Sergey Nivens | Dollar Photo Club

I have been in sales since I was 12 years old selling newspapers door to door. After college I couldn’t wait to get back into sales and make money and that’s just what I did.

If you were like me, you both enjoyed and hated sales at the same time. On the one hand, what a thrill it was to close a sale with the new customer. But on the other hand, the one thing I hated was either the loss of a customer or not knowing if I was going to hit my number this month. And, if you were like me, you hated not having control over your numbers.

Despite the negatives, I gravitated to sales for two reasons:

• So I could have control over my income.
• To have the freedom to do whatever I wanted.

But it seems under the surface I had neither of those two things, even though I thought I did. In order to truly describe why I do what I do, I came up with the word “freedom.”

If I made enough sales, my family and I would have the freedom to pick and choose which college to go to, where and how long to go on vacations, what kind of car to drive, and the ability to help the charities of my choice.

I went back and looked at my career/business model and saw it wasn’t broken. The thing is, I didn’t have a system — I had no idea where my business came from, no idea how the deals I closed really closed, no idea why I lost the business I did lose, and no idea where I was going to end up the next year. The only thing I knew was I was going to have to work hard if I wanted to stay in sales and enjoy that sense of freedom.

It wasn’t that hard to find the answer — all of my clients were manufacturers and they all lived or died by a process and data. There were a few things I didn’t have a clue about, but luckily I could study my clients and get the answers to my questions. What I found out is every one of them had a basic similar process:

1. They started out with raw materials.
2. They added value to that raw material by making some preliminary changes.
3. It then got passed on to another process and either something was added to it or it was changed again — value was added once again.
4. Depending upon the end product, they were able to determine how many more steps were needed. It could have been one, two or 20 more steps depending upon where they were currently with that product.
5. They inspected the output.

Having a process was the hardest part for me as a salesperson since I’m a little less detailed than most and certainly more chaotic. My motto was always “fire, ready, aim” and I lived by it every day until I actually followed the process. I really had to work at following it — many times I wanted to throw in the towel — but I got help from others. Never be afraid to ask for help and surround yourself with people who want to see you succeed.

Here is how I changed the sales process to fit me — remember this is very basic and you will have to add or delete what works in your world:

Start with high-quality raw materials (qualified prospects). Remember, if a manufacturer doesn’t have enough raw materials, they can’t start the process. Always make sure you have a good supply of raw materials (prospects) to start your process. Too often as salespeople we land some good clients and we start taking care of those clients while at the same time we forget to hunt. What that means is we’re definitely busy delivering our service but we’re not necessarily growing our business with new business. This is the hard part. Half of your day should be hunting in one form or another — keep searching for raw materials (prospects). Otherwise you will have the roller coaster effect: a great first quarter, bad second quarter, good third quarter, bad fourth quarter, etc.

How do we add value to this raw material? How do they add value to us? What would make this prospect more valuable to me? In my world, they were more valuable if I knew my competition and if I knew they were having a sales problem of some sort. All of this must have happened through my first appointment. I might not be able to get all of that information but if I could get more than 50 percent of it, they would then move on to the next stage of my process.

How do I now add even more value onto this raw material? Well if the decision makers were willing to discuss further the problem and what it was costing them, they would be willing to listen to my solutions, and it wasn’t a price game anymore. They told me what date they would make a decision. They told me what the expectations would be for a trial run of my parts. And they agreed to meet with me to go over a proposal and tell me yes or no.

Inspecting the finished product. I would create a price for them, would go over once again how my service would fix the problem and agree after the signature to a follow-up meeting to make sure I met all expectations.

Okay that is pretty basic and yes there is more detail that should be added to your process, but boy did it make a world of difference! My closing rate started going from 20 percent to 90 percent. Why? Because I was no longer producing a lot of prices for people that didn’t make it out of the second step of my process. If they weren’t having a problem, wouldn’t let me meet the decision maker, or wouldn’t tell me who I was up against, then why should I quote? My life changed from trying to get an order, to trying to see if you were the right raw material (prospect) for me.

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