Winning at Sales: How to Get So Good People Say “Thank You” for Letting Them Buy

By Taylor A. Welch

Learn to master the #1 “lever” to growing your personal income: sales.

Every great invention and advancement in history took place because someone was willing to use their words to sell something.

Whether you are trying to grow a business, make more money, or simply live a better life, you need to master the game of influence. The concepts Taylor shares in this book have created dozens of 7 and 8 figure brands. Now, for the first time, he’s giving you the masterpiece “source material” to influencing human decisions.

He pulls on the personal experience of training almost 5,000 clients, hundreds of thousands of customers, and over 700,000 sales calls to teach you how to grow your influence without being gross. You will not only get better at sales, you will learn the secret art of human connection. Filled with models, concepts, frameworks and scripts, this book is a guide that you will read again and again to influence people to make decisions that are good for them and good for you.

Learning how to sell is about more than just what to say. It’s how you say it; when you say it; when to say nothing at all; and the emotional state you are in when you finally do speak. It’s about human advocacy and respect for your customer. And whether you’re brand new to sales or a seasoned professional looking for an edge, it will teach you to get so good that your clients and customers will say “thank you” for letting them buy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McCall Press
• Release date: Jul 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781636985398

Taylor A. Welch

Taylor A. Welch is an industry-leading business consultant who helps online training and education companies grow. His first company as an entrepreneur broke every record in the online consulting industry: 700,000 calls from sales professionals, 500+ employees, and 100,000+ online customers and students. But the stats he’s most impressed with are not the work stats—it’s everything that has been preserved while building the businesses: a good marriage, healthy kids, and ample assets that will allow his family to build a successful future. Based in Franklin, Tennessee, today Taylor manages a portfolio of businesses focused on making the world smarter, happier, and healthier.

Book preview

Introduction

Nobody reads introductions, do they?

I’m not trying to hit a certain word count for this book. It’s dense and to the point. So, we’re going to skip the introduction. Let’s get straight to the money.

P.S. There is a lot of audio training that accompanies this book. If you want to access it, it’s on the house (another way of saying you don’t need to pay for it). Use the QR code below to access the private library.

Download Bonus Content Below:

Primer

Everything in life is about influence, from winning over a spouse, to making friends or negotiating a raise. Get good at influencing others, and your world is limitless. Nowhere is that more evident than in the world of sales.

Learning to sell is about more than just what you say. It is when and how you say something, when not to speak but just listen. The secrets of influence are found in the subtle pauses before you respond. It’s the mood you’re in when you do speak. If you read this book, you can become pretty good at sales… if you study it, you’ll be in the top 10%.

Over the last decade, I’ve trained over 50,000 people on how to use my models to sell more products. A few years ago, word got back to me that someone I trained had used my frameworks to build a business that I did not believe in. It bothered me to think that someone was using my legacy to promote a junk product. It bothered me so much that I decided to stop teaching sales.

For years, I built my own businesses and stayed out of sales training.

Unfortunately, the genie was already out of the bottle. My models started showing up in places I never expected to find them. I had stopped teaching the frameworks in this book, but it didn’t mean that people stopped using them.

While grumbling about this to a friend, they told me if I really cared about the moral implications, I needed to ensure people learned these concepts with the ethics included. It’s not a matter of if people learn this material, it’s a matter of how. If I wanted to control how this knowledge is used, I had to teach it myself.

My style is very different from how sales is traditionally taught. That’s because selling is not about a transaction to me. Sales is ultimately about leadership. United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower once defined leadership as "the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it, not because your position of power can compel him to do it. A commander of a regiment is not necessarily a leader. He can say to a body such as this, ‘Rise,’ and ‘Sit down.’ You do it exactly. But that is not leadership."

To me, leadership is helping another human get where they’ve always wanted to go—sometimes through decisions they may never have made themselves. Yet it can easily be weaponized.

In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, one of the first things I learned is the code of ethics. I am not allowed to use my skills to bully, hurt, or take. My coach, who is a brown belt, could easily kill me, but he has a moral obligation not to hurt me. As a professional, he is held to a higher standard. Influence is the same way. This book can give a black belt in the art of persuasion. If you are not honorable with these skills, you could hurt people.

My sales methodology isn’t just about winning deals and making money. My moral code with my teams is simple: never take money from someone if it isn’t in their best interest to give it to you. These lessons are not designed to be used selfishly. I want you to learn how to use influence to improve society.

As a final point, I want to say thank you—not for reading this book, but for learning sales. There is nothing good in your life that happened without someone influencing you into it. Whether it’s Einstein influencing the scientific community, or Steve Jobs influencing the world to try out a new device—influence advances society forward. Sales is the art of influencing those decisions.

So, thank you for advancing the world—one human at a time.

Conviction

Do you believe that the thing you are selling right now is the greatest thing you could sell to another human being?

If not, you have vulnerabilities that we cannot cover up with sales tactics. In order for these frameworks to work, you must have conviction in what you’re selling. As John Maxwell says, A leader with no skills but great passion will always beat a leader with great skills but no passion.

If you learn everything about the product and you still can’t get yourself to believe that it’s the best product in the market, find the best product in the market and sell that instead. That’s because people are going to feel your energy more than they’re going to hear what you’re saying. When your energy lacks conviction, you can say all the right things, but people still won’t trust you.

I’ve worked with reps who have never sold anything before but were able to outsell seasoned sales professionals because they developed genuine conviction. This is especially important when selling something without a clear deliverable like consulting, training, or education. If you’re selling something intangible like this, what you are really selling is the transformation.

An automobile or a trinket is a simpler sale than an advanced coaching program, but it is also a deteriorating asset. While most cars lose value as you drive them, education can be multiplied to many times the cost of acquisition. Without great educational opportunities, the world cannot advance. On an individual level, education provides stability, advancement, and better quality of life. The prospect, however, cannot test-drive education like they would a car. It’s your conviction in the long-term benefits that will convince a person to buy.

My frameworks are based on the idea of helping customers get to an end that benefits them. This sometimes requires you to challenge people who may be stuck in their current situation. We will rarely, if ever, sell on features and benefits.

Instead, we will sell primarily around the ideal outcomes of the prospect.

The Point of No Return

One of my companies sells what I believe is the best-in-class product for monetizing human expertise. We are a large firm and help a lot of different experts build healthy businesses around their expertise.

Even with social proof, a wealth of case studies, and years of experience, sometimes a prospect will feel nervous to move forward because they do not perceive risk the right way. They believe that making a leap is dangerous. But the reality is that it is more risky to stay stuck than it is to invest a couple of thousand dollars to move forward.

A salesperson without conviction might hear the prospect’s objections and try to counter each one. In other words, they will cater to the fear of their prospects.

A salesperson with strong conviction will challenge objections directly from a place of service to the prospect. They will paint a picture of what the prospect would be trading away by choosing to do nothing. Many people don’t even like their lives. But they choose the dysfunction of their present situation because it’s comfortable. It is a risk to go into new territory, but that risk is much smaller than staying stuck in something you don’t like. Every single giant leap for mankind has come on the other side of making a risky leap of faith into a different state—the New Normal.

The only way to get to a new normal is by refusing to tolerate the old one. That can feel scary to a lot of people. As a person of influence, your job is to guide prospects through the Point of No Return—the moment at which they decide to stop tolerating past outcomes and leap into a different future.

Mainline to the Subconscious

I once heard a salesperson for Jim Rohn—one of the original leaders in the self-development space—share a story about working for Rohn. One day, Rohn said to him, This is absolutely the finest program I’ve ever created. If you want to change your life and move forward to the next level, all I can tell you is to take me at my word and do whatever it takes to be here. If you don’t, you will always wish that you had, and if you do, it will be one of the most phenomenal experiences of your life.

The sales rep, who had never attended an event of Rohn’s, went on to become the top salesperson for his books, seminars, and inspirational products. The salesperson credited his success to that early conversation with Rohn.

How is it possible to successfully sell something if you have never experienced it?

His conversation with Rohn gave him the conviction in what he was selling. Conviction is an equalizer. It can flatten the playing field between reps who know all of the lingo and reps who don’t. It can create advantages even if you are not as experienced and trained as other reps. Conviction will propel you to become a far better influencer of people than someone with all the technical training, but no conviction.

Am I saying that you shouldn’t master the pitch deck? That you shouldn’t understand the products, or your prospects? That you shouldn’t be able to answer logical questions about the events, or the deliverables of the program?

Not at all. However, no amount of intellectual training will replace the power of conviction. Most prospects won’t even be able to explain it, they’ll just feel it. Conviction bypasses the logical brain and goes directly into the subconscious.

Your Duty to Influence

My friend Pete Vargas, Founder of 10X Stage Agency and one of the best speakers in the world, stopped by our offices a few years ago during our daily sales meeting. There were about 30 sales reps packed into a conference room. At my sales meetings, we do a lot of scrimmaging and role-play. We answer questions, challenge each other and get everyone fired up for the day.

I remember one of our younger sales reps that day was having a hard time. He would have great calls with prospects but get to