What You Know About Selling is NOT True

By Owen Van Syckle

The #1 key to increase sales is innovation, but you can't innovate if you don't ask the important questions that inspire change. This book is a guide to accelerate your sales and take more market share.

Sales planning is run by people who do not want to be challenged. Is it possible they have been missing something that has been in front of them the whole time? In this book, Van Syckle uses his experiences as a sales professional and entrepreneur to explain WHY everything you know about annual sales planning is wrong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667852768

Book preview

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© 2022 Owen Van Syckle

ISBN: 978-1-66-785276-8

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife, my soul mate, my person, my partner, my co-parent, my cheerleader, the person who completed me - Lesia Van Syckle. Anytime you say, you know I can, go do it, I feel unstoppable. Thank you, Babe.

Table of Contents

Foreword

It’s Personal

Short Introduction

Book Recipe - How This Book is Laid Out

Chapter 1: What is a Fiscal Selling Year?

Chapter 2: How to Redefine the Annual Sales Plan

Chapter 3: Throw Out the Annual Sales Plan

Chapter 4: Head Trash

Chapter 5: More Thumbs, less Fingers

Chapter 6: How do I start the Fiscal Selling Year, NOW?

Chapter 7: Keeping Score and Playing the Game

Chapter 8: The Balloon Effect

Chapter 9: Sales Maintenance

Chapter 10: What May Be Holding You Back

Conclusion

Just In Case You Were Wondering?

Appendix

Notes

Foreword

I first met Owen in a sales training session a little over 4 years ago just a few weeks after joining a new company in a new industry, Travel and Hospitality. I walked into a room with about a dozen people from one of our divisions and I said to myself, Oh, here we go again, another version of ineffective sales training taught by someone who couldn’t close a paper bag. I would later find out this is what Owen affectionately calls head trash, more on that shortly.

Having been a participant in dozens of sales training initiatives over my 25-year career, where the shot gun delivery approach had everyone energized and thinking for a brief moment they now had the keys to sales success and would crush their sales number only to fall back on their old bad habits of trying to out-talk a prospect into a deal by applying a $25,000 solution to a $2,000 problem. Shotgun teaching rarely works and if it does, the student’s success was short lived and not consistent. After all, all sales training programs are like diets, they all work if you stick to the formula and the program. The problem with delivering training in this way gives participants too much information in too short a time period and further, requires the participants to make big behavioral and mental adjustments that are very difficult to do and maintain. Further, most people don’t stick to the formula they crammed to learn for very long and as such these programs rarely deliver the desired results. I’ve seen it time and time again and yet for some reason, we keep doing it the same way, demonstrating the true definition of insanity by doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. It’s nuts.

His Sales Academy breaks all the rules of traditional sales conditioning and unpacks your professional development into multiple acceleration modules all designed to build on each other. In a traditional sales cycle, you generate leads, make contacts with prospects, conduct sales meetings, make your presentations, and then move to account management if you successfully convert. In Owen’s program you move from lead acceleration to trust acceleration, into diagnostics and lastly referral acceleration. The word acceleration is the key. Over the course of 10 months, you break down each of these steps in your assigned pit crew and truly learn the program by doing, reviewing, practicing, and reinforcing in a group setting.

You see, most sales training programs typically attempt to boil the ocean on the topic in a few hours or at best a few days, and that type of mass information download delivery never sticks for long. In order for it to stick you need to break it down into logical steps that build on each subsequent step, much like golf lessons where you learn the grip, the address, the back swing, the delivery, and the follow through. You can’t skip or cheat the system. Successful selling is exactly the same. Each stage builds on the next in a succinct way. It’s both an art and a science and in order to truly transform your approach you must start with the most fundamental and powerful elements- your beliefs as Owen would explain. This is where Owen’s session began and differentiated itself from all the other programs I’d participated in and it was at that moment when the lightbulb for me went off, there is a big mental component that must be addressed first.

He would go on to explain what he calls the the results cycle in detail explaining that each of the four elements making it up were interdependent and had to be followed in order. As he put it, your beliefs ultimately determine your behaviors. In other words, if you truly believe your service or product is not worth the price you will not demonstrate the behaviors necessary for success. Subsequently, those behaviors, good or bad, will influence your relationships. He goes on to explain, it’s how others perceive you. All prospects and customers ask themselves the same simple question, can I trust this person?. The answer to this question will determine your success. However, once you can master your relationship or trust building, it will positively affect the results you get which in turn reinforces your

beliefs and the cycle begins again! This cycle is applicable to not only selling but in life. That’s when I realized this program wasn’t just a sales training program it was a sales acceleration program coupled with mental conditioning with far reaching affects that could truly change people’s lives.

Another component to the academy that was unique was that he and his team of facilitators interview prospective participants to ensure they are coachable and of the right personality profile to benefit from the program as it’s laid out. He then has each participant actually sign an agreement that clearly outlines the expectations of each participant to ensure the recipe as he calls it is strictly followed and that includes their previous 12 months achievements and the goal looking ahead. As they say, what gets measured gets done and, in this case, it keeps everyone pointed to an empirical success metric.

Further, he requires all participants in the sales acceleration academy to read and internalize Jack Canfield’s book titled, The Success Principles. Hands down one of the best guides I’ve read for serious and long-lasting personal development. Chapter one set the tone and is the cornerstone for the program… Take 100% responsibility for your life. Sounds simple enough but this is where that thing called head trash I mentioned earlier, rears its ugly head in a big way. Most people, including myself, try to explain a lack of achievement and accomplishment because of things and people outside of your control. This is a hard message for most people who have grown up being told, it’s ok, it’s not your fault you missed your year, your sales quota was too high, or that person went to a better school than you, they had it easy or she grew up in a better neighborhood and had all the right friends, or he knew the right people who helped him along the way, and so on and so on. They go through their entire life making excuses for what they haven’t achieved, don’t have, or can’t do and never take ownership of their lives, ouch. Once you come to grips with the