Blueprint: Professional Selling

By Carl Stevens

For years, it’s been clearly recognized that 20% of the sales people produce 80% of the sales. What hasn’t been clear is just why this is so. Taking it as a personal and professional challenge, Professor Carl Stevens interviewed over 10,000 of the top revenue producers in over 50 countries to discover the surprising answers to their success. More importantly, his ground-breaking book, Blueprint: Professional Selling, clearly shows how you can do it, too.

Learn the secrets of success that thousands of sales professionals have paid thousands of dollars for at comprehensive 2 1⁄2 day seminars led by Professor Stevens. Find out why these same sales people became selling superstars, commonly reporting sales increases of one hundred and even as much as five hundred percent. Follow the Blueprint to “Make more sales. Earn more money. And have FUN doing it.” Order your copy of this ground-breaking work today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carl Stevens
• Release date: Jul 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452422732

Carl Stevens

Who is Carl G. Stevens? Professor Carl G. Stevens is the Founder and President of Carl G. Stevens and Associates. CSA has served as consultants to corporations, trade associations, and professional agencies. He has traveled to over 50 countries, speaking and teaching his unique The Blueprint for Professional Selling. Carl G. Stevens, BA, MS, CPAE is a world class authority in the field of professional sales education and effective interpersonal communication. Carl G. Stevens, CPAE* . . . . . ...Inducted into The Speakers Hall of Fame - The highest award in professional speaking. The prior 150 recipients include President Ronald Reagan, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Art Linkletter and Zig Zigler. ...received from Texas A&M University, “The Outstanding Sales Educators Award for the Decade. ...is a Charter Director of “The Center for Professional Selling and Sales Management” at Baylor University. ...Charter Director Advisory Board, University of Houston - ‘Sales Excellence Institute’. ...served as Corporate Director of companies covering a broad spectrum of products and services. ...customized sales and sales management manuals for national and international associations and corporations. ...the co-author of Selling, a college text book being used in all 50 states and Canada. ...is the co-author of Agri-Selling, a text book being used in the first ever four-year degree program “Sales and Marketing” at Purdue University. ...co-authored The Secrets of Super-Selling: How to Program Your Subconscious, Berkley Publishing, now in seventh edition. ...Visiting Professor in the Marketing Department at Baylor University, for two years. ...has served as a Professor of Marketing at Franklin University, and Lecturer at Ohio State, Purdue, University of Houston and Texas A&M. ...is the designer of the unique Blueprint for Professional Selling Seminar which graduates have called “a college education in selling.” ...created The Coaches Clinic for sales supervisors who have the responsibility for continuing sales education and motivation. ...developed the Effective Executive Communication, teaching state-of-the-art intrapersonal and inter-personal verbal and non-verbal communication skills. ...is the author of How Winners Win, a workshop curriculum on how to program your subconscious to get what you have always wanted. ...produced Advanced Studies in Professional Selling, an audio series with companion 201 page illustrated workbook. ...traveled over one million miles in the past 10 plus years working on six continents. ...has been described as “...a Will Rogers who has been to Yale... a Mark Twain-type humorist.” ...is one of only three men in the United States to have applied the success of behavioral psychology, demographics, and statistics to sales recruitment and training.” The Gallagher Sales Executive Report. ... is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, with degrees in Psychology and Business. Graduate studies in Law and Advertising. ...has always been number one in his personal selling competition. ...is a member of the advisory board of Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business and the Houston Baptist University Department of Business. ...has been invited to teach at more than 30 colleges and universities, from Princeton to Stanford Graduate School of Business. ...has served on the faculties of the American Management Association, the National Management Association and the Penton Learning System. * * * * * *

Book preview

BLUEPRINT: PROFESSIONAL SELLING

by

Carl G. Stevens

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Carl G. Stevens on Smashwords

Blueprint: Professional Selling

Copyright © 2011 by Carl G. Stevens

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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Advanced Studies in Professional Selling

Table of Contents

State of the Art: Professional Selling

Blueprint for Professional Selling:

Introduction to Professional Selling…………..

Chapter 1: Developing Time Saving Skills/Time Management……

My Professional Planning Program…..

Plus Professional Sales Analysis…..

Chapter 2: Blueprint: Preparation….

Chapter 3: Blueprint: Attention….

Chapter 4: Blueprint: Examination….

Chapter 5: Blueprint: Prescription….

Chapter 6: Blueprint: Conviction/Showmanship……

Chapter 7: Blueprint: Motivation…..

Chapter 8: Blueprint: Completion…..

Chapter 9: Buying Signals…..

Chapter 10: Trial Close…..

Chapter 11: How to Handle Objections….

Chapter 12: As a Man Listens…..(How to Handle Irate Customers)

Your Most God-Like Attribute: Imagination….

My Personal Sales Presentation….

STATE OF THE ART: PROFESSIONAL SELLING

SUCCESS FORMULA:

What single, personal proficiency will most determine your entire level of achievement throughout life? Two thousand eight top business leaders replied, your ability to sell yourself and your ideas. - American Management Association

PEOPLE PROBLEM:

American industry’s main problem is distribution. Effective salespeople are the key to distribution …. A very high proportion of those engaged in selling cannot sell. - Harvard Business Review

CURRENT CHALLENGE:

Many companies are challenged with decreasing sales revenue and rapidly increasing sales costs. The total revenue spent on sales and marketing is now up 20% to 25%. The average sales call cost has soared to over $500 with one large chemical company reporting $3,000.

COST FACTORS:

The average cost for an industrial salesperson to call on a consumer or prospect during the last 10 years has increased, 318%. Over the past 41 years, sales call costs have risen 23 times over, according to the survey. * - McGraw-Hill Research

STATUS OF THE ART:

80% of the business is done by 20% of the sales force. - Sales & Marketing Executives International

ECONOMIC LOSS:

90% of all the work salespeople put in is worthless—only 10% of what they do earns money for them. Nine-tenths of all their efforts is lost motion—utterly wasted. - Prentice Hall, Inc.

POSSIBLE SOLUTION:

The areas of greatest potential for opportunity and results are to be given the fullest resource support - in quantity and quality - before the next promising area gets anything. - Dr. Peter F. Drucker

Salespeople need help and sales supervisors need help in helping them.

Selection and professional education of field sales managers has become one of the most acute problems facing top management. American Management Association Survey revealed:

Why?

Over half of the sales managers surveyed had never read a job description of what they were supposed to do.

78% of these sales managers were dissatisfied with their training or had never received any specific training to equip them for their roles as sales managers.

Only 1 out of every 44 companies surveyed had any kind of company sponsored sales managers training program.

Why haven’t our improved selling skills increased proportionally?

BLUEPRINT FOR PROFESSIONAL SELLING

The Blueprint process has been referred to by graduates as a college education in selling. Blueprint is a distinctively different, result-oriented curriculum designed to do the following:

Give the salesperson a thorough knowledge of the principles of psychological and motivational selling.

Teach the concerned salesperson how to structure his or her sales presentation for top-level persuasive impact.

Increase the salesperson’s self confidence by teaching them knowledge of what to do and the skill of how to do it — thus making them comfortable in doing it.

The Blueprint gives the serious sales practitioners what all the recognized professions have — an accumulated and documented body of knowledge, a generic language and a structured approach to achieve their objectives.

A Blueprint: My Personal Professional Sales Presentation, a highly structured four-page outline is prepared by each participant.

If a salesperson is not completely happy with their current sales and earnings, this may be a good time to invest in you. Does it really work? Ask a Blueprint graduate who has learned and used it!

What is The Blueprint for Professional Selling?

The Blueprint for Professional Selling is a digest of a full semester taught by the co-author of the college textbook Selling. This text has been adopted across the U.S. and Canada.

It is a response to scientifically determine why eighty percent of the business is done by twenty percent of the sales people. Why, is this true worldwide? What is the secret of the success of the one out of five? Is it documentable and transferrable?

Carl Stevens went after the answer… relentlessly, implacably, indefatigably...until the truth was revealed to him - a scientific approach to the art of selling. This breakthrough has helped hundreds of companies and thousands of sales people make more sales … earn more money … and have more FUN doing it!

The Blueprint for Professional Selling has been called a college education in selling. Why? Because it gives serious practitioners what all recognized professions have …

an accumulated, documented body of knowledge,

a generic language, and

a structured, persuasive approach to achieve goals and objectives.

The Blueprint for Professional Selling process has a completely different result oriented curriculum which structures sales presentations in the proper psychological sequence for maximum motivational appeal. These include ….

Programmed instruction with case studies,

illustrated workbook

audio-reinforcement to increase spaced repetition.

A Blueprint: My Personal Sales Presentation outline is prepared by each participant to assure that the quality of the personal sales professional presentation is equal to the quality of the product that is being presented.

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INTRODUCTION TO PROFESSIONAL SELLING

SalesWeek Magazine, the professional journal of Sales and Marketing Executives International, reported recently that in one year salespeople spent more than $300 million on sales development material. Clearly, salespeople are searching for help in achieving greater success.

This professional sales development text is designed to give you a college-level education in practical sales techniques.

By participating in this custom-designed and field-tested Blueprint for Professional Selling you have shown that you are willing to invest the same time, enthusiasm and effort that a student invests in a college course. The results will be more than worth that effort.

The National Sales Executives Digest surveyed several thousand of your fellow salespeople in an attempt to discover their most secret thoughts, feelings and frustrations about their careers in selling. Among the three most frequent needs stated were the following:

Specific methods for improving sales - not what to do but how to do it.

A complete understanding of the principles and techniques of salesmanship - and how to apply them in day-to-day selling.

Training in digest form. Readable, educational material - short, explanatory, illustrated, believable.

This chapter of your sales education course is devoted to a brief discussion of selling as a profession. The basic question to be considered here is this: if other recognized professionals purse their goals by a reasoned approach based on an organized body of information and knowledge, cannot the sales person do the same? Our firm belief is that they can. Indeed, to achieve their fullest potential, they must.

Therefore we must establish such bodies of knowledge and with it proceed to develop a sound and realistic approach to selling that really works. To do this we will make a careful study of the seven professional modules of selling. Just as the musician has seven different notes in the musical scale with which to work - you as a sales person have seven different modules in a professional sales presentation. We will consider them, one by one, in full detail, as the instruction progresses. Let us now consider them in outline form.

The first of the seven is the pre-approached or Preparation. Obviously, the more you know about your prospect’s need or want for your products, the more effective and convincing a sales presentation you will be able to make. When you know exactly what pre-approach information you require and how to find that information you will have greatly increased your chances for a sale. If your prospect doesn’t have a problem, concern, challenge or perceived need or if you are unable to convince him or her that they have a problem, then you no longer have a prospect! (You will learn how to use a Preparation Information Sheet that has been field-tested by other successful sales professionals.

The second module consists of getting your prospect’s immediate and favorable Attention in a way that makes him or her favorably disposed. You have only seconds to do this as you will learn experimentally when we study the attention phase of the selling process later in our study. (You will learn 16 ways to clear the attention hurdle.)

Third, you must determine what the prospect wants (immediate or primary concern) and why he or she wants it. In short, you must seek the prospect’s dominant buying urge. There are three distinct methods for discerning the psychological reasons behind the prospect’s desires. We call this third module Examination.

Next, is the Prescription Module. Here you make the prospect understand that you understand the problem and you demonstrate that you have a solution to it. You will learn how to master this most misunderstood and misused part of the selling