a sales person start a meeting with, “What would you like to accomplish today, Bill.” This one question will save you hundreds of hours a year from working on things that don’t matter. It’s a way for the prospect to begin to share their problem with you. Just because the tool sounds simple, doesn’t mean it’s used.

2. “Is there any financial impact to this problem?”

I’m assuming that you’re not giving away your solution for free. And that in fact, there is a price the customer pays to buy and a price the customer pays not to buy. I want to understand the difference. By asking this question, you will start to learn what the financial consequences are for “not buying.” Then when you talk about your fee, the prospect will be comparing your fee to the cost of the problem. Sales amateurs will very rarely help the prospect make that connection. High achieving sales professionals deal with money more elegantly and eloquently. And this question will help you put money on the table without it just being about “your price.”

3. “Let’s do this.”

Get advances if you can’t close. “Lets do this” is a proven technique that allows you to talk about the next steps in the process while you move your prospect forward toward a final decision. Let’s suppose you’re an hour into the sales call and the prospect has shared with you some of the problems he has, but he’s still unsure of your product or service’s value. You want to go back to your office and study them prior to giving a proposal. In this case, you would say, “Let’s do this. I’m going to go back and put some thought into this and then let’s set a time we can come back in a week and take it a little further.” The better process manager you are, the better sales person you are.

4. “Here’s how we (I) typically work.”

Use this on the very first call where you’re laying out your process for getting them a solution. The high achiever needs to be thought of as an expert, not just in sales, but in the industry domain that you play in. Experts have processes and procedures. If you don’t have a sales process, get one immediately.

Letters are among the most popular means of communication throughout history. People loved exchanging messages through letters especially those that come far away. By now, letters were given new and different functions, most notable of which would be in business. Among the most popular type of business-related letters is the sales letter because it is a very important tool for reaching customers and prospects. This is why sales letter writing has been deemed to be a very important aspect in marketing.

Many entrepreneurs have observed the power of sales letter writing in capturing a significant portion of the market. As such, many businesspersons went their way on writing their own sales letters. Alas, not all of these aspirants were able to succeed with the materials they wrote. Some of these letters were not effectively written and were seen not to work as well as the others. It is thus important to know what makes of a good sales letter before writing one.

Here are some useful tips in sales letter writing:

- Gain Your Readers’ Trust: When your readers receive your mail, they should be able to put confidence in you so that they would feel safe to establish some business relations with you. The most common technique of doing so is by putting testimonials in sales letters to let people know of others who swear by your offerings. You may employ other tactics to gain people’s trust, what is important is for them to bank on what you say.

- Show That You Are Credible: Trust is just one step for people to give you some of their time, you also need to show them that you have something truthful to say to them. You should be able to show them that what you offer delivers its promise. Good means of doing this is by including scientific studies, successful stories and other materials that exhibit the truth in what you say. You need to show it more than you need to talk about it.

- The Letter should be Memorable: You can almost always expect people not to pay attention to your sales letter immediately. They simply might not need your product at the time they receive your letter, or they might not just be interested. However, this does not automatically mean that the sales letter is a failure – people can still respond to your sales letter after days, months, or years as long as they would remember it. If you can make your sales letter memorable, chances are the reader would be able to remember your products when the time comes that they are needed.

- Catch Attention: While looks are usually underestimated, it is important to make your sales letter writing very attractive whether you use visuals or not. It is not at all impossible to catch attention with mere words alone. Use bold statements that tickle your readers’ fancy. A boring letter would just end up in the trash with other junk mail. Be sure to make your sales letter writing upbeat and interesting so that your prospects would be enticed to read on and know more about what you offer.

- Give Clear Instructions: Winning trust, appearing credible, making your letter memorable, and catching attention is not enough for effective sales letter writing. It is important for your readers to be informed what they should do next by giving them clear instructions on how they could respond to your sales letter. Be sure to include how they can contact you and make it easy and convenient for them by leaving a mailing address, email, website, fax, or phone number where they can reach you easily. Of course you have to make sure that these are working well so you would not miss any customer.

Have you ever closely examined why some people are wildly successful at selling, meeting and exceeding every goal placed in front of them, while others lack either the self motivation or certain key skill sets to get them to their next level of growth and performance? After all, they all have the same product, the same tools, and the same compensation structure. They’ve all been through the same sales management-training program. In my experience of 25 years selling, building sales organizations and leading and managing thousands of salespeople, the answer has to do with the fact that virtually all sales’ organizations are comprised of four different kinds of salespeople:

1. The Performers – The Top Producers

These high achieving sales executives are the best at bringing in the numbers, but chances are that you spend a fair share of your time cleaning up her messes. Seems like they’re either sky-high or down in the dumps. When the performer is down, they are out of their selling zone, and productivity comes to a standstill. But when the performer is up, look out world!

2. The Professional – Another Top Producer

This top producer is very consistent, a total team player, even tempered, patient, and consistently bringing in the numbers. Professionals are also part of the elite members on the sales team, but they seem to be missing some opportunities that would catapult them to super stardom if they made some slight changes to their selling game. Instead, they stick to self-proven conservative approaches.

3. The Caretaker – Stuck In A Major Comfort

These are the sales executives that are simply stuck in their lackluster comfort zones — giving you a solid month about every third month, or giving you about seventy percent of what they have all the time. They have the potential, but they’re consistently mediocre. You just can’t get them to perform the difficult tasks that it takes to produce at top levels with any regularity. Worse yet, they’re passive aggressive. You say to yourself, “If I could only wake them up, they’d be right up there with the best.”

I was giving a speech on “Four People, Four Paths” to a leading company in the California real estate industry where I was emphasizing the importance of knowing exactly who you are. While I was quoting my book The Four Kinds of Sales People and explaining in detail the struggles and breakthrough opportunities for each of the four kinds of sales people, a woman in the audience yelled out, “Oh my God, I’m a Caretaker!” The crowd laughed and I congratulated her on her honesty and pointed out to her (and others who were not so forthright) the tremendous opportunity that existed if she made the conscious decision to change and begin doing the difficult things that it takes to produce top results on a consistent basis.

4. The Searcher – The One That Belongs In Any Career But Sales

All sales leaders have made some bad hiring decisions that result in sales reps that just don’t belong in sales. They perceived a sales career to be easy and they were wrong. Producing top sales is hard work. These misfits are consumed with fear, and if truth be told, they honestly hate sales. They have no real intention of making the necessary changes to be successful. You’re better off helping them find more fulfilling careers.

Do you distribute, re-sell or sell wholesale products? If you do, you will soon encounter what may be your biggest opportunity for success… or failure. A large order from your best customer. A large order that exceeds your current financing capabilities. If you deliver it successfully, you can count on taking your company to the next level. If you don’t, your competitors will be the ones that eat your lunch and take their business to the next level

So, how do you handle an order that is too large for your business? You finance it. How? Using purchase order financing.

Let’s look at how things work in your business right now. Every time you get a purchase order from a client you go ahead and order the product from your suppliers. You either pay your supplier upfront or using bank financing. The supplier delivers the product and then your client pays you 30 or 60 days later.

However if you don’t have enough money to pay your supplier, the whole transaction falls through. Purchase order financing can provide you with up to 100% of the funds needed to pay your suppliers and make the sale.

There are only three major requirements to qualify for purchase order financing:

1. You must have a purchase order from a large credit worthy commercial customer
2. Your supplier must drop ship items directly to your customer
3. Your sales must be final (e.g. no guaranteed sales or consignment)

I have a question for you? How is it that one freelance courier can make between £750 and £980 from courier jobs per week while another in the exact same circumstances can only make between £150 and £250 per week? What’s the difference between them?

In this article I want to talk to you about time management. One of the reasons freelance couriers are struggling is because it seems there is never enough hours in the day. While this is not true, the real reason is a wastage of time.

You see time is the only real modern currency we have today to trade with. You can’t save time and use it later. So how you use your time is a great and direct determining factor in your success a s a freelance courier.

I believe it is more important to work smarter then it is to work harder when both acquiring courier jobs or doing courier jobs so the correct allocation of your time is crucially essential to avoid having stress as a result of having to do too much in too little time.

To give you a rough outline of what you should be doing when you first start your freelance courier business, should make it clear as to why proper time management is so important:

1. You have to survey your area to scout and identify potential star customers. This includes customers from 2 segments initially namely private companies and courier companies.

2. You then have to present your business in a professional manner to these companies to build credibility and establish trust. This could be in the form of having a smart universal outfit or uniform with a company identity badge.

Large courier companies like CityLink, parcel force etc. all have their staff wear company close to establish branding and professionalism in the minds of customers. You should do the same.

3. Now that you have researched and surveyed your target customer base, created a professional image and established some sort of brand in the minds of the customer, you need to make contact with those customers. This is where you’ll start making phone calls, send out direct mail pieces, place classified ads and advertise on Google’s search engine.

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