Do You Have a System?

 Make your process so simple that when ordinary people follow it, they perform in an extraordinary fashion

Systematize everything

Jack had coached for three years and then he went fulltime with Equitable (now AXA) selling in our hometown. While I was still in college, I was an intern with Equitable and didn’t go fulltime until I graduated.

I made the Million Dollar Round Table early in my career. It took Jack forever to make the MDRT. One of the reasons being, he was a coach. He had a good market, but he had never been in sales.

When we both became District Managers, I started in Bloomington, Illinois, a white collar college town. Bloomington had two great universities, Illinois Wesleyan and Illinois State. Jack went into management in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. In the 1950s, Mt. Vernon was a desolate part of the state.

After two years in management, I looked around and nobody was following me. I’d hired a lot of good people – captain of the football team, National Honor Society students, president of the student body. I had the best looking recruits you’d ever want to lay your eyes on, but I couldn’t find them. They had all left; they were gone.

Meanwhile, Jack was down in Mt. Vernon building a great organization. He had a crowd following him. One day I went down to see Jack so I could find out what was going on in Mt. Vernon. I told him, “I have the best prospects; you have the best retention. You have a crowd following you; I don’t have anybody following me. What are we doing differently?”

I’ll tell you what Jack was doing; he was teaching everybody a system. Jack had a system for everything. Jack taught me how to be systems oriented as a manager. If he hadn’t done this, I would have failed in management. As it was, I became the #1 District Manager in the country for Equitable in Bloomington, Illinois, all because of this valuable lesson I learned from my brother.

When Jack was in college he wrote a book called, Coaching Baseball. He had a system for every part of the game. Several colleges adopted the book as their textbook on how to coach baseball. It was written for college students who were getting ready to go into coaching.

Just as Jack had a system for everything in baseball, he also had a system for everything in management and selling.

• What you say when you contact people
• What you say when they object
• What you say the first two minutes of an interview
• Fact-finding questions to use
• How to get a money commitment
• He had a system for keeping score called the Travel Guide. Today, we call it the Progress Guide.

What was my system? “Get out there and SELL.”

And what were my instructions? “You’re not having enough interviews. That’s your problem. Get out there and sell!”

And as they would be going out the door, they would shout back – “HOW? How do you see the people? What do you say?”

Jack was giving them a system for everything. I learned from Jack to systematize everything as it relates to selling and management

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How to Be Successful

 "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are always getting ready to do something, and those who go ahead and do it."

SHOW UP ON TIME, DRESSED, READY TO PLAY. We learned this lesson from Dr. Michael Mescon. Here's the way he'd dramatize that.

"If you just show up you're going to have 75% of the people in this world beat. If you show up on time, now you have 90% of the people beat. If you show up on time, dressed, ready to play, you'll have them all beat. That's the way to be successful."

That's what he would tell his young students getting ready to go out into the business world. That's the way you become highly successful!

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What is Your Competitive Edge?

 "Never forget a customer.

Never let a customer forget you."

Companies rarely have a product design or price advantage for very long. Their competitive edge, their only major advantage, lies in the professional manner in which their salespeople deliver distinctive service. Your image in business circles and your community has a direct bearing on your sales performance.

 

After the sale has closed is the time to remember that prospects who purchased the products and paid for them did so because they had confidence in the sales rep and the service that sales rep would provide. Whether or not that confidence will be maintained and even enhanced depends largely upon the manner in which the sale after the sale is handled.

Professionalism in selling requires prompt, personal follow-through. As Dr. Mike Mescon says, "Good or bad, right or wrong, clients are most likely to recall the last - not the first - experience. They remember the end of the story, not the beginning. Clients want consistent service from start to finish." As a professional, you want to deliver consistent service and achieve customer satisfaction.

Make certain prospects know they will get more from you in the way of service than they expect. Make certain they get more than they pay for. And make certain they get more in the way of service and information from you than they can possibly get from your competitors.

We believe that as a professional salesperson, you will be judged as much by the customers you keep as by the sales you make.

The basic principle is: Never forget a customer. Never let a customer forget you.

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