Closing prospects is one of the finest arts there is in the business world. It's a craft that must be molded, drawing from past experience as well as a continual search to learn new information and continually shape your skill set. It's been three years and I'm still learning the best method to closing prospects, because I understand that it's a lifetime skill. So what makes you struggle at closing prospects versus a million-dollar earner or top sales who can close at 2-3 times your ratio with the same amount of people? The answer is easier than you think, and I'm going to start with a brief introduction on two things you are not doing enough of.
What makes the "closers" of our industry better than you at closing prospects is simply this: they have done it more than you!
Now
take a deep breath... and refrain from rolling your eyes and clicking
out of this article. It's not over yet. Think about it: what makes your
top earners in your company different from you? They got skills! They
are ordinary people who have taken advantage of a system to learn how to
leverage a skill set that they have acquired. Other than that, they are
dads, single moms, contractors, government workers, doctors, bank
employees, and business owners, just like you and I.
Skills
are an adaptation that is learned from knowledge, and honed with
practice. When I first decided to go to culinary school, I had no
professional experience whatsoever, and I had never worked in a kitchen.
One year, $50k in tuition, and a restaurant job as a dishwasher later, I
had picked up the basic knowledge that I needed. I learned skills such
as preparation, making lists, grouping tasks together, time management,
speed of service, urgency, knifework, butchery, food science, and
organization. Now, could I have learned all this on my own? Of course,
but it would have taken me years and years to figure it out and catch
up.
Learning the skill of closing
prospects is the same idea. You can either invest money in to proper
training and knowledge acquisition, or you can invest time and figure it
out yourself.
What makes the
top-tier leaders different is that at some point in their home based
business career, they decided that enough was enough. They weren't
closing prospects well enough, and they invested financially in their
own self-development. Remember my bolded point in the paragraph before
this that you can either invest time or money. Of the two, the only one
that is a constantly diminishing is time!
Money
can always be had again and again, and it may seem like it leaves
faster than it comes, but lost time can never be recovered. Time, not
money, is our most precious resource. Your leaders have spent more money
in investing in themselves than you, and thus they have a larger pool
of knowledge to grasp from.
The
second part of why your leaders do better at closing prospects than you
is that they APPLY their knowledge more frequently than you. They have
trained their mindset that success in a home based business system is
all about working the numbers. The person who gets in front of the most
people wins, assuming they have the knowledge to prospect. If you want
to learn how to be closing prospects more efficiently, you must go out
and get your "NOs". Go through the fakers and find yourself the makers.
When
you practice your application of knowledge, it keeps getting better.
You learn how to adjust and control after each interaction, and you get
better. You may have to go through a series of rejection before you get
your first triumph, but you need to persist. Repetition is the mother of
skill, and the skill of this business is closing prospects. Go out and
challenge yourself today: make a goal to get 100 NOs. Change your
mindset; I dare you. If you go out looking for 100 NOs, you'll be
shocked at how challenging it is to get 100 NOs. You'll find that you're
going to get surprised with YES along the way.