Do you ever find yourself saying something like this: “Why won’t my sales prospects call me back? I keep following up, and I hear nothing from them. What am I doing wrong?” The answer to this perplexing and frustrating question is usually found in one or more of the following four reasons:

​We have all heard it before, if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Ryan Taft agrees 100 percent with that statement. But sometimes we ask for the sale and still don’t get it. There are reasons people don’t buy that have nothing to do with our delivery or mindset, but you need to focus on the things that you can control. Here are three common sales closing mistakes and how to avoid them.

I posed this survey question to my weekly email subscribers: “How quickly do you follow up with a customer after your first sales presentation?” Hundreds of you responded in the first couple of days (thank you!) and we’ve compiled those results into this snazzy Infographic:

​Here’s Amy O’Connor’s brilliant idea for dealing with “I’m just looking”. Are you ready? Stop prompting your customer to say it in the first place. Brilliant, right? I know! But wait, there’s more. When you hear “I’m just looking”, that’s your cue to launch into this four-step pattern:

Have you ever had one of THOSE days? A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. You know, the day where EVERYTHING goes wrong? You might not be able to change what’s happening around you, but you certainly can do something about the way you handle it. So, here are five tips to help turn a bad sales day around.

​You’ve probably heard that goals fail because they were not written down, or because they were not realistic, or because of a lack of accountability. All those things are important, but none of those hits on the biggest issue of all. More than anything else, success in goal achievement is traced to one thing: goal clarity.

​Proper influence and persuasion is about making it easy for people to do what is in their best interest to do. Our job in sales is to help people achieve whatever mission they are on. The best helpers are the most successful sales people. How do you know how to become more helpful? Amy O’Connor says to focus on these three character traits.

Ryan Taft and his wife Melissa were out and about looking at new homes. After looking at a few, he asked Melissa what she thought of her interactions with the sales people. She said, “They are nice enough, but none of them let me talk.” It was the “let me” that caught his attention. Allow your prospect to share more during the sales process and you will be much better equipped to actually close the sale.

It is up to you to create a strong and positive emotional tone for buyers. You are setting them up on a blind (ish) date and you want this to happen! Give yourself and your customer permission to enjoy the process as the real, live human beings that you are!

When a buyer wants to cancel, sometimes it is for legitimate reasons and other times the reason for canceling is based on a catastrophization in the buyer’s mind. Catastrophization stories may seem ridiculous to us, but in the buyer’s mind they are very real and therefore must be taken seriously.