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Speaking Topics SALES ACCORDING TO SUN TZU'S ART OF WAR
A winner must experience triumph in body, mind and soul even before he goes forth to fight his battle. You cannot make a sales call in the hope you might make a sale; you must already have sold your product or idea in your own mind before you can expect to sell it to another. The Eight Essential Elements of Winning 1. TAO: moral standing, ethics, righteousness. The product and the company culture need to be in line with Tao, righteousness. Without Tao, a short term profit is attainable, but long term success is not possible. 2. TIEN: timing. The timing of your products and your marketing strategy needs to be in line with the social timing and the universal timing. 3. DI: geographic conditions, assets and liabilities. How you utilize your company's assets and liabilities, as well as how each individual understands how to turn his/her liabilities into assets in terms of relating to their everyday work as well as accelerating the quality of one's life. 4. JIAN: leadership. How your leaders relate to their staff, customers and your suppliers according to the following five qualities: wisdom, trustworthiness, benevolence, courage and discipline. 5. FA: execution. An effective executive's actions will result in keeping the revenue coming in rapidly. Sun Tzu practiced rapid victory through "Eat what You Kill" and "Reward Results". 6. XU, SHI: the paradox of the real versus the unreal. 7. QI, ZHENG: innovation and tradition. 8. KNOW THYSELF, KNOW OTHERS: competitors, suppliers, distributors, buyers, customers, bosses, staff, the ever-changing social, economic and political factors, plus anything else that could effect your business that you should know. The essential elements of being a salesman are logically knowing yourself, your product(s), and your customers in equal measure.
One of the most powerful positions in any company is that of star salesperson. Nothing speaks louder than bringing in a profit for the company. Whether one is a man or a woman, when anyone brings in the profit, he or she will be highly valued and treated like royalty. When you define your sales battle plan, check it with the following list. As Sun Tzu said, “To engage the opponent, first follow the defined strategic plan. Then, reacting according the your opponents movements, make the proper adjustments." A just cause creates the necessary unity of purpose among the leaders and those led. The more you can justify the necessity of your product and service; the more empowered you and your team will be.
You just have the bad luck of running into your buyer when they are in a highly resistive mood. Don’t press it. Use the strategy “Pretend to Be a Pig in Order to Eat the Tiger.” Every salesman needs to learn to be a pig sometimes....
All business objectives are focused towards getting those dollars in and closing the deal as soon as possible.
No matter what your position in life, you are always your initial product—sell yourself first. Until you have sold yourself, there is no hope you can sell another product, whatever the goods or services. In fact, it is much easier to sell you than to sell your product because you usually have no direct control over the product you are selling. However, selling yourself does not mean glueing a permanent plastic smile to your face. The essence of who you are is the result of your self-cultivating and self-evolving as an individual and business person. If there is nothing substantial behind your eyes, then your fear, greed, desire, and anxiety will reveal the nothingness in your soul. If you haven't spent much effort on working to improve yourself physically or mentally by doing the right things and thinking the right thoughts, it will show.
"Eat what you kill" is the secret to operating any corporate or entrepreneurial project. To translate this statement into today's modern marketing and sales terms: create results. A salesperson may draw a salary from the company, but they cannot become a burden to that company. Like the lioness, you must quickly bring in the kill so that you can feed yourself as well as the rest of the company's employees. If you remember this, you will always be valuable wherever you go, whatever you do.
Do not think that your sales appointment is the time and the place to use your "three inch long tongue" to whip your buyer into submission. The more cleverly you “overcome” his objectives, the faster you remind him of the countless times he has lost verbal battles with his wife, his boss or smart-ass salespeople like you. Most sales courses produce a flood of fast-talkers and slick maneuverers. Today, buyers worldwide, without ever having taken a class, have gotten a second-hand education in slick salesmanship from previous salesmen. Thus, the more you talk, the more you will talk yourself out of a sale. Listen, and tune in to your buyer’s heart and mind. Once you have a clear grasp of his psyche, then release your super-focused mind power. Do not just look at his eyes; you need to look "into" his eyes. Like a laser beam seeking the target—be in control. Looking into one’s eyes and mind does not mean fixating on him like an owl. Being in control of your buyer’s mind, does not mean being psychologically overwhelming or bossy. The proper state of mind occurs naturally through the subtle exercise of your “focused intention”. Below are a compilation of the steps towards achieving this state for your consideration.
The salesman has a limitless boundary for achieving income as well a limitless depth for experiencing poverty and misery. The Chinese character for money consists of three symbols. The first symbol represents gold. The other two represent spears. The hidden meaning is that if you wish to seek gold, you need to use the weapon of the spear. But why two spears? Lack of money is more of a state of mind than an external condition. The character for poverty is also composed of three symbols. The symbols depict a man standing at the bottom of a pit, bent as if under a great burden. When you are full of fear for the lack of money, you are low in spirit and high in anxiety. You announce to the world your pitiful condition without having to say one word. The only reality that exists for you is your own mind. When your mind experiences the wealth of abundance and a lack of scarcity, your heart will burst with the joy of being free from fear. When your heart frees itself from being a hostage to fear, you become a new person. Out of the freedom of lacking, fear, and anxiety for earning money, the channel of money comes gushing like the Mississippi River.
The new sales strategy is not about how much you can talk, it is about what you say, and how you say it. Use words efficiently with intention, sincerity and power.
Make your self invaluable by bringing in the kill to feed yourself and others. How can anyone discriminate against you at your office, or anywhere else for that matter, no matter what your gender or race, when their survival is in jeopardy without you? This is the creative way of exercising the principle of Fa by preserving yourself through your ability to keep the money rolling in for you and your company.
The best way to ensure you have a long solid relationship with your buyer is to transform yourself from a seller to a “problem solver” for your clients, customers and distributors by becoming indispensably useful to them. Let people use you—but this does not mean let them abuse you. You become their strategic partner; not their personal valet and gopher. I have met people who have volunteered to become a servant to their prospects or clients. People will gladly take on a free slave, but no one will do business with their slaves or gophers.
If you don't generously reward your superior performers, most likely, you will end up creating your own competition. In order to ensure your own survival, generously reward those who bring in results for you.
Sales begin before you meet the buyer. When a salesperson meets a potential customer, the first thing that goes through his mind is “Good, this is my opportunity to make a sale.” Wrong. Your opportunity to make a sale occurs before you meet with your potential customers. I want you try an intuitive experiment with fishing. If you have never fished, you may want try to go fishing—or just go fishing in your mind. On this mental trip, you do not carry any bait with you. As a matter of fact, you do not even need to carry a fishing rod—the fish you want to catch do not eat worms. The fish that you picture in your mind are the people who buy your products. Sit at the edge of your mental river and concentrate on your fishing rod—or the imaginary pole in your heart. Do not leave your place until you can see you have caught your fish without using any bait. The fish that you want are not in the water; they are in your heart—see these fish in your heart. In your heart, mind, and soul experience your customers convinced your idea or product is just right for them; that they cannot live until they have it. Wherever you want to be in your career and whatever you wish to achieve, practice the experience that you have gotten there already. Once, when you truly own the experience of having accomplished that, the rest will be seen as merely going through the motions. While other salesman start to sell when they meet their buyers; you, on the other hand, know the time to make sure you will make the sale is prior to your trying to sell anything—prior to your meeting with your buyers. To the untrained eye, you are simply practicing traditional selling; but you know that you are embodying your own version of new and radical, unconventional sales practices.
Unless you can keenly identify your buyer’s motive for buying your product and where his/her Li (gain) lies in possessing your products and/or services, you do not know how to speak his language. By giving you his money, he intends to gain more than the value of the money he just put out. If he is not clear about this, then it is your job as a salesperson to point it out to him. Again, this relates back to how well you know your product’s selling points. For a salesperson, the battlefield is not the commission; it is the joy of “I serve”. If a salesperson misidentifies the battlefield and thinks he is fighting to gain his commission, there is no hope of winning the battle because there is no such thing as a battlefield of commissions—only a battlefield of the customer’s well-being. Being detached from your commission, become attached to your customer. When you are focused on money, you will lose sight of serving your customers and prospects. In fact, if you are hungry, it will often show as your desire to eat them up and your customer will speedily run from you to ensure that they do not end as your lunch.
There are battles you need to stay away from because you will only lose; just as there are buyers who you need to realize will never become your customers. When you do enough of the right things, in time, the math will add up and the absolutely desired results will chase you.
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