Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PAUL McCORD is a speaker, sales trainer, and consultant with over twenty years' experience training sales personnel from every imaginable industry. His sales training and consulting company, McCord and Associates, is a Houston-based firm that focuses on helping small to medium-sized companies develop their sales teams.

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Create the Kind of Client-Referral Network That Will Make You a Millionaire

Developing a solid referral base is the single most important――and difficult――task you face as a salesperson. Now you too can achieve results like the sales megastars.

In Creating a Million-Dollar-a-Year Sales Income, master sales trainer Paul McCord sets out a detailed, yet flexible course of action that has been proven to generate referrals in virtually any sales system or environment and in any industry. This easy-to-read, conversational reference guide features compelling real-world examples of common sales mistakes and solutions that will transform lost opportunities into real prospects. You'll discover how to:

• Generate a large number of qualified referrals from each of your clients
• Turn your clients into your personal sales team
• Negotiate for more referrals
• Avoid the most costly mistakes salespeople make
• Guarantee future generations of referrals
• Increase your sales production and income by 200, 300, or even 1,000 percent in just months

"Referral selling is a cornerstone of sales success. This amazingly effective and detailed plan will fill your pipeline with hot, ready-to-buy leads――fast!"
―Frank Rumbauskas Jr., author, Never Cold Call Again

"A very powerful book that will create many superstars within my organization. A must-have, must-read book."
―David Choate, District Manager, Farmers Insurance Group, Texas

"A great source for new and seasoned salespeople. It breaks through the myths that hold salespeople back and replaces those myths with a real method for succeeding in sales."
―Phil Himes, Regional Vice President, Capital One Mortgage Banking, Baton Rouge

In the end, the joy that earns this book a rare five stars is the practical, thorough and innovative treatment of referrals that can have literally massive benefit to anyone, not just in sales, who wants to connect with valued other people.-ChangingMinds.org

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Creating a Million-Dollar-a-Year Sales Income

Jossey-Bass

Chapter One

One of the questions I hear most often from corporate executives and salespeople is, "Why do salespeople fail?" Generally speaking, salespeople fail because they lack desire, commitment, selling skills, and/or training.

LACK OF DESIRE

A strong desire to succeed is a prerequisite for success in sales. Professional selling is a tough occupation. On most days, a salesperson will hear the word no more often than yes. At the beginning of a sales career or when changing jobs, each salesperson spends a huge amount of time prospecting for leads. In spite of the hard work that's required up front, sales can also be a tremendously rewarding and lucrative career-if you begin with a sincere, heartfelt desire to succeed. You must have a passion to make those sales. This desire can't be faked, but it can be fed. If the initial spark is present, training and encouragement will help it grow.

Many of us enjoy certain aspects of sales: signing a contract with a tough client; the completion of a long-term sale; earning a good commission; and having a significant amount of freedom and control over how we spend our time. On the flip side, salespeople work long hours with no guaranteed income and face rejection, competition, stress, sales quotas, and many other issues on a daily basis.

Desire is the need to accomplish the goal of selling a product or service. One of the definitions of desire is "the feeling that accompanies an unsatisfied state." Without the accomplishments of selling, the salesperson feels unfulfilled. The successful salesperson has an emotional need to be fed the fruits of sales success.

LACK OF COMMITMENT

Unfortunately, desire alone doesn't ensure success. I've talked with many former salespeople who wanted to succeed, viewed sales as a noble and honorable profession, and had a strong desire to make a significant income. Yet they failed because they lacked commitment. They weren't willing to take the punishment of being rejected more often than not; they weren't willing to put in the time required; they weren't willing to invest in themselves and learn the profession; and they weren't willing to take the advice, constructive criticism, and guidance of their peers, managers, and prospects who chose not to purchase.

Desire is the want or need to succeed, while commitment is the determination and willingness to do whatever is needed to achieve success. Selling is a demanding occupation. Most professional sales positions require more than 40 hours per week. Generally, a salesperson can expect to work longer and harder than anyone else in his or her company. Clients don't necessarily need you when it's convenient-they need you when they need you. And that can be any time-day, night, weekends, holidays, or during your vacation.

As previously mentioned, selling requires the commitment to work through a number of activities most salespeople find difficult and even distasteful. The sales process must begin with a prospect to sell to-and prospecting is the single biggest commitment killer in sales. More than any other factor, lack of commitment to work through the initial failure and frustration of prospecting drives people out of sales. Although it's a clich, the sales profession truly is a numbers game, and the successful salesperson needs to keep a constant flow of prospects in the pipeline. Most people who don't make it in sales fail because they lack the commitment and persistence to consistently initiate the beginning of the sales process-finding someone to sell to.

Salespeople have a number of prospecting methods at their disposal-cold-calling; buying and working leads; paying for mass direct-marketing campaigns; purchased advertising; networking; and, for a few, generating referrals from existing clients and prospects.

Cold-calling is a time-honored method, and also the most difficult form of prospecting. Picking up a phone and calling a complete stranger who will most likely say "no" is the most terrifying and discouraging part of selling. And we get to do it over and over, every day, until we build our businesses. Whether the sales are business-to-business or direct to the public, cold-calling flushes more people from the ranks of sales than any other single aspect of the profession.

Close behind cold-calling is working sales leads. Despite what most lead supply companies claim, sales leads are virtually the same as cold-calling, even though the prospect indicated some level of interest in the product. Unfortunately, other salespeople have already contacted many of these leads. Purchasing leads means you've taken one step forward in prospecting-you have reason to believe the person is interested in your product or service. You've also taken two steps back, because you know competitors will also come calling-and that will probably create a price issue.

Most new salespeople can't afford to create a marketing campaign through media advertising or direct mail. In a major market, a small newspaper display advertisement may cost well over a thousand dollars. Direct mail usually costs at least seventy-five cents per piece. Both marketing methods require long-term exposure to generate results. Consequently, the average salesperson would spend thousands of dollars before generating a single prospect-tens of thousands before generating enough prospects to stay in business. Another common prospecting method is networking through members of organizations, family, friends, and acquaintances. In many cases, this is where the salesperson finds his or her early customers and clients. It's a perfect place to start, but that's exactly what it is-a beginning. Most of us don't have enough contacts to generate major sales activity, although these early leads may sustain our businesses for a month or two. When your family and friends go into hiding, it's time to develop new leads!

A few salespeople are lucky enough to have their companies purchase leads, advertise, send out direct mail campaigns, and sell products and services, providing the salesperson with a few walk-ins or call-ins. But even these setups have serious limitations. Leads purchased by companies are usually the same leads a salesperson would purchase him- or herself, and the company divides these leads among a number of salespeople. Even industries usually considered to be "walk-in," such as furniture stores and automobile sales, tell new salespeople up front, "If you want to make money you can't rely on walkins alone."

Other prospecting methods include trade shows, seminars, and conventions. These prospecting methods have the same problems and limitations as those outlined previously, and may require a fair amount of experience, sophistication, and expense on the part of the salesperson or company.

The sad fact is, over 85% of professional salespeople rely on one or more of these prospecting methods outlined for virtually all of their prospect-generating activity. In my referral selling seminars, I ask attendees to list their top five prospecting methods in descending order, from most productive to least productive. When...