The Law of the
Dress Rehearsal
Practicing Your Lines Elevates
the Level of Your Performance
You would probably be amazed at the amount of preparation that goes into a first-rate production. But that’s true of every great performance—especially in sales. Remember earlier when I shared with you my first experience with Tom Hopkins? One thing I didn’t tell you was that Tom’s presentation that day covered six hours and included a thirty-five-page workbook for each participant. Pretty normal as far as seminars are concerned.
But there was something about that day that was very abnormal—in a surprising way. Early in the seminar, I noticed that Tom had not gone to the podium to look at his notes for almost thirty minutes, yet he walked us through the workbook without missing a single word. It made an impression on me, so I continued to make this observation as the day went on. A few times I found myself wondering if he had sneaked a peak at his notes while I was writing something down. Surely, I thought, he had to look at some point. Near the end of the seminar, as Tom was discussing the importance of scripting and mastering sales presentations, he noted, “If you observed me closely today, you noticed that I did not look at my teaching notes once. That’s because I have spent over one hundred hours making sure I know my stuff so I can effectively and convincingly present the information to you.”
I was impressed when he made it thirty minutes without notes. But the entire seminar? That was truly amazing, and it made a lasting impression on my young sales mind. I acknowledged that mastering my “lines” was something very important to my success as a sales professional.
And if you’re serious about reaching the peak of your selling potential, you must acknowledge the same. You must know your lines. You must know your presentation. You must know the next step. In the process of selling, you don’t have time to think about it. You don’t have time to flip through the pages of your “How to Sell” manual if you’re interested in earning a customer’s trust. The truth is that if you want to be a world-class sales professional there are two things you should never have to think about:
1. how to sell
2. what to say in a selling situation
Remember the popular prime-time show hosted by Dick Clark and Ed McMahon called TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes? For an hour we laughed as we watched some of the best actors thoroughly mess up their lines. We laughed because it’s very human to make mistakes. And seeing actors make bloopers reminded us that despite the flawless performances we saw on their television shows even the very best actors forget their lines from time to time.
But have you ever made a blooper in sales? Ever said something you shouldn’t have said or done something stupid then wished with everything in you that someone would just yell, “Cut!” so you could start again? I have—and it doesn’t feel good. That’s because in sales, unlike television, you don’t get a second chance to retake your lines. You don’t have a production crew to edit out your bloopers and create the impression of a flawless performance. In sales, once a word or an action is out, it’s out, and you can never reel it back in. You can’t undo the negative impression it may have created or regain the sale it may have lost. Sales is a live performance day in and day out—like a Broadway play, where most mistakes are noticed, and where one wrong move can jeopardize the entire performance if you’re not careful.
Consider for a moment: What do the following have in common?
• Riverdance
• Cirque du Soleil
• An N’SYNC concert
• The Phantom of the Opera
• The President’s State of the Union Address
The answer: Every performer involved in each top-notch production spends more time practicing the production than they ever do performing the production. And the same must be true of you, if you desire to build a successful, high trust business. You must practice more than you play so that when the curtain comes up you know what to say. That’s the Law of the Dress Rehearsal.
A HIGH TRUST PERFORMANCE DOESN’T
JUST HAPPEN
Unfortunately, the truth is that most salespeople are not prepared to succeed when opportunities present themselves. Most salespeople are not sure how to proceed in a selling situation, but they do anyway, right or wrong. They’re not sure what to say in a selling situation, but they speak anyway, right or wrong. They usually end up talking too much and listening too little. And when the curtain comes down, they wonder why the customer didn’t applaud with approval. Unfortunately, most salespeople are not prepared to earn a customer’s trust, so they generally don’t. That’s why the average salesperson has to make dozens of sales attempts before landing one sale. That’s because high trust doesn’t just happen. While you can haphazardly persuade, manipulate, or con customers into buying your product or service from time to time, you can’t earn their authentic trust and lasting business that way.
The Law of the Dress Rehearsal says that to give a great performance you must be well practiced. In other words, to be highly successful you must know what to say and do when a sales opportunity arises. You must know how to earn high trust initially, then foster high trust permanently. That’s what it means to follow the Law of the Dress Rehearsal.
THE HIGH TRUST SELLING SYSTEM (HTSS)
Over the next six chapters, I am going to lead you through one of the most profound and productive sales systems ever designed. The High Trust Selling System (HTSS) has been field tested by sales professionals of every shape and size for the last twenty-two years. My team and I also use the system and generate millions of dollars in sales every year. In fact, thousands of my company’s clients have effectively implemented the system into their selling practice, and most have doubled, tripled, or quadrupled their sales and their paychecks in as little as one year. And I am certain the same can be true for you if you’re willing to implement and adhere to the system in your business.
Before I explain the High Trust Selling System, think about some important questions that will help till the soil of your business mind and prepare it for the very fruitful seeds to come.
• Do you have trouble talking to prospects?
• Do you have a firmly imprinted process in your mind that leads any prospect from inaction to action and allows him or her to naturally and enthusiastically say “Yes” when you ask for an appointment or business?
• Do you have trouble using the phone to effectively set appointments?
• Do you have challenges maintaining control of appointments?
• When you make a call, are you thinking revenue (commissions) or relationship (mega commissions)?
• During the presentation phase of an appointment, do you know in advance what you are going to say, or do you tend to wing it?
• When you get an objection, do you know precisely how to respond?
• When someone says “No,” do you know how to turn that prospect into a transition client who in the next thirty to 365 days will become a client for life?
• When someone says “Yes,” do you have a retention system so you can continue to add value to him or her as the relationship grows?
• When someone asks you, “How much does it cost?” do you freeze up and fumble with your words?
• Are you confident in how you sell? If so, in what is your confidence?
If you’re like most salespeople, you probably don’t have a good answer for some of the previous questions, and that’s OK—for now. The purpose of this chapter and the six chapters that follow is to give you the right answers. To give you confidence in your selling process so that you can gain the confidence and high trust of your clients, and in turn build a steadfast business. Hopefully, the first seven chapters taught you how to lay the foundation necessary to become a trustworthy salesperson. From this point on we will discuss how to lay the foundation necessary for building a trustworthy sales business. Consider this chapter and specifically the High Trust Selling System as the bridge that will link your salesperson foundation with your sales business foundation.
The HTSS describes the four “Acts” that must be performed effectively if you desire to build a high trust sales business. In sales it’s not enough to be a trustworthy person. While it’s certain that you must have a trustworthy foundation within you (beneath the surface) to be highly successful, high trust selling is still about taking action; the right action. Therefore to become a trustworthy salesperson with a trustworthy sales business you must not only know why you are selling, you must also know how to sell during each act of the process. You must know how to apply yourself, so to speak. That’s why the Law of the Dress Rehearsal is so critical—because the better you know how to sell, the better you will perform. And every steadfast business is built one sales performance at a time.
Act 1: The Approach
The Right Prospecting Technique to Land a High Trust Appointment
THE HIGH TRUST SALES PYRAMID
Every high trust business is built on a foundation of prospecting; therefore every prospecting call must establish a foundation of value and trust if it is to successfully land an appointment. Ideally, prospecting begins before an attempt is made to secure an appointment with a potential prospect. As the one doing the selling, it makes sense to prequalify the individual that is highly likely to have a need for your product or service. Once an individual has been established as a solid prospect, the approach can then be made with confidence. The problem is that very few salespeople actually enjoy this part of the selling process because they aren’t confident in the process with which they go about it.
Most mediocre salespeople sit around waiting for the phone to ring. They hope someone will call them, and magically, that person will be a perfect fit for their product or service. Occasionally such salespeople will send out a bag of letters (because the rejection of a letter is much easier to deal with), but they never follow up on them. Or they get leads from their company but after ten rejections they can’t get very excited about making the eleventh call. Then they blame the product or the company’s poor marketing and advertising for their poor performance. The truth, however, is that mediocre salespeople never take full responsibility for their own actions. And selling is the salesperson’s show, the salesperson’s performance. Therefore you must own your lines if you are to ever excel.
Selling is the salesperson’s show, the salesperson’s performance. Therefore you must own your lines if you are to ever excel.
High trust salespeople open their show with an entirely different technique than most, and that technique is the key to their superb prospecting performance. The foundation for successful selling starts with a compelling opening act, which I call “The Approach.” The Approach refers to both prospecting and appointment setting. This is where call reluctance (or stage fright) usually rears its ugly head. But the number-one reason why salespeople experience stage fright in the opening Act is because their approaches, historically, have not conveyed high value or created high trust. But successful salespeople have rehearsed their lines and believe that what they bring to the stage is highly valuable and highly trustworthy. As a result, they experience less reluctance and more excitement.
The key to a compelling approach is to become passionate about your purpose and product and the value they can add to your prospect. A passionate salesperson can make the buying process fun. In fact, you should never make a prospecting call without a purpose. You see, your prospecting audience will only be receptive to you if what you have to offer is compelling to them. Imagine what you would do if you sat down to a show that was billed as a blockbuster performance, but after the first few lines it felt more like a flop, or worse, was an entirely different show altogether, one that you had no interest in seeing. That’s what it’s like when you try to call on a random prospect without having prepared your lines. But when you’re well rehearsed and confident in your opening lines, and when you take the time to call on the right prospect, you will experience far more approval than rejection.
Act 2: The Interview
Creating High Trust with a Prospect
THE HIGH TRUST SALES PYRAMID
Once you have the attention of a qualified prospect, the second thing you must rehearse and master is how to effectively conduct a High Trust Client Interview. An effective interview is a discipline that all top-performing sales people have mastered. If you don’t master the High Trust Client Interview, your sales career will flounder, you will lose money, and you will usually end up working with prospects that will bring you grief.
When teaching the High Trust Client Interview in my seminars, I break the audience into groups of two. I have each group determine who is going to go first and then tell them that when I say “Go,” the first interviewer has thirty seconds to sell his or her pen to the other person. As I listen to their interviewing techniques, I find most of them are doing the one thing they shouldn’t—they are talking. I yell, “Stop,” and as they have all been trained, they keep on selling, keep on talking, keep on trying to close. I appreciate their tenacity. However, high trust salespeople know that initially there is an inverse relationship between talking and getting the sale.
To follow up on this exercise, I ask the audience this question: “Before you started telling the prospect everything your pen could do for him or her, how many of you asked, ‘What’s important about owning a pen to you?’” Rarely do any hands go up. I continue, “How many of you were 100 percent certain that the pen you were selling was the one your prospect would want?” Again, few, if any, hands go up. I press on, “How many of you were certain your prospect was in the market for a pen before you started selling it?” No hands. The case is built—the audience understands, as must you, that a vital part of selling is asking the right questions so that what you sell and what a client wants match up. If you skip this Act, you will experience resistance, which comes in the form of stalls, objections, or noes. And what’s worse, you might remove any opportunity for future business. The result of a poor performance in Act 2 is having to make more calls on more people to get the numbers you want; and that probably doesn’t give you the life you want because it means more hours on the job and less time off.
To perform well in Act 2 you must learn that the key to selling is not selling; it is providing. And the key to providing is knowing in advance what to provide. Neither can be accomplished without mastering the art of asking value-adding questions, then listening to what your prospects tell you. And so you don’t misunderstand, the mind set of a top performer is void of manipulation or shady tactics. Topnotch performers are always thinking win-win.
You must learn that the key to selling is not selling;
it is providing. And the key to providing is knowing in advance what to provide.
Our research indicates that there are valuable benefits in mastering the ability to listen before you sell. It shows that the more questions you ask, the more needs you discover. And discovering values and needs is the very purpose of the High Trust Client Interview.
KEY QUESTIONS TO GET YOU THINKING
In the example I gave from my seminar, it would be important for sales professionals who are in the writing instrument business to ask these questions in advance of selling a pen:
• What’s important to the prospect about owning a pen?
• What type of pen design does the prospect typically favor?
• What type of ink cartridge does the prospect desire?
• What color of ink is the prospect’s favorite?
• What is the prospect’s budget for the next pen he or she buys?
• How many pens does the prospect buy in one year?
The answers to such questions are critical because without them you will have to ad-lib your sales presentation. Put it this way, without the knowledge gained from the questions above, you could not know the emotional motivation for the prospect’s pen purchase, nor could you know the logical factors that make up his buying strategy. Cap or push-button? Rolling ball, ballpoint, or old-fashioned ink tips? Black or blue ink? A BiC or a Mont Blanc budget? His average repurchase rate? On the other hand, if you knew such details up front there’s no doubt you’d have a much easier time selling pens or whatever it is you sell.
Once you have successfully interviewed your prospect, the third Act in your selling performance is presenting solutions to your prospect’s needs. While on rare occasion you may be able to ad-lib your way through the first two Acts, in Act 3 you must be well prepared. This is the point at which preparation must meet with opportunity if you’re going to be successful.
Act 3: The Solution
Offering Trustworthy Solutions to Your Prospect’s Needs
THE HIGH TRUST SALES PYRAMID
All high trust salespeople are in a constant pursuit to discover needs for which they can offer solutions. You must be in the solution business to give a successful performance in Act 3. I learned this early on in my career and the result was nothing short of huge—my income went up 300 percent in less than one year. In fact, the key was something one of my early mentors told me: that there are basically ten reasons why a prospect would use you and ten reasons why they would use your company. He said that all I had to do was learn those twenty things, develop scripts to effectively address them, and then memorize those scripts. So that’s what I did. For four weeks I interviewed my customers to learn their needs. I then scripted my solutions to their specific needs so I would never lose a sale again from lack of preparation. You need to do the same thing. I will cover this in greater detail in a coming chapter, but for now, get to thinking about the needs of your prospects.
Below are some of the needs that I hear expressed in the marketplace on a consistent basis. See if they are similar to your existing clients’ reasons for working with you.
You:
• Experience
• Knowledge
• Integrity
• Professionalism
• Communication
• Accessibility
• Flexibility
• Responsiveness
Your Company:
• Location
• Delivery
• Product/Technical support
• Reputation
• Innovativeness
• Financial Strength
• Market Share
• Product Line
• Research and Development
Whatever the needs may be, you must have answers, and you must be confident in how you present them. That is the key to a solid performance in Act 3.
Act 4: The Action
Asking for the Prospect’s Business
THE HIGH TRUST SALES PYRAMID
Once you have offered effective solutions to your prospect, the fourth and final Act in a high trust selling presentation is asking for the business. I find that this area of the selling process is where my views differ most from other sales authors and trainers. Many sales success manuals and books teach you to ask for a prospect’s business constantly. They tell you it takes several attempts to finally gain a sale—but that is only true if you haven’t performed well in the first three Acts. The key to your performance in Act 4 is to understand that people will want to do business with you if and only if they trust you. In other words, if a prospect doesn’t trust you, she won’t buy from you, no matter what you do or how many times you ask for the business. But even if she does trust you, you will not ascertain her business if you don’t ask for it. The key is to ask for business only when you have
• thoroughly understood the prospect’s needs and buying strategy,
• completely answered the prospect’s needs and questions with your solutions, and
• confirmed an indication that the prospect would like to proceed.
When you’re careful to ask for a prospect’s business at the right time, you won’t continue to hear the wrong answer.
INTERMISSION: OBJECTION MANAGEMENT
DEEPENING A CUSTOMER’S LEVEL OF TRUST
By the time we’re to the end of this book, you will see why most high trust salespeople rarely have to deal with objections. But objection management is a valuable skill if you desire to be a top sales performer. And it’s important to note that objections can occur during any part of your presentation. The fact that we are discussing this last is not an indication that all objections occur after you ask for business—though that is where they most often occur. Just think of objection management as an intermission in your sales performance that can happen at any time, but ideally not at all.
There are only two reasons you will ever get an objection. First, if you have not thoroughly and convincingly solved the prospect’s stated needs. This is either because you don’t know them or your solutions were weak. In other words, you have not yet created enough value or trust. Second, if your prospect fears the change that a commitment may bring. But regardless of the reason for the objection, the key to objection management is to not lose with sloppy management the rapport you have built.
Objections are not obstacles—they are opportunities to further a relationship and advance a sale.
Objections are not obstacles—they are opportunities to further a relationship and advance a sale. You need to think this way. Objections are not insurmountable if you’re prepared. What I don’t like about most sales success manuals is that they teach you to “overcome” an objection. But I’m here to tell you that if you try to overcome objections, you will lose more sales than you win. Instead, the key is to become successful at managing objections by preparing beforehand how you will respond. And the good news is that there are not very many objections. They don’t change much over the years. Preparing for them is simply a matter of learning what they are and then rehearsing your responses.
I get excited when I receive objections because it usually tells me that the prospect is still interested in our dialogue. But what I want you to understand is that objections are not necessarily signs that your performance is flat. Some prospects will object just because they can. Your job is simply to be prepared for them when they do. But the fact is that if you are committed to mastering the High Trust Selling System, you will become such a top-notch performer that you will rarely have to deal with objections at all.
Jim McMahan is the one sales professional I know who best personifies what we’re talking about. When he began his sales career in 1986, Jim was very motivated to succeed. He was twenty-six years old, jobless, living on his wife’s salary, with a child on the way. He didn’t have time to dawdle, so he immediately began to study successful salespeople, trying as best he could to comprehend and model their strategies and techniques. That’s when Jim was first introduced to the Law of the Dress Rehearsal. He bought into the idea of preparing responses and set out to observe twenty of the most critical sales situations in order to gain the proper knowledge for creating powerful scripts that would prepare him to excel in key sales situations. And excel he did. In fact, with his scripted responses in place and some rehearsal under his belt, Jim’s effectiveness and credibility increased dramatically.
In one instance, Jim’s coworker asked him to help give a sales presentation to a potential client. He was glad to help out even though he stood to gain no business from the meeting. Or so he thought. Jim sat down in the meeting with his coworker and his coworker’s prospect and gave a confident presentation just as he’d rehearsed. He answered questions eloquently and put to rest all of the prospect’s objections and hang-ups. And in the end what happened was unexpected. He won the prospect’s confidence. She was so impressed with his presentation savvy and objection management that she recruited him to do business with her. And that was more than just a flattering pat on the back for Jim. Today, the two still foster a strategic partnership from which Jim earns over seven figures a year. That’s what can happen when you follow the Law of the Dress Rehearsal.
But we’ve only discussed the outline for a successful sales presentation. Let’s get down to the details within each Act that are necessary to build a high trust business. That begins with the Law of the Bull’s-Eye.