Donald Miller

Now, three-step plan, don't overthink it. In order for you to engage this, all you need to do is have an intake session with me where we talk about it. Second, I'll give you a custom strategy on what I think you should do. And three, if you want to move forward, you and I can move forwards. You want to remove the cognitive dissonance by giving people baby steps.

Then step four is actually to paint the negative stakes. I don't want to see you struggle with this anymore. And I know if you don't buy my product, you're going to keep struggling with it. And a month from now, a year from now, this is going to be even more painful. Let's deal with it now. So step four are negative stakes. Step five is positive stakes. However,

With my product, this is the life that you're going to experience, and here's how great your life will be. And then finally, step six, ask for the sale. I think you should buy this product today. It's the right product for you. Click here and enjoy this special offer. Let me just summarize it.

Start with the problem, position your product as a solution, give them a three-step plan, paint the negative stakes, paint the positive stakes, and call the customer to action. If you write that follow-up email, you will close way more sales. Not only will you close more sales, but you will have just learned how to sell.

And the way you learn how to sell is you find out what the customer's problem is, and you position your product as a solution. If you do it five times, in an email, you will never have a sales conversation again that's the same.

For instance, if you work at a mattress store, because we work with Tempur-Sealy to train some of their salespeople, you don't want to go up and say, what brought you in today? You know what brought them in today. They're looking for a mattress. You want to go up and you say, hey, welcome into the store. Let me just ask you, what do you hate about your current mattress?

If you say, what do you hate about your current mattress? They're going to say, well, it's too soft in the middle or it's hurting my back or it's too warm at night and whatever. And you say, great, I've got three things, three mattresses here that will solve that. Let's take a look at them because they're at different price points and they have some different.

You are a mile into the sales conversation. And when you ask what brings you in today, you're nowhere. You're absolutely nowhere. They're going to try to avoid you. That's how you sell and it's all you need to know.

You know, it's interesting, Hala, I just spoke to 250 sales reps for a big, probably $1.4 billion company, 250 sales reps in the room. And I said, hey, raise your hand if there's a customer that hasn't made a decision yet. You've been interacting with them, but they're sitting the fence. 250 hands go up. That's a sales rep's job. So everybody in the room had that. I said, open your computer.

We are literally going to write them an email right now. And we spent the next hour formulating 250 emails. I said, hit send. And then I needed to get off the stage because I had a flight. So the chief revenue officer got up, said, Don, thanks. And I rolled my bag out of the back of the door. Got a call two days later to my staff. Chief revenue officer said, I've never seen anything like it.

We closed $2.4 million worth of sales in the room.

And it's not because we coerced the audience into buying anything. It's not because we manipulated anybody. What those customers were doing were sitting the fence because they didn't fully understand why they needed that product. And every sales rep in that room made it clear. And now they tasted that success. I'm sure they've made tens of millions now because that was over a month ago.

And they're starting to have very different sales conversations. and sending out very different proposals and giving very different presentations. That formula works for follow-up emails, works for in-person conversations, works for keynote presentations, works for elevator pitches, works for proposals. That's the formula you want to use to close sales.

You can't write, especially a response email, if you've already started a conversation with somebody, you can't write a good email without having done a very good job listening. If I said, Hala, you and I had a great conversation. Congratulations on your 8 million. I think that's incredible. I heard you when you said you have 60 employees and things have gotten more chaotic. I felt your pain.

Chapter five of my new book will walk you through five meetings that will completely revolutionize your staff. And within about three months, you won't feel that pain anymore if you run these five meetings. That's me listening and saying, well, here's the part of my product that would solve Holla's problem.

You start doing that, you're going to sell a lot more books and a lot more leashes for dogs and a lot more nutritional supplements or whatever it is that you sell. You're going to sell a lot more of them.

Well, story is the universal language. And when you're having any kind of conversation, whether it's getting together with a friend to catch up or it's a sales conversation or even if it's a conversation with your therapist, what your brain is doing the entire time is trying to organize events into the structure of story.

Your brain is subconsciously figuring out who the hero is, what the problem they're up against is. how they're going to get out of that problem, what the happy ever life will look like if they do get out of that problem. So because most people are not actually very good communicators, it's very hard to figure out what the story is actually about.

But if we actually lay out our communication in the form of story, The person that we're talking to doesn't have to use any mental bandwidth in order to understand what we're talking about. And that gives the brain a really pleasant feeling because the brain doesn't have to work hard to organize the information. We tend to follow leaders who are able to do that.

You know, it's interesting, Hala, I just spoke to 250 sales reps for a big, probably $1.4 billion company, 250 sales reps in the room. And I said, hey, raise your hand if there's a customer that hasn't made a decision yet. You've been interacting with them, but they're sitting the fence. 250 hands go up. That's a sales rep's job. So everybody in the room had that. I said, open your computer.

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