I’m happy to have on today’s show Steve de la Torre, a sales expert and a Market Like A Nerd coach. He’s best known as being the host and founder of the Fitpro Inferno Podcast, where he digs deep into the minds of successful fitness professionals. He’s been in the fitness industry for 19 years, and has also worked in the marketing space with many different companies during that time. He’s got a wealth of knowledge regarding marketing and sales calls to offer our audience today.

Time Stamped Show Notes

• 0:00 – Introduction
• 3:10 – Working smarter. Steve’s #1 trick for working smarter, not harder is to dissect your daily/weekly tasks into “eliminate, automate and delegate” groups. Draw out 4 columns on a piece of paper. Column 1: write out every task item you do on a daily/weekly basis. Column 2 – Eliminate: write out the tasks from the first column that you can remove from your workload. Column 3 – Automate: write out the tasks that you can automate. Column 4 – Delegate: write out the tasks that you can delegate. This process will leave you with only a few simple things that you need to do in column 1.
• 5:40 – Scaling by getting others involved with sales calls. Hiring others to handle your sales calls enhances your positioning in the prospective client’s eyes. Your sales person is the gatekeeper doing your qualifying for you, and has the added benefit of allowing for more sales calls to be made without monopolizing your time.
• 8:40 – Developing your sales mindset. Sales should be seen as you allowing other people the opportunity to change their life by making the commitment to purchase from you. You are raising them up by offering what you do and helping them grow. To help the most people possible, you’ve got to outsource your sales conversations, and Steve has 3 tips to do this:
• 10:20 – Tip 1: Know what your end result is. You need to know exactly what the client will get out of your product, what’s the promise that you’re giving them? The conversation should surround this promise, not the nuts and bolts of what you’re selling them. If that promise is valuable enough, you’ve got something to sell and the process of selling is much easier.
• 12:30 – Tip 2: Be an expert in your ideal client. When you become an expert in your ideal client, you truly understand their fears, problems and desires. You can use this knowledge to help move them along to get that all important “yes.”
• 13:30 – Tip 3: Have a process of questions leading to “yes.” Sales are about questions, it’s not about pitches. Questions give you control of the conversation and guide the client to a “yes.”
• 15:25 – The purpose of the question process. The purpose is to build urgency, and then you want to be able to see whether your prospect is at the “enough is enough” point. Are they serious and ready to commit to improve their life/relationships/business? You can take somebody from mildly ready to seriously ready by asking the right questions, and also address their fears about taking the next step.
• 16:15 – Favorite questions. “What’s been holding you back?” “In the last 12 months, has this problem gotten worse or better?” followed up with “In the next 12 months, if you don’t do something about this, is it going to get better or worse?”
• 17:25 – Don’t monopolize the conversation. During the sales conversation the prospect should be doing most of the talking. Once they commit to the purchase, then you can reverse this and present to them how you’re going to help them solve their problems.
• 18:35 – Create the system then delegate the sales conversations. You want to delegate the calls to someone who is heart-centered and empathetic, someone you can trust who will always be caring about the prospective client and wants to help them. Once the system is created, you can tweak and adjust to improve the sales process.

Resources Mentioned:

• Fitpro Inferno: Website | iTunes
• Free video training from Steve, The 7 Question Close Method: com/nerds