"THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELLING: INCREASE YOUR SALES FASTER AND EASIER THAN YOU EVER THOUGHT POSSIBLE" by Brian Tracy

• I went to the most successful guy in our company and asked him what he was doing differently from me.
• Rather than trying to overwhelm the prospect with the features and benefits of my product, I focused on learning about the prospect’s situation and how I could best help him or her.
• Success is not an accident. Failure is not an accident either. In fact, success is predictable. It leaves tracks.
• Here is a great rule: “If you do what other successful people do, over and over again, nothing in the world can stop you from eventually getting the same results that they do.
• Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. —NAPOLEON HILL
• The only real creators of wealth in our society are businesses. Businesses produce all products and services. Businesses create all profits and wealth. Businesses pay all salaries and benefits. The health of the business community in any city, state, or nation is the key determinant of the quality of life and standard of living of the people in that geographical area.
• In every large sales force, four or five people out of one hundred make as many sales and earn as much money as all the rest put together.
• This winning edge concept is one of the most important management and sales ideas of the twenty-first century. This principle says, “Small differences in ability can lead to enormous differences in results.” The difference between the top performers and the average or mediocre performers is not a huge difference in talent or ability. Often, it is just a few small things done consistently and well, over and over again.
• In selling, you only have to be a little bit better and different in each of the key result areas of selling for it to accumulate into an extraordinary difference in income.
• If your goal is to be in the top 10 percent of salespeople in your field, the first thing you do is find out who is already in the top 10 percent. Instead of following the followers, the average performers in your business, follow the leaders. Compare yourself to the top people.
• Remember, no one is better than you, and no one is smarter than you.
• Top people are usually willing to help other people who want to succeed.
• Here is the cosmic joke: there is usually very little difference in talent between the person who earns $50,000 per year and the one who earns $100,000 per year. The only difference is that one has settled at a lower level while the other has refused to settle for less than $100,000.
• To increase your income, you must achieve your financial goals in your mind before you can ever achieve them in your reality.
• Imagine yourself as if you were already the kind of person you want to be, earning the kind of money you want to earn. Look at other people who are earning more money than you and imagine that you are exactly like them.
• The fact is, once a person is a million-dollar-a-year person, no one would think of offering him or her less.
• These seven key result areas are prospecting, building rapport, identifying needs, presenting, answering objections, closing the sale, and getting resales and referrals.
• The solution for your fears or reluctance in any key skill area in selling is for you to master that skill.
• You can learn anything you need to learn through practice and repetition.
• The more confidence you have in your ability, the happier you feel when you are doing that part of your job, and the better results you will get.
• You never feel uneasy doing something that you are good at. You only feel anxious doing something that you think you are not particularly good at.
• Every single step that you take to improve in any area raises your self-confidence and increases your likelihood of success each time you try it.
• Fear and self-doubt have always been the greatest enemies of human potential.
• The good news is that your self-limiting beliefs are usually based on erroneous information. They are not based on fact or reality. They are very often illusions in your own mind. Because they are unreal, you can get rid of them by replacing them with new, positive beliefs of confidence and competence in any area.
• How much you like yourself is the key determinant of your success in sales and of your income. As a matter of fact, it determines how successful you are in every part of your life.
• you become what you think about most of the time.
• In addition, you become what you say to yourself most of the time. Successful people control their inner dialogues.
• You will be more persuasive right after having made a sale than at any other time.
• There are two major obstacles to making and closing any sale. They are both mental. They are the fear of failure and the fear of rejection.
• The fear of failure is the biggest single reason for failure in adult life. It is not failure itself, but the fear of failure, the prospect of failure, the anticipation of failure, that causes you to freeze up and perform at a lower level.
• The second major obstacle to selling and closing is the fear of rejection. This is the fear that the potential buyer might say no. The fear of rejection is triggered by the possibility of rudeness, disapproval, or criticism toward the salesperson by the prospect.
• Here’s the key to dealing with rejection. You must realize that rejection is not personal. It is not aimed at you. Rejection has nothing to do with you. Instead, it is like the rain or the sunshine. It just happens from day to day.
• Perhaps the two most fundamental qualities for success in sales are boldness and persistence. It takes courage to get up each day and constantly face the fears of failure and rejection. It takes persistence to keep coming back, day after day, in spite of continued difficulties and disappointment.
• When you are selling to a company that you want to switch from their existing supplier to you, remember that it usually takes about five visits to break down the prospect’s natural skepticism and resistance.
• One of the important secrets of success in sales is for you to understand and accept that people don’t “think it over.” The minute you walk out of the prospect’s office or home, he or she forgets that you ever lived.
• When a person says no to you, he is not saying no to you as a person. He is simply saying no to your offering or your presentation or your prices. The rejection is not personal. Once you know and understand that saying no is not personal, you stop worrying about it when people react to you or your product negatively.
• Everything you do to raise your own self-esteem, including positive self-talk, affirmative visualization, personal motivation, enthusiasm, and individual training improves your personality and increases your effectiveness in selling.
• When you organize your life so that you become a perpetual self-esteem-generating person, that alone will contribute more to your income than any other factor.
• The friendship factor in selling simply says that a prospect will not buy from you until he is genuinely convinced that you are his friend and that you are acting in his best interests.
• Your job as a sales professional is to win people over to your side by making it clear that you care about them and want the best for them.
• The individual with high self-esteem is the one who has the greatest facility for making friends wherever he goes.
• When people feel that someone genuinely likes them, they are more open to listening to that person and to buying what he is selling.
• Everything you do to improve your level of self-esteem increases and enhances the quality of your relationships with your customers.
• The primary emotion in sales success is enthusiasm. Enthusiasm accounts for 50 percent or more of all sales ability.
• Anything you do to raise your self-esteem will increase your ability to sell.
• Here’s the key: You cannot give away something that you don’t already have. You cannot convey enthusiasm if you don’t have it yourself.
• When you resolve in advance that you will never give up, you will be mentally prepared to bounce back from failure and rejection. When you continue to persist, no matter how difficult the situation, you will eventually succeed.
• The reason so many people fail in sales is simply because they do not persist long enough and work hard enough to get those first few winning experiences.
• Interestingly enough, when you make the decision that no matter what happens, you will never give up, your self-esteem increases immediately.
• If you do what other successful people do, you will eventually get the same results that they do.
• All truly successful, highly paid people, including salespeople, love what they do. You must learn to love your work and then commit yourself to becoming excellent in your field. These two go together, like a hand in a glove.
• Excellence Is a Decision.
• Many people make the mistake of thinking that if they have the ability to excel in a field, it will come naturally. But the fact is that excellence is the result of years of hard, dedicated effort in a single direction. There is no substitute for hard work.
• Don’t be wishy-washy or vague. Decide exactly what it is you want in life. Set it as a goal and then determine what price you are going to have to pay to get it. Most people never do this.
• According to the research, only about 3 percent of adults have written goals. And these are the most successful and highest-paid people in every field.
• A goal that is not in writing is merely a fantasy.
• The primary reason that people succeed greatly is because they are action oriented. The primary reason that people fail is because they do not take action. Failures always have an excuse to procrastinate, until finally their energy and desire are gone and they are back to where they started.
• do something every day that moves you toward your most important goal, whatever it is at that time.
• Develop the discipline of working on your goals daily so that it is as normal and as natural to you as breathing in and breathing out.
• Adversity shows you what you are made of.
• You can always tell how successful you are going to be by how quickly you bounce back.
• Your mind is your most precious asset, and the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life. Commit yourself to lifelong learning.
• As you learn, you become more valuable. The more knowledge you acquire that can be applied to practical purposes, the greater will be your rewards and the more you will be paid.
• Every time you learn and practice something new, you move ahead in the line.
• The more you learn and do, the faster you move toward the front of the line.
• If you are not continually learning and growing, the knowledge you have is actually diminishing. The incompetent person of tomorrow is the person who has stopped learning today.
• The person who does not read is no better than the person who cannot read.
• Read every morning, listen to audio programs in your car, take all the training you can get, and continually put your new knowledge into action.
• Your time is all you have to sell. It is your primary asset. How you use your time determines your standard of living. Resolve therefore to use your time well.
• Your goal is to focus on those activities that contribute the very most value to your life and your work.
• Never work without a list.
• Your ability to focus and concentrate, to be absolutely clear about your most important task, and then to do only that task until it is done, will do more to double and triple your productivity and performance than anything else.
• Do what successful people do. Follow the leaders, not the followers.
• Identify the very best people in your field and pattern yourself after them. Decide to be like them. Associate with them as much as possible.
• If you want to know how to be a successful salesperson, go to the top people in your business and ask them for advice.
• When you ask for advice from a successful person, take that advice. Do what the winner encourages you to do.
• You tend to take on the values, attitudes, dress, and lifestyle of the people around you.
• Guard your integrity as a sacred thing.
• Develop the ability to face the world and see life as it is, not as you wish it would be or could be.
• You must do the things every day that lead to the goals you have set for yourself. Face the reality of your life, whatever it is. This is the mark of the truly honest person.
• Think of yourself as a highly intelligent person, even a genius. Recognize that you have great reserves of creativity that you have never used.
• One of your foremost aims in life must be to identify your special talents and then to develop those talents to a high level.
• A person who does not think about his work when he is away from it is a person who is not suited to that line of work.
• The mark of superior people is that they set high standards for themselves, and they refuse to compromise their standards. They imagine that everyone is watching them, even when no one is watching. You can tell the character of a person by what he does and how he carries himself when he is alone.
• The key to success in selling is for you to start a little earlier, work a little harder, and stay a little later. Do the little things that average people always try to avoid doing.
• Develop a sense of urgency, a bias for action.