Steve Jobs didn’t personally teach me to how to increase sales. Like you I didn’t know him personally. I learned so much about how to increase sales from watching his actions and his life. Here are a few tricks I learned for increasing sales from Steve Jobs. All quotes are from Steve Jobs.
Technique #1 to Increase Sales: Don’t Expect Perfection From Yourself. Instead Pursue Excellence
“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”
“Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”
You will never be perfect. You will never enroll every prospect you talk to no matter who good you are. Don’t expect perfection from yourself. Instead pursue excellence. Excellence is not easy, but excellence can be reached. Pursue every sales activity with the mindset that you will do it with excellence in view. Always focus on setting a standard of quality. Everyone wants quality over price, even if they don’t admit it. What if you don’t currently sell a quality product? Find a quality product to sell. There are no shortcuts. Increase the quality of your product and increasing your sales is much easier.
Technique #2 to Increase Sales: Life is NOT Fair, Grow Up!
“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
“I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.”
“This is not a one-man show. What’s reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there’s a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they’re not losers. What they didn’t have was a good set of coaches, a good plan.”
Steve was given up by his birth parents. His planned adoptive parents decided they wanted a girl. He started Apple in his parent’s garage at 20. He was fired Apple by age 30. He was publicly humiliated and felt like a failure. He felt he had let down the entrepreneurs that came before him.
Failure is a part of life. It is part of the price of success. Failure is an event, not a person. YOU are not a failure even if you feel you have failed at something. Selling is a learned skill. I have failed in sales in the past. I was fired from a network marketing company at one time because I didn’t know how to sell. I found a great mentor and learned how to sell. If you have failed you can still increase sales by finding a great mentor, put a sales and marketing plan together and sell a product or service you love.
Technique #3 to Increase Sales: Don’t Live Someone Else’s Life. Do What You Love With Enthusiasm
“Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle”
After Steve was fired from Apple what saved him was he still loved what he did. He created what would become the most successful animation studio on the world. He was famous for using the phrase “Insanely Great”.
Enthusiasm is so important to increase sales. You must find a product or service you truly believe your prospect MUST have. This will help you effectively handle their objections and change their life. If you have found a product you are passionate about you must sell yourself on why your prospect should buy it. To increase sales you must have total belief in your product or service. If you haven’t found that product or service you are passionate about, keep looking until you find it.
Technique #4 to Increase Sales: Find a Need and Meet it. Even Anticipate Your Prospects Needs
“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”
“The products suck! There’s no sex in them anymore!”
Steve changed the world because he anticipated a need that the market didn’t even know they had. That is what niche marketing is about. To increase sales you must find out what your target market needs and then meet that need. When you know the people you serve well enough you can often anticipate what they need before they see the need. You can do this in every sales presentation because prospects have needs they haven’t even thought of. Help them see how your product or service meets those needs and your presentation will be almost irresistible.
Also Steve understood that numbers and figures are boring. He had to get everyone emotionally involved in the product to get them to buy and increase sales for the company. You eventually got the point you couldn’t remember what life was like before you had your computer or ipod or iphone etc.
To increase sales, get your prospect emotionally connected to the benefits your product or service will give them. How will it change their life? Who in their life could they help? What will it cost them if they don’t move forward? People make buying decisions based on emotions. After they decide to buy they back the decision up with logic. If you have ever heard anyone say “it was on sale”, then you know what I’m talking about. They bought emotionally and they back it up with logic by saying it was on sale.
Technique #5 to Increase Sales: The Power of “NO”
“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”
“I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.”
“It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much.”
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”
Steve Jobs was about living life on his terms and not wasting a moment with things he didn’t think were important. We all have that control. You’ve heard the phrase “terminally ill”. WE are all terminally ill.
There is so much power in the word “No”. Saying “No” will increase the value of the things you say “yes” to. You only have so much time here on this earth to help others. Say “No” to the things that rob you of energy and time. Say “No” to wasting you sales time doing nothing or engaging in negative talk about the economy. Say “yes” to bringing quality value to your clients. Say “yes” to activities that increase sales such as making your phone calls. Say “yes” to planning your goals and taking action on them. Say “yes” to leaving a legacy and living a life of no regrets. “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”
BONUS – Click HERE for a FREE video to increase sales, the “Trojan Horse Technique”
Kristoffer Thompson
Master Sales Coach
Increase Sales Training
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