How Newark Ohio Down and Out Sales Crew Peformed Sales Miracles

This is not just a story, it is a true story. It is not just a story, it's a set of instructions that can awaken your amazing sales potential.

I was put into sales management much against my wishes. Teaching my system of "The Magic of Numbers and Statistics in Sales" was no easy task, because people considered my stories of guaranteed sales to be a fantasy.

I traveled to our Newark, Ohio office which had had a lot of problems and needed to be rebuilt. It had been declared by the current manager as a disaster. He said no one could make any sales in Newark, Ohio.

The Newark sales manager's negative thoughts were so strong that everyone in the office believed there was no way to make sales in the city. I had been told to shut down the office but I persuaded senior management to let me try to rehabilitate the office, rather than shutting it down.

This was the last chance for that office. The place was riddled with the doubts of the sales people and especially the sales manager. This was the toxin that was killing sales in Newark, and if I couldn't get it out of there, the game would be over.

But I absolutely knew that people in Newark were not different than in any other town we had successfully sold. I knew the Newark office could make sales.

Because my system had been successful everywhere, all I needed to change in Newark was the negative thoughts.

My first action as new manager was to tell everyone they were correct. Newark was an impossible place to sell. I told them they would need to find work elsewhere. I believed it would be easier to start with a new crew then to change the attitude and belief of the current.

One young lady begged me to stay, she told me she really enjoyed her work there and she wanted to keep her job.

I warned her that I expected a lot more than the previous manager. I told her that she would be responsible for three times the amount of the previous quota.

She told me she was willing to do that, but with tears in her eyes she told me she didn't know how to do it.

I looked at her, and I could see through her eyes into her soul, that she was open to suggestions and willing to learn. I believed that she could do it if she was shown how.

I explained exactly how she needed to follow the system step by step and I showed her how that would lead to making her quota. I showed her every single thing that needed to be done to succeed.

I explained to her that sales was more than just coming to work. You have to actually work while you're at work. You have to believe while your dialing that the people want what you have. You have to be kind, you have to be sincere, you have to transmute the feeling you have about the products and services to the prospect on the phone. Without this, nothing will ever happened.

I showed her how to determine the number of sales she could count on per number of prospects contacted by keeping track of her results by percentages,. . After keeping track for a while, she would see that, say if she started out making one sale for every 10 prospects she contacted that she now will know she needs to make ten presentations to count on one sale.

I showed her that to make her quota of 1500 dollars per week, that she would have to do a certain amount of presentations each week in order to get a certain amount sales.

She was amazed the first week when she actually hit her goal. And she had done it herself! The truth of my system became more real and more true to he as week after week she made that quota. Finally she understood that it was all up to her to do a certain amount of presentations, and that would lead to a certain number of sales, that would create an amount of income she could count on.

The next step: getting more sales from turning no's to yes's, by raising herconsistency and continually making her beliefs more positive. And the reward would be even more increases in income.

During this time we developed a very good crew. Everyone was hitting their quotas, everything was going fine. We had a core crew of five people plus myself.

Over time two salespeople from the old crew had come back to me and I allowed them to come back one at a time, and I taught them the new way. At this point I had a blended crew, some new members, and some members from the old sales team. Everyone used the new system, everyone was successful with it. But the greatest challenge was yet to come.

We had been able to turn the sales people from the old crew around, because we showed them that Newark was a great place to work. They could see it for themselves, they made sales, and now they could see that people really wanted our products.

One afternoon I pulled the same sheets of numbers that had been used by the previous manager out of the drawer of my desk. These shame-filled pages still held bookmarks of the unfinished area and notes that detailed that sad results of the old method of calling.

When the old crew saw me pull out the numbers, a chill shot across their face. They asked, we're not going to dial those are we? I said yes we are. These are wonderful numbers we are going to do great with them.

They told me, we have dialed those before, and they did not work. Those are the meanest people we ever called, they slam the phone on us, they will not talk twelve even fifteen to us. If we make a sale they are never home when we try to deliver.

I explained to them, you are now a powerful crew. You are some of the finest people in this company. We have been setting records over every other office in the company.

It was quite an accomplishment for this sales team to have the top sales records in our very large multi-statecompany. I looked each of them in the eye and said, "TIt's different this time, and when you call those people, they will say yes!" There is nothing to fear from the old numbers, as long as you have a different attitude, you have new sales skills. You have sold Newark before. My dejected group told me it would would "Try". That was the warning.

To keep spirits up, I created a positive party-like atmosphere in our office. I made coffee, and brought in refreshments, and tried to keep the tone light with humor. But near the day's end, we had not made even one sale.

Now I had promised my boss, that I would never walk out of my office without at least seven hundred dollars in sales for the day. We had zero. However, I was not worried, I knew my crew had the ability to pull off a minimum day in only one hour if they decided to. We normally turned in twelve hundred dollars or more per day in sales.

I asked everyone to stop calling for a moment. The room was dark with fear and negative thoughts, the legacy that had been part of their office life from the old manager. These non productive negativities had taken them hostage again. I knew that the miasma was not coming from the numbers, they weren't bad luck. But it seemed very much like the bad stuff was attached to those numbers. Everything had been fine before we started on those sheets.

I explained to them that their success came from themselves and their frame of mind. It had nothing to do with management. All I had simply done was point out what was inside themselves, and what their own abilities were. If they could look inside themselves now, they would see that they still had the ability, and they could still make this a very successful day.

We tried on again. They started to whine, they started to talk negatively. I knew I was losing my crew. By 8:30 I had had enough. We only had 30 minutes left and we had no sales.

STOP! I told them. I shared with them that I had made a promise never to turn in less than 700 dollars for one days sales to my supervisor and I vehemently insisted to keep that promise with whatever time we had left. I listened to all the bad talk all day long, now they had to listen to me.

I know that you are the best crew I have ever had, and probably one of the best I will ever have. But you have let me down.Now that is fine, because I have let people down also. But mostly I am concerned that you have let yourselves down. You have let this poison of negative thought infect you, and I have to show you that it is only yourself stopping you. It is not the people we are dialing.

They knew I was angry when I asked them to give me the very worst sheet of numbers in the room. They agreed with little delay on a specific sheet on numbers. I took it, and I announced that we would make that $700 today if I had to do it all myself. I told them to get the drivers ready to deliver product and pick up checks. I warned them that we were going to be very busy in a short while.

I selected two of my sales people to write down orders as they heard me make them, because I knew I would not have time to write down these sales, so they would have to listen closely as I worked on the phone. In order to make $700 in less than half an hour I'd have to make 20 sales in about 20 minutes.There was no time for a no. For my plan to work, veryone had to say yes. But I knew, that if I had the belief, no one could say no to me. I knew that if I was sincere, if I believed I was doing the right thing, If I believed I was doing something good for someone, it would work, and no one would say no.

So I sold the first call. Then I sold second person I talked to, and I sold the third person I talked to. I was doing it! Every call was a yes! I was truly at the top of my game! I was showing them they could control it. I was proving to my people that they could choose not to allow any negative beliefs in their minds to stop their sales.

By the time 9 o clock rolled around, dialing the very worst numbers that crew had to offer me, I hit my 700 dollar quota. My drivers had the products delivered and the checks picked up by 9:30.The crew was amazed. They could not believe what they had just seen. I then handed back the sheet of numbers and told my crew that I would never accept "bad numbers" as an excuse in that office again.

That was just the beginning. Now they knew that success was up to them. My sales team outsold other offices with 3 to 4 times the numbers of sales staff. The local district gave us what they considered the worst sales territory, and we turned that around to have our highest sales figures ever.

They knew they could do it, and we still outsold many of the offices with 12-15 phones and 20-25 salespersons.Although my 5 people had to share 3 phones, and we were calling an area no one else wanted, my people knew that did not matter.

The rest of the company averaged 5 sales out of each 100 contacts. But in our sales room, at least half of everyone we talked to became a sale. The sales team I had trained was doing better even than I had done as an individual sales person, and I had sold approximately one out of every three, which was a very respectable number and made me a top salesperson. The sales were unbelievably high. But my sales team knew it was true, because they were doing it.