welcome to new beginnings with karen dell where we celebrate the creativity wisdom and courage of people creating change i am so pleased to have with me rocky romeo the third  rocky is the founder of the sales trainer of america that pound trainer says sales trainers of america and he is going to talk to us about common myths the mistakes that people make in approaching sales and i'm very fascinated with this topic myself because i don't consider myself a good sales person and i want to learn from you so welcome rocky thank you how are you pleasure  wonderful i'm glad to have you tell us a little bit about your business what it is that you do and then i want to ask you some questions around myths that people common mistake people have around sales first tell us what you do what i do is i go into an organization and i try to find out all the places they're losing sales and then show them how to fix it ok great great and what are some of the places where people do sales what are some of the common mistakes that you find the common mistakes that i find are very simple fixes that makes them common mistakes and of course is more complex mistakes of course but to give an example i worked with a coffee house in pennsylvania and one of the problems that they were having is that they have entertainment on friday and saturday nights and people would come in for the entertainment so that the tables not order anything taking up space and then they would leave and so the coffeehouse was a very comfortable with that so that was one of the problems that i had to solve and the problem to that is very common  problem and a solution very simple what i asked them to do is simply well after the music starts or during the break is to go up to each table send a waitress or waiter to each table and say thank you for coming to our coffee house tonight hope you're enjoying the entertainment what can i get you one and just that simple thing of what can i get you to increase their business thirty five percent wonderful it's such a simple solution so they have to get over the embarrassment if they have it or hesitation of actually going to a table and say thank you for coming what can i get you today that's interesting because a coffee house is in business to sell coffee there your coffee nowadays costs a lot of money  in places that are not name starbucks because they are getting you know these very exclusive coffee beans that they're selling so maybe the question really is what's the hesitation that people have around asking the simple question what can i get you on the case of a coffee house or even in the case of retail boutique stores the bottom line to all of that is there has to be motivation to make sales to begin with a lot of here's a secret a lot of boutique stores and certain coffee houses do not have that motivation because they're financially independent and a lot of people retire into the boutique or retail business so there's really no need to make a sale to begin with so if they feel a little bit uncomfortable in asking for the sale then they just won't do it if you don't have that motivation if you go into a store that needs to make a sale to pay the rent to pay employees to make a living then they're not as hesitant to do that because there's real motivation to do that that's interesting so i'm just trying to picture myself opening up a shop and i'm not motivated to sell but i must be motivated to have a shop oh yeah there's a  store they were close by into a shopping mall and they have the greatest products gets everyone's attention very unique products so people are in and out of there all day long because it's as a shopping destination and one time i went down there and there was a chain across the door a small chain and it was a lady sitting by the chain and she was letting people in i think it was a quarter she was charging to let people in and although that sounds strange really does they're not making any money for people who come in and take a look so if they're not motivated to engage the customers when the customers come in if they just run behind the counter and sit and wait for people to bring them things they usually waited quite a long time and they're actually running in my opinion a museum because they have such unique products that people come in to look at that look at this look at that and had their wowed but they don't buy anything so i think charging a little entrance fee is one way to solve their problem but a better way to solve their problem is to realize what you have you have to sell and to get them up to par to actually go out there and engage t customer and let them know what's new and cetera et cetera is better than sitting outside with a chain charging twenty five cents yeah i would agree so you know this whole notion of sales it sounds like underneath it all is an emotional element there's obviously the product and the value but unless the seller when i hear you saying is motivated to sell then they have a boutique they have a coffee house they have a retail shop where people can walk around look but not buy absolutely and i guess that's that's revealing is very revealing i guess i could talk about the shop because they're no longer in the i was doing business with a very small boutique store in a certain area and just so happened that because i was doing business with them on a personal level and i was buying a lot of their products into the thousands of dollars i thought i would introduce my services and so i asked well how many people actually come into this specific little boutique store a week and they usually say something about oh maybe thirty or forty people week and so how many people buy maybe one wow so i and they're in a very unique shopping area so i said well how do you pay the rent how do you live and so we're not really worried about that when we get tired of retail we're just going to retire because you see that shopping center over there rock on that and you see that store over there i own that in those apartments down the road i don't that's all we then get a little tired and would just close the shop and go and about six months later because the so though that's an example of people that really aren't motivated to make  a lot of small boutique stores retail stores a lot of people are just kind of as a retired thing or just as a little pleasure thing there are a lot of people who work on wall street that go into retail boutique stores and they just want to have a look at they really don't have any need to make any sells at all wow wow and does that become a tax write off for them probably ok i'm not an accountant but ok i would think so ok so who are your target clients for what you do i have two types of clients one is the individual person and one is a is a store or a small business that has employees the individual sales person they come to me for training such as an insurance agent and accountant a car salesman things like that they come to me and say how can i sell better banks come to me well say bank bank employee still ok and they come to me so i have to cross sell what do i do now i was just speaking to some attorneys and they need to cross sell on some of their services to are upset and the other is people who actually have employee sole say like a small service company maybe a carpet cleaning service locksmithing service small group boutique retail store with three or four full time employees a couple of part time employees so that's about the main type of clients that i deal with and every once in a while i actually deal with the much larger clients some my clients include american express pinero bred ford motor company just to name some of the bigger one ok and with the larger ones it's again to help individuals with their sales or is it to teach something else now some help individual with their sales unless it's a privately owned company ford is very public yes but there are bread and so forth but if there was a let's say a restaurant and i did a restaurant in north jersey and i i actually go in undercover was one of the things that i do for certain companies so i went undercover and i found out that the chefs were feuding with the waitresses and this is a very large banquet center with fifty four employees just in the bank what's in there a little while and sounds kind of funny about the feud but here's what happens if the chefs and the waitresses are feeling the chefs hold back the food they make the food late so the waitresses bring the food late they don't get any tips and of course the customer suffer still and management hadn't a clue that any of that was occurring and i was just one of the problems that i found while i said that while and what was your recommendation to correct that well they have to sit down to solve the problem they have to have a mediator and just solve that problem because there's some wants and needs on both ends where they're not communicating properly one of my clients actually had three different cultures in her company and all three different cultures spoke three different languages and they weren't communicating with each other and they stayed in their own culture group which actually slowed down that business tremendously now as a business in south plainfield and so one of the things that i was called to do besides training them was to get them to like one another and talk to one another and work with one another even though there's a little bit of a language barrier and wound now what you just described is the management consulting work that i do it time stuff where individual groups may not you said communicating well with each other and they have their own lingo that is not cross pollinated in it it inhibits the overall performance of the organization so it sounds like you're not really limited to sales you actually look holistically at organizations to figure out what's working sales may bring you in but to your point you know you're finding that the waitresses and the chefs may not be communicating the way they should or as you said there's three different cultural groups that are communicating differently i try to look at anything that's slowing down sales or stopping sales or anything that can create a hazard there was a  and so that was one of the things that i had a point out that was very dangerous i could involve lawsuits and race like that a lot of things that i kind of teacher kind of common sense but they just don't see it right then right just don't see it  and have to be to get motivated to do it there was an antique store in somerville and a friend of mine said i think you need to go see the lady who owns the antique store she needs them some more customers so i went in and i talked to her and she didn't really have antiques but she had a lot of newer products i would say like for outside gardens like stone statues and things the decorations and so one of the questions i asked her was when somebody comes into your beautiful store how do you ask them to buy what you have and this look of horror comes on her face and she says i would never be so rude as to ask somebody to buy what i have how rude is that so i said well what are you doing with all these products and she said i love all these products so my recommendation was we're not working together but i would suggest you take all these products and put them in your living room surrounded by them all day long she wasn't mowed really her to sell now no i didn't they take the gig if you are right i didn't take the assignment because i knew i was up against something that was really going to impede my reputation as well as her reputation so i didn't want to you know because she would try to do things maybe and fail if she did because she's not motivated enough to really do it right and how would you know impede her reputation of course and if my clients are not a when this this little shopping area closes at night how do you go on and market your business he said well i have a website i said but when the when the shopping area closes there are still people walking around here to do so i said let's take some of your brochures let's put them in a brochure holder five dollars ninety five cents from staples put it up on your door but the brochure isn't that the only thing you need to do is to look at that once a day because kids are going to come around lift up the brochures and put in a walking their dog early before this mall area opened up and they went in and one thousand dollar product wow so i keep it up yes he was convinced it was commenced wonderful so it's very  the solutions but it takes a little bit of imagination and i think the toughest challenges are when there's a detriment and you have to turn the detriment around and make it a benefit example was another location where there was an art store and they had a problem they were in a prominent shopping area but the outside light kept coming in through the windows they put the artwork in the windows and it was fate so they came up with a solution and the solution was to put a very dark orange coating on the windows but then that impeded all the colors so one of the things that i had suggested was to get some fishing string and get some small round mirrors and attach the window right to get their attention just to turn their head look and bring people in that's great that's great so how did you get interested in sales i mean i understand you're teaching other people you training them but where was your motivation to even get into this business well i actually graduate at westminster choir college oh ok i'm actually a certified voice teacher and choral director ok and when i graduated i found out that once a music teacher gets a job in a public school they're pretty much there for a long time ok so there weren't any positions open so a colleague of mine from south jersey called me up and he said well rock i got something that's music but it it's not what it is but it isn't ok so what do you don't he says i'm selling baby grand in grand pianos in the mall and this was in south jersey so i looked into it and i actually started selling  baby grand grand pianos it would bridge center mall while woodbridge ok did that roughly about eight years on and off for eight years and basically we were selling grand pianos and baby grand pianos to people that don't play and have no money and we were selling draw on commission ok and what that means is if we didn't sell one of the baby grounds or grants within thirty days we had to write the company a check for a thousand dollars wow and if we didn't sell one in ninety days you were fired but you did that on and off for eight years so you know the reason i left it's was because i figured out because it was a mall location yeah so i figured out when do people come into the mall they come into the mall mostly in the fall in the winter so i'd make a lot of money and then i'd give it back in the spring and summer again give it back you know but it was my first basis for being trained in sales and i learned a lot just to better blah blah blah so you go back to the store when all that's over in this couple comes in we're looking for a piano well i have a yamaha piano here let me tell you about the amah so yamaha taught us that not only do we play the piano to show it but we take apart the piano to show it so i take out one of the keys and i hand it to the customer the husband wife and i said yamaha exclusive these are adirondack spruce keys and you know why they use adirondacks proust's now adirondack spruce doesn't expand what moisture so your keys don't stick and that saves you money and let me talk to you about the pin block may have a hard rock maple and cuts thread tuning pins and holes that the the strings of the piano very tightly so you piano doesn't go out of tune as often that saves you money and other yamaha screws are no nonna i take this out i take that out so after about an hour i got about three or four parts on the ground with the  rock no intention of buying a piano it was the piano rock my wife and i were walking in freehold mall yeah and when we walked past freehold music store in freehold mall they played our wedding song i had to buy oh wow true story and i lost the deal wow why because i made the sale very technical and i didn't make it a motion  the typical thing that you see the grandmother comes in with the seven year old or eight year old girl she hops on this big block of any piano she's playing all because she's great and she's pretty good so i suggest that they bring back the mom and dad so they come back with the mom and dad she plays again they leave and then they come back again so now i know it's decision time right so she's playing great and so what happens is that she leaves the piano and the little girl yeah and she's standing there and the father standing on the right ok and a mother standing on the left a little girl and they're holding hands and then the father bends down to the little girl and says this do you don't you love this beautiful piano would you like to have it home or would you rather three weeks and disney world  i thought i was really going to get out all right but again i didn't get them to emotionally involved and i sure don't that great great so you learn that way yeah yeah so again it is there is a motion motivation both on the part of the owner to engage the part of the buyer correct and the sales person even though they may not be the owner they have a job to do they have to get an emotional appeal to the to the buyer ocean is what i hear you say sure and sometimes is very difficult especially if you're selling mechanical products yes if you're selling gears well sales had a very bad reputation for a long time and the bad reputation was to be a salesperson a good sales person which corporate america still believes to this day you have to be able to sell anything to anybody any time  ok and that is absolutely wrong the people that can sell anything to anybody at any time you can always find them in one place jail that's where they are ok that's not a professional salesperson professional salesperson is to ask you questions to see if your product fits their needs and that they can afford to solve their problem with your product right that all that is there's nothing new about happen all right so there has to be a fundamental need absolute for the product or service absolutely and if you have that goes up the sales person to find that out and if you're working on commission which means you know you have to sell to eat you want to find that out as fast as possible so that's what the sales person is trying to do has the right questions to find out if there's a want if there is there a need can they afford it and can actually use the product  right so otherwise you just be talking to people all day long so exactly is this the idea is to really find out those questions what i do is i train people to do that to ask the right questions to say the right words sometimes that lawyers attorneys to get out of it right like oh well so i never say sign the contract i always say approve the agreement ok which is much nicer absolutely and sign the contract so there are certain words that are go words certain words that are no words certain words are ghost words and ghost words are used by the prospect all the time cells people generally fall for it and the ghost word may sound like wild ugh ugh give it some thought  or it looks good looks good is not a yes or no right but it looks good or sounds great sounds great doesn't mean you're going to buy it but a lot of times the average your sales person will set that as a big positive when really i yeah you can't wrap your arms around right you can't wrap your arms around it yeah now i know you have a training coming up can you share with us when that is and it's going to be in september i know that yeah it's going to be at the end of september and it's going to be alchemy and it's a health spa this time so really working hard with the owner to try to get an incentive to give to the people that attend a wonderful but she does have a conference room so it's going to be at the conference room and it's in kingston at alchemy and there is any questions on that he just shoot me a quick e mail of the website you should be able to see or give a call whatever and i'll give you more information about that but this workshop is going to be a networking skills ok a reason i chose networking skills it's still the fastest least expensive way to build your business i would agree because you could network anywhere that you feel there are customers for you the problem with networking these days which i'm teaching people how to overcome is a lot of people are networking just on a social basis so they're not networking on a business basis if you go to a social have a social but if you're going to a business networking such as a chamber of commerce networking event or other big event where a lot of other business people you should be networking for business absolutely and not just you know where the carrots and right it's a good day outside right so i teach people what to say and how to do that and how to close for an appointment if the other person is really interested and then how to take the next step and do it in a really nice way so it's not the doesn't put anybody off or anything it's wonderful that's wonderful well rocco thank you thank you so much for joining us believe it or not we're out of time so much when i know i know i have to have you back after your training in late september we can go about some of the things that came up out of that and i want to thank you for tuning in to new beginnings with karen