Wombat Book --- NewSell
by Dr. Michael Hewitt-Gleeson

This html-coded online version of the Wombat Final 15/5/06 9:12 AM -- wombatbook.pdf, was prepared by Darlene Sartore with some additions, clarifications, minor adaptations, color texting, and numbered paragraphs to make the text easier to use in follow-along reading and referencing during dialogs.... This version is for use only by course presenters certified by An Ever Better World Internet Academy. Permission granted from author on March 5, 2007.

PART 2. The Start AND The Newsell Strategy

Chapter 8. The Start
Pdf pages 87 - 98
It’s not the close that takes care of business,
it’s the start.

1. CVS to BVS

2. CVS to BVS is what I call a thinking switch. It means that the current view of the situation (CVS) can never be equal to the better view of the situation (BVS). I have written in more detail about CVS to BVS in Software for Your Brain...

(NOTE: Text used in Wednesday Webinar at An Ever Better World Internet Academy.)

3. Back when Jack Welch was Chairman of General Electric, he called me once and left an urgent message on my voicemail: ‘Michael, I need a BVS!’ GE was in crisis. Caspar Weinberger, the then US Secretary of Defence, had cancelled the company’s defence contracts. This was a direct and immediate threat to a brand which at the time appeared on everything in American homes from light bulbs to refrigerators. Jack went on to use a CVS to BVS strategy throughout the General Electric Company. ‘Finding a better way every day’ became a GE slogan which was put up in every GE office and factory around the world. He used the CVS to BVS idea to create a new strategy for GE whichhe called boundarylessness. The idea kept spreading and evolving and today the Ford Motor Company use the slogan ‘No Boundaries’ in their TV commercials. This is just one example of the power of the CVS to BVS idea.

4. In the next few chapters I’ll show you how Jack used my formula CVS X10 = BVS to help him bring GE back from the brink. He went on to grow GE from a $35-billion manufacturing company to an empire worth more than $350 billion.

5. I’d like first to draw your attention to the paradox of starting. Once you get started there is momentum and feedback but getting started can be difficult. The paradox of starting is this: most races are lost not at the finishing line but at the starting blocks. Why? Because most people never even enter the race! They just never get started.

6. At the Beijing Olympics in 2008 only one swimmer will win the gold medal for the men’s 400-metres freestyle. Before the race, there will be a dozen or more swimmers on the starting blocks pumped and ready to go. Thousands will witness this exciting event in ‘The Water Cube’, Beijing’s spectacular new National Swimming Center, and several billion global viewers will watch it on a screen. But even on that day, most people on the planet will just not get started.

7. The Start of the Sale = Customer Attention

8. The start of the sale is customer attention. Before a customer can say YES or NO their attention must be on your offer. Fred Herman, author of KISS: Keep It Simple Salesman, used to say, ‘First, you’ve got to get the customer’s attention.’ Yet, most of the time the vast majority of customers’ attention is not focused on your offer at all, and when the customer’s attention is not on your offer then there can be no hope of a sale.

9. The Check Move

10. To manage customer attention I designed a new unit of measurement which I called the Check move. A Check move (taken from the game of chess) is simply a customer contact of any kind and is represented by the symbol: C

11. For years it’s been a common belief in selling that most sales were lost at the close. In other words, salespeople were missing sales because they were not ‘closing’ them. Our research showed that this simply isn’t true. The whole issue of ‘closing the sale’ is a nonsense and I have offered a reward of $100,000 to the first person who can prove the salesperson closes the sale.

12. FACT: The decision to buy is an electrochemical event in the brain of the customer and the salesperson does NOT control that event.

13. FACT: 99 per cent of sales are not missed at the close at all but at the start.

14. FACT: It’s the failure to start the sale – to contact a customer by phone, by snail mail, by email, by fax or in person – that is the source of most lost business.

15. FACT: 99 per cent of C moves haven’t even been made.

16. Keeping track of their C moves (customer contacts) helps salespeople measure how much energy they are putting out into the marketplace. Focusing on their C moves helps them:

raise their energy level and avoid wasting time

stop their obsession with ‘the close’ and all the archaic manipulation tactics that customers hate and which have given the selling profession such a bad name.

17. Focusing on the start – C – rather than ‘the close’, reduces the rejection and disappointment salespeople feel and boosts their energy levels. C allows them to initiate many more customer contacts.

18. This, of course, leads to better sales results because the only move that can turn a prospective customer into a client is CHECK which is enough to make it the most important move in business. As Woody Allen once said, ‘Eighty per cent of success is showing up.’

19. MBO or MBS?

20. Most plans in life are full of details on how to get to the finishing line but contain little or nothing about how to get to the starting blocks. Yet nothing happens until someone STARTS something.

21. For many years in business we have had MBO or ‘Management By Objectives’. We also need MBS or ‘Management By Starting’. Many management gurus write books about ‘Goal-Setting’. Maybe they should also write books about ‘Start-Getting’ since, most of the time, most people never get started.

22. To start is the fundamental creative act. To change a switch from the OFF position to the ON position is to start something and means something has now been created. It has been said that the most important skill in writing a book is sitting down at the keyboard – getting started.

23. Strategy is all about control. If you are in control you are in a strategic position, if you are out of control, you aren’t. Starting is a strategic act because we can control it but we cannot control finishing.

24. Once we start, many other factors come into play: other people’s reactions, the weather, consequences and the unexpected. These may prevent us from finishing. But if we are good at starting then we can always start again, and again, and again. It may be that finishing is simply the repetitive act of starting, and starting again, and starting again, until we declare that we have ‘finished’. There is a southern American expression called ‘the get-go’ which I really like. The get-go is the start, the beginning, the very first step. In oldsell, most sales are lost right from the get-go because, the sale never got started.

25. The Physics of Selling

26. I designed newsell for people in business, whether in a Fortune 500 corporation or a small family company. Perhaps you are in business for yourself at home, in a small office, in a partnership or joint-venture. Or maybe you are an MLMer or a salesperson on salary or commission. Or you may be just contemplating exploring some of these business opportunities. Whatever the case, newsell will help you understand the physics of selling and allow you to develop the basic skills of doing business professionally and successfully.

27. What do I mean by the physics of selling? In short, you have two things in selling physics to work with: TIME and ENERGY. Every customer contact, every time you move from UNCHECK to CHECK, requires a unit of TIME + ENERGY.

28. In the next few chapters we’ll look at these two basic resources – TIME + ENERGY – and give you:

a new unit of measurement for managing your energy more productively and

a new strategy for expanding your time called ‘cybertime’. Cybertime is a new way for you to get a better appreciation of time as a resource.

29. Newsell is young, fast and scientific. With newsell, we are only interested in control – methods that can be tested or results that can be measured. Newsell is not interested in academic, philosophical or motivational hype. These can be found elsewhere. Newsell focuses on building the field power of the businessperson. The field power comes from his/her two fundamental assets: time and energy. In military terms, this is called ‘force’.

30. Logistically speaking, results are directly linked to how well you can apply this force, this field power, to the marketplace. The more force (time and energy), the more results.

40. NOTE: The use of the word ‘force’ refers to logistics here. It does not refer to style. It is not the style that is forceful: that would be oldsell. It’s the big increase of time and energy in the marketplace that is forceful, as we shall see.

41. Using the newsell strategy maximises your fundamental assets in the field by:

  • increasing activity and

  • reducing fatigue.

42. Force

43. Force has its limitations – there are only 168 hours in a week and there is a limit to how much energy one can exert. But most of us aren’t coming close to challenging those limitations. If we are going to find extra force and to reallocate it to sales and business activity it has to come from somewhere.

44. But where do we find this extra field power, this extra force? In oldsell, considerable time and energy was used up by ‘the close’ even though, as we have seen, the salesperson cannot control ‘the close’. So we can take back the time and energy lost doing the oldsell dance called ‘the close of the sale’.

45. Example: A company sent out a seminar invitation to accountants. They followed up with telephone calls of the oldsell variety nervously asking, ‘Would you please come to our seminar?’ After two weeks they had only two positive responses and were understandably disappointed with the results. Then someone in the company suggested a newsell approach. They sent out another letter with a chocolate Freddo Frog and made follow-up phonecalls of the newsell variety asking, ‘Did you get your Freddo Frog?’ This time they got 32 seminar attendees.

46. Focusing on the close makes both the salesperson and the customer nervous and wastes precious energy. It also makes salespeople reluctant to make more calls. Focusing on the process (Did you get the frog?) is much easier on both the salesperson and the customer and so more energy is available for more calls. More calls = more YES answers.

47. Oldsell is results-driven. The strategy is to focus on the close and that is where most of the force is squandered. Sales statistics show that this approach has failed. One of the main reasons for the failure is the lack of control. The decision to buy is controlled by the customer so any force applied to this area is a waste of field power.

48. The Theory of Newsell:
The Customer Closes the Sale

49. Newsell is process-driven. The strategy is to remove the force being used up by the close and make it available for the area you can control – the start. The start is the customer contact, the actual making of the sales call, the process of selling. In newsell, we call the process the CHECK move or C.

50. The natural enemy of the businessperson is not the customer but fatigue. This fatigue is caused by trying to do the impossible, trying to close the sale. This wastes a huge amount of sales power and leads to call reluctance and lost sales.

51. Control the Process

52. You cannot control the result because you cannot control the customer’s brain but you can control the selling process which is the customer contact. Newsell helps you avoid the principal cause of fatigue in selling – rejection – by giving you a selling strategy which puts you in control of the selling process.

53. Example: A business development plan to increase the number of their clients who had access to the Internet was run by a financial services company. The plan was results-driven. The report stated: ‘We have spoken to everyone and they don’t want it.’ A newsell-trained manager then ran a newsell 60-day campaign that focused salespeople on the process, not the results, of their offer. The result: An increase in new sites from 111 to 478 – more than 400 per cent!

54. We can control the process but we cannot control the result. Failure to understand this basic law of physics is the principal cause of failure amongst sales managers . . .and losing salespeople is failure.

This html-coded online version of the Wombat Final 15/5/06 -- wombatbook.pdf, was prepared by Darlene Sartore with some minor adaptations and color texting, for use only by course presenters certified by Ideal Network Academy. Use permission herein granted from author Michael Hewitt-Gleeson on March 5, 2007.

Hardcopy book and pdf format sources NO longer online, might be available from links at
http://www.schoolofthinking.org
WOMBAT SELLING: How to sell by Word of Mouth

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