Volume #17

Ask your way to success

“If you don’t ask, you don’t get’
Mahatma Gandhi

A few months ago I released a brand new marketing resource called The Unfair Business Advantage Report.

This report contains interviews with 25 top sales and marketing experts in 5 countries. Many of the experts in this report are best selling authors, famous speakers and super successful business people.

And a lot of people have asked me “How did you get so many great experts to agree to give you an interview and then tell you their best sales and marketing strategies?”

And do you know what my simple secret was?

I just asked.

I’ve learned over 33 years in business that if you ask successful people for helpful ideas and advice a large number of them will say ‘yes’.

To me this is the one of the easiest, simplest and fastest ways to improve your sales.

All you do is find someone in your company or in your industry who is doing better than you are in. Then ask this person for some helpful advice.

I am actually shocked that so few people ask experts for helpful advice when the positive results are so attractive.

Asking one person tripled my sales:

One of my early sales jobs (over 29 years ago) was selling a business service to business owners that involved trading goods and services without exchanging money. This is called Bartering and today its a billion dollar industry.

The bartering service I was offering was a proven way for a business owner to improve his sales and also slash his expenses. I found the service very hard to explain to new clients, and as a result I was not doing very well selling it. I was struggling to make more than one sale a week and I was feeling very frustrated.

I then started looking at how other sales people in my company were doing. I noticed that our top sales person was a man called Don who was making six sales every week. I couldn’t work out what he was doing different.

So I asked Don if he would show me what he did to make all his sales every week.
Don generously agreed and went through his sales presentation with me.

I saw immediately that Don’s sales presentation took 7 minutes while mine took nearly 25 minutes. I also noticed that Don had created two simple visual sales aids that explained in 30 seconds how our Bartering service worked. I was trying to explain the same service just with words and was making it very complicated.

I could see immediately that Don’s sales presentation and visual aids were a proven way to improve sales. So I asked Don if I could use some visual aids like his and also use his sales presentation. He was happy to let me do this.

I began using Don’s sales presentation and visual aids and within a few weeks I was consistently making 3 sales a week. All because of one good idea I got from another salesperson that was doing well.

All I had to do was ask him for some advice.

In my personal experience many top salespeople and business people are both delighted and thrilled to be asked for advice. They get a real kick out of being able to help another person improve their results from a helpful tip they passed on to them.

The secret is you have to ask them for help.

A top speaker was more than happy to help me:

Many years ago I decided I wanted to be a business speaker and be paid to talk to business groups on sales and marketing. I joined Toastmasters, read a lot of books on public speaking and gave a number of live talks.

However after a year of doing this I was not doing that well. So I rang up a very successful business speaker called Des who had been speaking professionally for twenty years.

I asked Des if I could sit down with him and get some ideas on how to better. Des invited me around to his home and spent two hours showing me what I could do to improve my speaking results. In particular he gave me some very simple ideas on how I should package and charge for my speaking services. Des did this all for free and was very glad to help me. I put into practice everything he showed me and in the next six weeks I made over $14,000 in speaking fees. This was a huge improvement from what I was doing and all it took was a couple of good ideas from someone who was already very successful in the speaking field. All I had to do was ask.

The big mistake is not asking these people for advice. We often hold back from approaching super successful people because we think they are too busy or won’t want to hear from us. Yet most of the time this is completely untrue. You just have to ask these people for help and they are delighted to give it.

His own people won’t ask him for help:

I was speaking to a team of real estate sales people and asked them who the top salesperson was in their entire company. They all told me it was a person called Barry. He was the top seller out of over 900 sales people for the company.

I asked the sales team if any of them had asked Barry for advice in the last six months. It turned out none of them had as they felt he was probably too busy to talk with them. I then told them something quite shocking. I explained that I had just been speaking the previous week to another real estate salesperson who worked for a different company in the same area as Barry.

This salesperson had rung up Barry and asked him for advice about a difficult sale he was working on. And Barry had happily spent an hour of his time showing this salesperson what to do. Even though he worked for a totally different company.

His own people won’t ask him for advice, yet he is happy to advise a competitor who takes the time to ask.

A great benefit of asking for advice:

One of the best reasons for asking successful people for advice is that it can save you a huge amount of time. In one ten minute conversation with someone who is very good you can get ideas that might have taken them years or even decades to learn.

I saw this when I decided to create my marketing guide ‘The Unfair Business Advantage Report’. I emailed sixty seven sales and marketing experts in five countries and asked if they would like to share their favourite sales improvement strategy for my guide.

To my surprise I had over twenty three enthusiastic ‘yes’ responses to my invitation.

The end result was an excellent marketing guide with 302 pages of easy to use strategies to quickly improve sales.

I’ve learned that when you ask business experts for helpful ideas you will be delighted at how many will say ‘yes’. The simple secret is to start asking.

Action Exercise:

Make a list of 10 people in a similar type of business to you, who are getting better results than you are.

1:
2:
3
4:
5:
6:
7:
8:
9:
10:

Contact at least two of these people in the next week and ask if you can take them out for coffee or lunch and get some ideas on how you could improve your own business results. You will be pleasantly surprised how approachable a lot of these people are. When you sit down with these people ask them some intelligent questions and listen carefully to what they tell you. You may even want to ask if you can take notes or record what they say.

Here are the types of questions you want to ask these people:

What are the most useful books you’ve ever read that have contributed to you doing so well and what did you get out of these books?
If you were starting out in your field again today what would you do differently?
What are the most useful learning lessons you’ve had about doing well in this field?
What advice would you give someone who wants to do really well in this business?
How do you get new customers for your business?
How do you get repeat and referral business?
What little things do you do that you find make a big difference to your sales results?
Who else would you recommend I talk to?
And so on.

Have you now contacted at least two of the people on your list and asked for the opportunity to take them out for coffee or lunch? Yes/No

Once you have met with at least one of these people, what are a couple of ideas you have got on how to improve your own sales or business results?

Ideas you learned:

1:
2:
3:

Helpful Resource:

If you haven’t already downloaded my Unfair Business Advantage Report I invite you to check it out. It contains in-depth interviews I did with 25 top sales and marketing experts from around the world. I asked them to share their favourite strategies on how to increase sales, boost profits and get an unfair advantage in any business. You can grab a free copy at this link

www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com

To subscribe to Easy Business Success just go to

www.EasyBusinessSuccess.com
(This is completely free and won’t cost you a single penny).

You can contact Graham on graham@twomac.co.nz

You can read back issues of Easy Business Success at
http://www.easybusinesssuccess.com/back-issues.asp