Best Practice Sales Training Your Salespeople Will Value, Adopt, and Master

Client Builder™ sales training provides companies and sales professionals with a proven, practical road map for filling their prospecting pipelines, improving their closing ratio and increasing sales and profits.

Unlike other more theoretical systems, Client Builder speaks the language of salespeople. It provides simple, practical strategies and techniques that are easily adopted into everyday selling situations, helping sales professionals differentiate themselves from their competition. Although it simplifies the sales process and puts control in the seller’s hands, it is equally beneficial to the parties on both sides of a deal.

Client Builder Academy™

The Client Builder Academy™ is an online learning management system that helps the trainer and sales manager monitor a salesperson’s learning and hold them accountable. It includes a robust combination of reading materials, video clips and exercises that provides a variety of ways to learn and integrate the concepts and practices.

Customization – Based on each salesperson’s individual needs, together we choose from among thirty different sales courses to use in whatever combination and sequence we deem best to create fast wins as well as long-term development.
Flexible Delivery – With the online platform as a foundation, our sales training and coaching can be delivered both in-person and virtually, enabling powerful, event-based immersions as well as ongoing training that can fit into daily work routines.
Adaptable to Individual Styles – Utilizing our strategies and techniques, salespeople build their own personal selling playbooks tailored to fit their unique style in the context of what and to whom they sell. Managers are also provided feedback and included as true partners in each salesperson’s individualized training process.

Core Principles

Client Builder training is built on the following set of beliefs and principles about selling. While we hold these axioms to be largely self-evident, some sales cultures and situations may not be compatible. You should take care to ensure a proper fit of any sales system to your situation.

You must believe in what you sell. At its very essence, selling is about the transfer of beliefs. Your client will never believe in the value of your product or service any more strongly than you do.

Keep your focus on your prospect at all times. It sounds simple, but most salespeople focus primarily on themselves, their product or service, or their organization. Your focus should always be on your prospects or customers and their felt pain and desires.

The better you are at prospecting, the better you’ll be at selling. If you don’t have a full pipeline of new opportunities, every deal becomes critical. Yet your ability to sell becomes compromised, as the more desperate you feel about making a sale, the more you tend to do everything wrong.

Seek to be respected, instead of being liked. Although people tend to do business with people they like, salespeople who seek to be liked rarely succeed in the long term. They lack the guts to guide the sales process in the appropriate way, so they end up selling on price and hanging on to opportunities long after they are dead.

Collaboration, not competition, is the appropriate mindset for selling. Too many companies and salespeople view selling as a contest in which one party is trying to win at the expense of another. This mindset makes it harder for your prospect to let down their guard and tell you what you need to know to qualify them effectively. So it’s in the seller’s best interest to look after the client’s best interest.

People buy emotionally; they only justify their decisions rationally. When it comes to making buying decisions, it’s not what buyers think, it’s what they feel that determines whether they’ll buy from you.

People buy when they have “pain.” Pain is the gap between where people are and where they want to be. Regardless of whether you sell a product or a service, tangible or intangible, to consumers or to businesses, in the end what you really sell are solutions to an individual or an organization’s pain.

Use systems for prospecting and selling. Adopt an overall strategy and set of techniques designed to ensure that you handle every buyer-seller interaction in as close to the optimum way as humanly possible. Without systems, your sales efforts will be inconsistent and so will your results.

You can’t “convince” anybody of anything. Traditionally, salespeople have been led to believe that they must convince someone to buy. The fact is, all you can do is facilitate your buyer’s decision process and supply the proof they need to convince themselves. Your success (along with your credibility) is determined by the questions you ask, not the answers you give.

10.

Selling is a process of disqualification. The most important resource you have as a business person is your time. Smart business people do not waste their time with prospects that are not qualified.

11.

Give your prospect the freedom to say “no.” Most salespeople are taught to push for a “yes.” All this does is frustrate your prospect and force them to lie to you. Giving your prospect the freedom to say “no” reduces the pressure on both of you and helps you get to the heart of their problems so you can determine if there is a good fit with the solutions you provide.

12.

Give yourself permission to fail. Failure is often just a stepping stone on the road to success. You should never punish failure, but rather continually seek improvement while only punishing a lack of effort.

The 7-Step Sales Process

Client Builder is a selling system tailor-made for businesses that sell solutions to problems, whether those solutions come in the form of products, services, or some combination of both.

It gives salespeople a proven, practical, repeatable method for increasing their odds of closing every deal in the shortest possible time frame at the highest possible margins.

The foundation of the Client Builder selling process is a set of seven steps that form the building blocks of a deal, together with Advance Agreements, which act as the mortar holding it all together. These are specific understandings between buyer and seller as to what will take place at each and every step in the process from initial contact to closing.

1. Preparation

The objective of this step is to gather sufficient information about your market and the individuals in it so that you can begin to qualify your prospects and make the best possible impression on your initial sales call.

7. Confirmation

Finally, you strengthen your agreement with the buyer and eliminate any lingering “buyer’s remorse.” This is also where you establish the expectations you have for one another and how any failure to meet those expectations will be handled.

2. Diagnosis

This is where you determine whether your prospect has “pain” – a compelling, personal reason to acquire your product or service. Like a good doctor, your job is to get at the root of what’s causing your prospect’s pain so that you can prescribe the right solutions when it’s time to present. It’s where the lines of communication are established and the relationship is built. It’s also where the sale is typically won or lost.

6. Presentation

Here you bring the deal to outcome by delivering the proof your prospect needs and asking for a final decision. Believe it or not, this is often the shortest step in the entire process. Sometimes it isn’t even necessary, as the decision to buy is typically made long before you get to this point.

3. Investment

The goal of this step is to determine whether your prospect is willing and able to invest the resources required to fix the problems or seize the opportunities you uncovered in the Diagnosis step.

4. Decision Process

The objective here is to uncover the who, how, when, why, and what of your prospect’s decision-making process. Although the questions asked in this step are extraordinarily simple, they are often overlooked. As a result, salespeople frequently find themselves presenting to people that do not have the authority to make a final decision on whether to buy.

5. Commitment

Salespeople frequently invest lots of time, energy, and money in creating proposals or presentations that never close. Before investing this time and effort, you want to make certain that your prospect is committed – to solving the problems you helped them uncover in the diagnosis step; to investing the time, money, and effort needed to gain your solution; and to making a decision in a timely manner.

The Curriculum

The training curriculum chosen for each salesperson is based on their individual need for skill development. However, a key outcome of providing a selling system to a team is standardization of process and nomenclature. So to ensure a common playbook is available, some of the Client Builder modules may be assigned to all salespeople.

Following is a partial list of available modules:

Looking Back on Your Future: Determining what motivates you and setting personal and professional goals.
Improving Your Mental Game: How to generate greater self-confidence, the fundamental ingredient you need to maintain a high level of achievement.
Preparation: Identifying your target market and preparing your opening strategy.
Proactive Prospecting: Developing your personal prospecting plan and putting it into action.
Preparing to Prospect: Identifying your “common complaints” and preparing your “30-Second Qualifier.”
Creating a Referral Generation Machine: How to design and implement a system for consistently generating quality referrals.
Stress-Less Prospecting: How to uncover opportunities through networking and events.
Cold Calling Made Easier: How to reach decision makers in spite of voice mail and gatekeepers as well as how to handle their objections.
Building Rapport & Trust: How to build rapport and avoid the hidden traps that sabotage your interactions with prospects and customers.
Advance Agreements: The mortar that holds your deals together and keeps you in control of the selling process.
Diagnosis: Uncovering the problems and opportunities that you can help your prospect solve and capture.
Advanced Listening & Questioning Techniques: How to use questions to uncover pain, create a sense of urgency, and drive sales.
Investment: When and how to discuss the investment your prospect will have to make to buy your products and services.
Decision Process: Uncovering the who, how, when, why, and what of your prospect’s decision-making process.
How and Why People Buy: Understanding the psychology behind the sale and why people do what they do when it comes to making buying decisions.
Closing the Deal: Establishing the commitment, presenting your proposal and getting a final decision.
Confirmation & Keeping Customers: How to safeguard your deals, manage expectations, and build lasting customer relationships.
Overcoming Resistance: How to overcome stalls and objections and change your prospect’s mindset without making them defensive.
Overcoming the Enemy Within: How to change your results by changing your beliefs.
Increasing Your Selling Horsepower: How to dramatically improve your sales performance by working on four crucial elements and five hidden weaknesses.
How Selling Has Changed: What you must do to survive and thrive in today’s hypercompetitive sales environment.

Ready to intensify your sales results?