Addicted to the Process: How to Close Transactional Sales With Confidence and Consistency

by Scott Leese

  Every day is a win when you’re watching people grow and blossom. The beauty and the joy for me is knowing that I poured myself into providing people with new opportunities to hit bigger milestones—to do things they have never done before—and watching firsthand as they succeed. This experience has allowed me to continue to grow as well.

  So I am telling you, if I can do this sh*t, so can you.

  Light Your Fire

  I want to show you how to hit the same milestones I hit myself—the ones I’ve successfully taught hundreds of transactional salespeople to hit. But for me to do that, you have to be open to what I have to say. You have to be open to change. You have to be willing to do things you’ve never done before.

  Take a moment now. Acknowledge that you don’t know everything. Recognize that there might be a different way, a better way, to make some improvements.

  It’s important to read this book from start to finish, and to follow the Process. The Process is in place, in a specific order, for a reason. It’s critical not to jump around trying to find shortcuts or to think that you have certain things already mastered. The path has been laid out for you. You simply have to choose to follow that path.

  Once you’re done reading, it will be time to apply what you’ve learned. This will affect every aspect of your life: the choices you make, how you work and how hard you work, how much you care, and how seriously you take it. It will affect you in ways you didn’t think were possible, and perhaps in ways that terrify you.

  A good friend I respect very much once told me that success boils down to one question: “How bad do you want to make it happen?”

  This book should provide you with a shot of adrenaline that lasts long after you’ve closed it. Periodically, though, you’re going to lose track of what has made you great. When that happens, come back to this Process, reference it, and remind yourself of how you became successful.

  Use this book as the first step on your path to sales greatness. Light the fire within. Then return to rekindle it when you feel your flame burning low.

  Now or Never

  It’s time to stop thinking about taking your life back and just do it.

  The great thing about a career in sales is that you don’t need a college degree. You certainly don’t need an MBA from Harvard or Stanford. You don’t have to be exceptionally gifted or acquire special skills that take forever to learn. What you do need is an intense desire to succeed and the willingness to hustle.

  To get started, all you have to do is make a mental shift—and then make a commitment. Do what I discovered was a blessing in disguise: jump in without a backup plan. Go all in! You don’t need to overanalyze it.

  Then once you get started, you can use each opportunity as a stepping-stone to move forward from one place to the next. There is no perfect time to do anything, and there will always be an excuse not to start.

  So what are you waiting for? This is your “now or never” moment. Let’s choose “now.”

  Chapter 1

  The Process

  At the Plate

  Imagine you’re a baseball player going through a slump. You’re not hitting home runs. It’s been a while since you hit anything. You start to get obsessed with the struggle instead of focusing on success. You think, “I need to hit a home run!”

  To try to turn it around, you tweak things—too many things. You change your batting stance. You start swinging at the first pitch every time. You chase every breaking ball. Do these frantic attempts to change ever work?

  One of the first things they tell you in baseball is to stop worrying about the result and start focusing on the process. Stop focusing on hitting home runs, and get back to the basics. Get your batting stance situated: get on balance, keep your elbows up, bat back, knees bent. See the ball. See good pitches. Don’t worry about how far or hard you are hitting it. Just try to make contact.

  All of a sudden, you get a hit. You start to come out of the slump.

  Once you are making contact consistently, you need to get to a place where you’re driving the ball. You start to hit the ball hard, but in your next at bat, you hit a groundout. Then you hit a high, deep fly ball, and somebody catches it in the alley. But soon you hit a single. Then a double.

  You hear your coach say to your teammate, “He’s coming back.” And before you know it, you’re hitting home runs again.

  You trusted in the process, you went back to the basics, you put in the time and effort, and it worked. This is how transactional sales will work for you too.

  What Is the Process?

  Before you can have faith in the Process of transactional sales, you have to understand it. So what is this Process, anyway?

  The Process is the routine required to give you the best chance for success in transactional sales. It is a methodology and series of habits, decisions, and actions. It’s the way of going about every single sales call you make that gives you the greatest chance of being the best salesperson in the company.

  Too many people in sales focus on selling what their product does. They constantly talk about features and benefits. But that’s not how I think about things. I think prospects could not care less about your cool product and company, because they don’t know they have a problem. Or if they do, they certainly don’t think it’s important enough to do something about it any time soon.

  The Process I’ve come up with is mirrored after the addiction model.

  With the addiction model, you first have to get people to admit they have a problem. Then you get them to understand why they should care about having this problem and why it’s important to change. Then, and only then, can you get them into rehab. I think sales is very similar to this process.

  With the Process, my first job is to get prospects to admit that they have a problem. Then they’re ready for me to educate them on why they should care about having this problem. I have to communicate the need to solve the problem immediately. They have to see the value and feel the urgency of making this particular change. Only then are they going to be open to hearing about the answer to their problem. That’s when I can talk about what the product does and present it as the solution, offering them the opportunity to take advantage of it.

  If I just called you up to tell you about my company and what my product does, your first reaction would be, “What does this have to do with me?” Similarly, I can’t just walk up to someone with a substance abuse problem and say, “I know this kick-ass rehab facility. You want to go?” The immediate reaction would also be, “What are you talking about? I don’t have a problem.” You can’t solve people’s problems until they acknowledge them and care about changing them—right now.

  The Process is in place for a reason—to bring you the greatest chance for success.

  Why Have a Process?

  The Process provides a strategy to follow. It’s a road map and a guide to help you get to where you want to go.

  Generally speaking, when a group of new hires starts in sales, they’re a bunch of inexperienced people running around trying to figure out what to do. If I let them just figure it out on their own, they’re going to struggle, and they may never figure it out at all. I need to provide the right tools and the right guidance from the get-go. I need to reduce the time from inexperience to success.

  The best tool for success is the Process. If you focus on it, rather than worrying about the outcome, the results will follow.

  Too often salespeople are so fixated on thinking, “I need to close the deal,” that their process breaks down. They get what I call “happy ears.” They take shortcuts. If they’re on the phone and the prospect shows any interest, they become overly excited and desperate. They jump ahead in the Process and skip over some parts. Their patience wears thin, and they get anxious to close instead of staying calm and patiently creating value and urgency.

  When this happens, the odds of
closing the deal are greatly diminished.

  It’s really important to stay dedicated and adhere to the Process all the time. When you believe in it, it works for you. If you follow the Process and pitch people the right way, it will work better than any other methodology.

  And once you’ve learned this Process, it’s important to keep using it. Don’t tinker. When people first get started, they all make the same mistake: they follow the Process, have some success with it, and then think they have it figured out. They say, “Now I can put my own spin on it.” And when they do, it falls to pieces.

  The most common response I get from someone who started off strong but is in the midst of a sophomore slump is “I don’t know what happened!” I ask, “What did you change?” And the answer is always “Nothing.” Yet once we dive into the calls and the pitch and process used, it becomes painfully obvious that the person has strayed from what was working before.

  I’m teaching you to do it this way because it works. And it will work consistently. If something is working, don’t change it. Just get better at each of the steps within that Process.

  Small Wins, Big Results

  Getting better at each step of the Process can be explained using the Japanese business concept of kaizen.

  Kaizen is the idea of making small, daily, continuous improvement. If you are struggling, you just need to pick one thing to work on and improve that small piece. Otherwise, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the big goals that you set for yourself.

  For example, I used to have a goal to “read more.” There was no way for me to feel any sense of progress toward that goal because it was too vague and overwhelming in its scope. It scared me off, and I actually read less because of it. But then I realized that the real goal was to acquire information about leadership, sales, and business. So I set the specific, smaller goal of reading one book per quarter. Reading one book in three months sounded attainable, so it motivated me to keep going.

  Once I achieved my goal and was reading a book every quarter, I graduated to one book per month. It was a manageable goal that provided me with small wins, which reinforced my good decisions.

  You want to be very specific with your goals. You need your goals to be measurable and achievable so you get wins under your belt that build up your confidence to keep going. There is a reason that powerhouse college football programs schedule games against Tiny No-Name University from the middle of nowhere early in the season—they are looking to get their rhythm and confidence going. Focusing on the Process will give you the small wins that eventually lead to the big results you want.

  The World of Transactional Sales

  People have been selling things since the dawn of humankind. Cavemen tried to convince other cavemen to search for food in a certain area. That method—one person attempting to convince somebody else of something—is sales.

  There are more books about the sales industry than you could ever read in a single lifetime. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book is that I believe the world of transactional sales does not get the respect it is due. And I believe the beginning of one’s journey into a sales career doesn’t need to be so scary. Transactional sales—the specific world we’re talking about in this book—doesn’t get as much attention as the other areas of sales, and that’s a shame.

  For some reason, transactional sales has been seen as a less glamorous field than other forms of sales. It’s not in the spotlight all the time. It can require a lot more grit and hustle, and some people find that grimier. Over the years, I have received feedback that demeaned the transactional sales world unfairly.

  But there’s no other world for me.

  Working for a big corporate enterprise-level organization, where you work deals for years and wine and dine people multiple times to move prospects through a hundred different steps, sounds tedious and exhausting. (And you’ll never convince me that it makes you a better salesperson!) If I were able to close only one deal a quarter, I’d get to go home only four days out of the year with that feeling of I got a win today. Where is the rush in that?

  I’m too much of a competitor for that world. I want to go home every day feeling that I won or lost. If I won, I want to feel as if I’m on top of the world. If I lost, I want to feel like dirt, and I want to use that to motivate me to never feel that way again. And I want it all to start again tomorrow. I want to know each day I come into the office that I have the possibility of a kick-ass day. I need that hope.

  There are a lot of new beginnings in transactional sales versus more traditional sales positions, where one relationship is nurtured over time. It’s not that one is necessarily better than the other. It just depends on what you like to do. I like to describe transactional sales as big-wave surfing: dropping in, going fast, and going hard. The enterprise and long sales-cycle world is more like longboarding, taking your time and just slowly riding the wave.

  Dropping in on a wave may be more physically demanding, but the thrill is also more intense because of it. And in transactional sales, we get to experience that thrill more frequently.

  Follow the Process

  I have surfed the waves of transactional sales. And I have wiped out, but I’m hoping you won’t have to—at least not as hard. If you follow the Process and have faith in it, you can be successful.

  There are four important steps on this path: build the mindset to succeed, know your stuff, sell it, and stick to the plan.

  Build the mindset to succeed. Nothing in sales is more important than how you feel about yourself and what you’re doing. You need the right mindset to be open to new ideas, to learn, and to decide that you want to be successful. You control you. Your confidence and your self-esteem are everything. Protect them with great care. Work on them daily. Eliminate anything in your life that does not lift you up.

  Know your stuff. You have to know what you’re selling and how to sell it. You need to know the product, know why it’s important, and know something about your customers and the challenges they face. Then you need to know what you’re supposed to say and exactly how to respond in any situation. This makes you a sharper salesperson because you’re not thinking of your next line. You are able to listen and pay attention to the more subtle aspects of the interaction. If you are not worried about what you need to say next, you can focus on the needs and problems of the prospect.

  Sell it. Sell it, and sell it the right way. The Process is a way to sell based on value. Somebody has a problem, it’s important to solve this problem right away, and you’re selling the solution. Following the Process leads to small wins, which then lead you to big results. Find pain. Build value. Talk about what the product does. In that order. Do not try to sell it in any other order. Your results will suffer.

  Stick to the plan. Life happens. Things change. The only difference between successful people and less successful people is how they handle those changes. The older I get, the more I realize all of our lives are f***ed. Nobody is immune. It’s the way we deal with our issues that sets us apart. When you have a problem, don’t tweak the steps or focus on the results. Go back to the basics and follow the Process. That’s your plan for success.

  Now you’ve been introduced to the Process. And the same Process that you will use to guide the sale is the one you are personally going to use while learning transactional sales. After all, you want to change your life, don’t you?

  You have a problem, whether it’s debt, or an unfulfilling job, or not knowing how to get where you want to go. You should care about that problem: this is your life, and you get only one. You deserve to make it a success. And the solution is in your hands. This book gives you the opportunity to follow the Process from small wins to big rewards.

  This Process encompasses both you as the salesperson and what you do when you’re selling. I’m going to break both of those down for you throughout the rest of this book, starting with your mindset.

/>   Chapter 2 will give you the mindset you need to succeed.

  Chapter 2

  Build the Mindset to Succeed

  A Reason to Succeed

  Everybody has a reason for wanting to succeed. To say it’s about the money is a cop-out. The money is a means to an end. What will you do with the money? That’s something specific—and that’s your reason.

  Recently, a young salesperson who works for me tried to tell me he didn’t have a reason for wanting success. I just looked at him sideways and said, “Come on, man. I don’t believe you.” I started asking him questions about his life, and he revealed that he takes Uber to work because he doesn’t have a car. I pointed out that might be a reason to work hard and make a larger commission check next month than the one he’d just made.

  He told me, “I never looked at it that way.” From there, I told him to get more specific.

  Rather than just having him tell me he wanted a new car, I gave him an assignment. I said, “Go home tonight, go online, and figure out which car you want. What color is it, which dealership has it, and how much does it cost? And I want you to tell me how much money you have now versus how much this car is going to cost. When you do that, tell me how much you need to make in commissions every month to save up for this car.”

  He came back the next day and said, “Holy crap! If I hit the next commission tier instead of this one, I’m only three or four months away from buying my new car.” Lightbulb moment!

  On the surface, he didn’t think he had goals. But everybody has a reason to succeed if they can just visualize it and get specific about the details.

  Win or Lose

  That salesperson of mine found his reason to succeed. After that, he needed to find the right mindset.

  When you are in the frame of mind to do whatever it takes to win, you have the mindset to succeed. No matter what obstacles are in the way of achieving your goal, you will find a way to get around them. You will rearrange your life to surmount any challenges and accomplish what you set out to do. And once you’ve done that, you will make more changes to hit your next goal.