Great Mystery of Sales

Every person involved in sales has read an article or attended a seminar about a particular prospecting technique and thinks "I used to do that."  In some cases, they may have been successful with the strategy and then, for whatever reason, they quit doing it.  Therein lays the great mystery of sales.

My close freind and national sales trainer Dave Beson says "Everything works; nothing doesn't."  There are lots of things that will work but they must be done and for a long enough period of time to give them a chance to return the results.

I've seen Dave take a large piece of paper off an easel pad on stage and start describing different prospecting techniques.  He'd pretend to be an agent talking about what won't work.  I won't call for sale by owners; there's too much competition from the other agents.  At that point, he'd tear a piece of paper off and let it fall to the floor.

He'd mention another type of prospecting such as expired listings and state why he wasn't going to work that either and tear another piece of paper from the larger piece.  He'd literally go through most of the common types of prospecting such as open houses, floor duty, farming, direct mail, cold calling and others while each time tearing one more piece of paper from what was originally a large piece of paper.

Finally, Dave would have one small piece in his hand and ask the audience "if you've eliminated all of these different things, what's left for you to do?"

My personal belief is that you don't have the right to say something won't work until you've given it a fair chance.  More importantly, when you're faced with reduced income and the challenge to increase it, why don't you examine the things you've done in the past where you've had success.  Just because you're not doing them now, for whatever reason you stopped doing them, doesn't mean they won't work again.  In fact, I'm almost quite sure they will.