INVITE,PRESENT,TRAIN PART 1

PROSPECTING SKILLS TRAINING

Tim Sales teaches a three-part formula: invite, present, train. Of these, by far the most critical is inviting. You can have tools and other people do the presenting and training for you— but inviting? That part’s up to you; that’s what you’ve got to get good at. What gives Tim the right to be telling you all of this? He's truly a been-there, done-that seven-figure income earner who’s not only done it once (after all, he could have been lucky, right?), but then started all over and did it again. From there, Tim has become internationally recognized as a speaker, trainer and author— and most famously, as the creator of the enormously successful “Brilliant Compensation” program, which has millions of copies in circulation.

There are two things I admire most about Tim.

First is his commitment to people and to doing whatever it takes to help them learn how to do this business right. And the second;Tim is such a no-BS guy: he will not allow the people he trains to have anything in front of them except something he's proven works in the field again and again and again.

Tim is ex-military, an underwater bomb squad guy, so there is nothing wishy-washy or unsure about him; yet I've heard him do things on one of his recorded live cold calls that spoke with such humanity, it touched my heart. I asked him to talk about that call,because it shows how powerful and at the same time how human and caring his approach is. Tim, will you describe the genesis of this three-part formula?It came purely from experience: it was something I needed to do to make the business simple for me. When you first enter this business, it’s daunting to look at all the information available and try to figure out what you actually need to do.

The first thing I did was observe the typical opportunity meeting and typical training meeting. In the training meeting, they covered the product, the comp plan, what you must do,what you must never do, how to have posture... all these different categories of data were flying at me. I quickly saw how easy it is to get focused on things that don’t necessarily make a difference in your ability to build a business!So, I broke it down into three basic categories:

1) invite someone to look at the business;
2) present it to them;
3) then show those who are interested how youdid the first two steps.

Once I had that simple foundation, I could put my attention on the right thing first. What this also shows you is that if you don’t focus on inviting first, then you’re getting off track.

How so?

Here’s what often happens: let’s say I just sponsored you into the business, and I start teaching you all about the compensation plan. But the compensation plan is not something you are ever going to need— unless you can already invite!

Inviting is the first step of the process: it's the most important step, and the first thing that everyone in this business needs to know.

Here’s something else this formula shows: you can be terrible at presenting and training and still make it in this business! Why? Because if you can invite well,then you can put those people you’ve invited in front of good presenters or good presentation tools, such as videos, audios and Web sites; but if you can’t invite well, then you’re going to have a tough time getting anywhere in this business.

Let’s go back to the step that comes before inviting:

what do you do to connect to people, so that you can do the inviting?Prospects can come from all sorts of sources. There are people you know,referrals from people you know, direct mail, including e-mail, postcards and any other kind of out bound campaign; then there are advertisements in newspaper,radio, different media; it can be people you meet while you’re sitting on an airplane, or at a party...

Do you favor any one of these?

No, I don’t have a favorite. I like to be effective at all of them. If someone comes into my business and is reluctant to approach his warm list, I want to be able to teach that person how to do the cold market— which means I need to be able to do any one of these things myself.

Tim, what’s your opinion of the directive to “Go tell your family and friends”— the pure warm-market approach we’ve been doing for 50 years?

The philosophy itself is very accurate— but the method through which we typically go at it has degraded our reputation as an industry.

Networking in the truest sense is what the very top businesses actually do. It's what all businesses did, across the boards, prior to about the mid 1800s, when advertising began. Before that,we were all professional networkers. That's all we did.

Then in 1850, the first public advertisement came out: the tobacco industry created a portrait of a man with an American flag draped around him, looking at a cigarette with a smile on his face. That was the first real ad, and in the century and a half since then, advertising has pretty much taken over as the medium through which to communicate business to masses of people.

But even today, when you look at the top echelons in any business, that kind of pre-1850 networking is still what occurs. If one company wants to buy another company, they don’t put out an ad: it’s all done through networking.

The top people sit down for lunch and have an exploratory conversation: “You have a business; I have a business, what’s the possibility of us taking our assets and combining them together…?” This is professional networking at its best.

That’s pure networking: contacting people you know and getting a referral. WhatI teach is to go back to that kind of business. So yes, write a list of the 200 (or 2000) people you know— but don’t destroy the relationship in the process!

In terms of destroying relationships, are there a few common traps people fall into?

Let me illustrate it this way: I created something I call the Inviting Formula. [Tim's 'Inviting Formula" is detailed in a PDF attachment you can download at the end of this article.]

The first step is to greet the prospect: you get them to talk freely and openly to you. That’s the requirement: they must be talking freely and openly before you can move out of the greeting step.

The next step is to qualify: find out what that person needs, wants or doesn’t want in life.

Once they're qualified, then and only then do you open your mouth concerning what you have. In the process of teaching this formula, I found that I could give one of my new distributors the exact scripts I use to do this, but they wouldn't get the same results I was getting.

For a trainer, this is quite a frightening thing. So, I would take the phone back and call a few people, and they would say yes to me, but no to that other person. And my training efforts began to crumble— until I started to identify what the difference was between what I was doing and what they were doing.

I started to pin point what I call the 10 Communication Qualities: ten qualities that a person possesses if he has learned how to be a great communicator.

[The 10 Communication Qualities are also in a PDF you can download at the end of this article.]

Being a great communicator is not something people are born with. All you have to do is take a trip down the maternity ward and look at all the screaming babies:I dare you to try to pick out which one of them is a born communicator! You can’t… they’re all screaming. One of those communication qualities is called “Too Much Assertiveness". To assert means to force your opinion on another. If you use too much assertiveness in communicating with your warm market, then you’ll blow a relationship. If I come on a little too strong, you step back just a little. If I come on way too strong, you hide— you see me on your caller ID and you don’t answer it! This is a behavior I’m trying to limit, minimize and even eliminate in the industry.

When you say “too strong,” the first thing I think is the classic aggressive used car salesman. But there’s another kind, which is a huge pet peeve: The careless network marketing amateur who calls up and says, 'Hi Tim, how are you, Gosh, haven’t talked to you in a long time, how’s the wife and kids... hey, do you keep your business options open?”

Absolutely— and you know why that’s too assertive? Because you didn’t get a good greeting! You didn’t get the person talking freely and openly to you before you qualified.

"Do you keep your business options open…?” is a qualifying question. But if you come out with a qualifying question without having completed the greet step, it will be experienced as too assertive, and you won’t get any kind of productive response.

Something I especially appreciate about your approach is that you allow that “greeting” step to take whatever time it takes- is that right?

Absolutely. It can take time. I’ve done a greeting for three months. That’s“courting.”

If you went to a singles bar you wouldn’t walk up to someone and say, “Hey, will you marry me?” That’s coming on too strong! But if you say, “Hey, would you like to have a cup of coffee together?” it’s a whole different ball game.

It can be, “Let’s have coffee” or even, “How have you been?”— but really,sincerely asking it like you care, not like when you step up to the grocery store check out and say, “Hi, how are you?”

Say a more about that?

There’s this fictitious question we ask, “How are you?”
The person’s not really asking that question, it’s just another way of saying “Hi.”

I’ve heard this a number of times on airplanes: somebody says, “So, what do you do?” and then they don’t listen to a word the other person says from that point on: they just say, “Uh-huh, uh-hah, uh-huh,” and all they’re listening for is a point where they can get an angle to pitch their company on the person. Instead of saying, “Really … systems engineer? Really! Tell me more about that— what’s your typical day like?” and really finding out who that human being is.

I did a call with a lady named Nadira that started off with an objection. She was a purchased lead, and someone had already called her prior to my calling her, so our call began with her objection. Obviously, that’s where we needed to start. But once I moved her past the objection, I still needed to get the greeting.

The formula is the formula: you always have to get the greeting before you move on.

In that call, her last statement is, “Well … I guess I’ll try something else.” The key question that turned that call was when I said, “Well, what are you gonna' do?What are you going to try?” Then I just listened.

She went on to tell me that she was a doctor and started telling me a little about her life and what she’s doing and why she’s doing it. And it was like having a canvas unfurl in front of me, and I began to paint on it… Who is this person? What does she want, what has she not been able to accomplish? There’s so much you’ll find when you’re genuinely interested in someone, when you want to work to help that person.

I’ve heard this call you’re referring to, and it was remarkable. I loved and admired your working with this lady. As you learned more about her circumstances, I could hear your excitement for her connecting with your opportunity— it was tangible. She was trying to raise the money to reunite her family, wasn’t she?

Yes: her husband was in Algeria. He had gotten her and their daughter out of harm’s way by sending them to America, and now she needed to make enough money to bring him over too.

And she was a doctor, but couldn’t work as a doctor because of red tape. What happened to her?

Here’s how we got to the “qualify” part of the call.

I kept asking questions and listening. I learned that she’d been trying unsuccessfully to find a way to get her husband over here for two years.

Whatever it is a person wants, they’ve already proven that they can’t get it without your help. How do we know this for sure? Because they don’t have it. So our job is to listen. If you get a good greeting, they will then tell you what they have not been able to accomplish so far.

So I asked her, “Is your husband going to come here?” And she said, “Yes.” I said, “When?” And she said, “Well, I don’t have a date yet.” I said, “Oh, how long have you been here?” She said, “Two years.”

That was the moment I identified her need. I felt incredibly compassionate right at that moment— and I knew exactly what she needed help doing. And, I knew I could help her.

When you’ve done this many times, you know that you can help most anyone,but some people don’t want help. There’s a perfect combination that occurs when you locate a prospect you know you can help and who wants the help. When you find that combination, it makes you very happy.

That’s the way it happened. She didn’t come in without objections, I might add. When I met with her, it turned out to be an issue that she was a doctor and not a sales person, and we had to move her past that point too.

Do you want to say anything about that?

When someone has not been successful at doing something, there is always a reason. All I have to do is keep working with that person until I identify what they put up as a barrier that prevents them from accomplishing the thing.

I knew it was only a matter of time for me to surface whatever that barrier was forher. Once we explained the whole program to her, She started saying, “Oh, I can’t do that, I’m not a sales person….” So I had to walk her through this scenario:

"Let’s pretend you just did an X-ray (she is a gastroenterologist), and you found a cancer as big as an apple in my colon. What are you going to advise me?”

She said, “Well, we have to cut it out.” And I said, “But wait— no, no, no! I’m afraid! I don’t want to do that! I am not going into surgery!” What would she say then? And she responded the way she would in that situation to move me toward accepting the surgery.