The key to almost everything in life is to find the most accurate perspective.

“Closing the sale” is a fatally-flawed perspective.

It assumes that the seller can control the buyer’s decision-making on all three levels…

• rational (their thoughts)
• emotional (their feelings)
• physical (their actions)

This is what leads to buyer’s remorse, to “yes-meaning-no”, hatred, fear and distrust of sellers, etc, etc, etc.

I created a training program for sellers in 1991 called Fourth Generation Selling.

My first client was a network marketing company wanting to help its distributors improve their retailing and sponsoring strike rates of less than 10% (retailing) and less than 1% (sponsoring).

The worst part of this challenge was that I was dealing with people who had little or no experience in selling, and were mostly terrified by the thought of having to sell.

The best part of the challenge was that I was dealing with people who had little or no experience in selling, so they had very few distorted perspectives and self-destructive habits to reverse.

The concept of Fourth Generation Selling is based on a simple principle: You cannot control everyone or everything around you. All you can control is YOU and YOUR RESPONSE to everyone and everything around you.

When people are not in control of their circumstances, they feel at risk. This creates fear. The level of fear they experience is in inverse proportion to the level of control they have over that situation.

By trying to “close the sale”, we’re actually trying to control the buyer — or to remove control from them.

The result?

We create FEAR!

(Can you say d-e-a-t-h-w-i-s-h?)

FEAR is why people DON’T do things.

(If you think otherwise, you’ve got the wrong perspective again. Pay a visit to http://MasterYourFEAR.com.)

So here we are, in the 21st century, STILL teaching sellers to “close the sale”, using FEAR OF LOSS as our primary tactic to get people to buy!

As Homer would say… “D’oh!”

Bottom Line: in a typical “selling” situation, BOTH sides are driven by FEAR OF LOSS! (Think about it… isn’t the seller‘s behaviour really being caused by fear of loss? And isn’t fear of the seller, and the seller’s motives, driving the prospect’s behaviour?)

So how do we reverse this suicidal approach to selling?

First, get the right perspective: verbs are either active or passive mode. That means doing something (active) or having something done to you (passive).

In any situation involving selling and buying, the typical perception (by both sides!) is that selling is active and buying is passive.

*Wrong!*

The fact is that it’s totally the reverse in its outcome when either side really understands the psychology involved:

Someone makes a BUYING decision — not a SELLING decision. (Have you even heard the expression “selling decision”?)

Why?

Because they control the M-O-N-E-Y!

Any seller with a scrap of intelligence and integrity will work from a very different — and infinitely more accurate and powerful — perspective:

They’ll remove the fear of loss from the prospect’s decision-making.

And, by using this approach, they’ll automatically remove their own fear of loss!

In restructuring my client’s approach, I created two simple presentations that took less than three minutes each — and resulted in a 90+% strike rate for retailing and an 80+% strike rate for sponsoring within 30 days.

(It was actually less than a week for the test group, but across the network the minimum period we could accurately test was a calendar month, since that was the minimum reporting period.)

Since then I’ve taught Fourth Generation Selling to direct sellers in all kinds of professions, including financial services, automobile dealerships, real estate agencies, home appliances, kitchens and bathrooms, encyclopedias and many more.

All have reported measurable (stunning!) increases in purchasing rates, retention of sellers, referral rates, satisfaction rates, and reduced cost-per-sale rates, return and refund rates, marketing costs, advertising costs, complaints, dissatisfaction, re-dos and re-makes, etc.

The real difference is NOT in the skills involved (although they’re important). It’s in the MINDSETS involved, on BOTH sides of each transaction.

Mindset (perspective) determines attitude, which influences behaviour.

This is the 21st century, folks. It’s time to get rid of distorted, misleading perspectives like “closing the sale”.

(This is one of the first new insights you’ll learn in my new Fourth Generation Leadership™ program, “SUCCESS in Network Marketing”.)

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