Making Millions in Direct Sales: The 8 Essential Activities Direct Sales Managers Must Do Every Day to Build a Successful Team and Earn More Money: The 8 Essential Activities Direct Sales Managers Must Do Every Day to Build a Successful Team and Ea

More Praise for Making Millions in Direct Sales:

Mike Malaghan’s book will help you overcome the number-one reason salespeople quit their jobs or their profession: rejection. He shows you how to accept it, he shows you how to deal with it mentally, and he shows you how to overcome it in a way that you will win for your customer and win for yourself.

Jeffrey Gitomer, author of The Sales Bible and Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling

"Use the tools in Making Millions in Direct Sales and the doors in face-to-face selling are sure to open. Mike’s outline of the 8 essential things sales managers must do every day will keep you on track. With a book like this, anybody can sell anything to anybody, I LOVE IT!"

—Joe Girard, Worlds #1 Retail Salesperson, attested by the Guinness Book of World Records, speaker/author, How To Sell Anything To Anybody; How To Sell Yourself; How To Close Every Sale, and Mastering Your Way To The Top

www.joegirard.com

"With vision and heart, Mike Malaghan lays out a sure course that will take you step-by-step to successful sales management. Building and leading sales teams requires more than just goal setting and teaching how to overcome objections. Managing teams to sell products and services requires personal discipline, compassion, cultivating relationships, and more. It’s all in Making Millions in Direct Sales"

—Jack D. Wilner, speaker, trainer, and author of 7 Secrets To Successful Sales

This is the practical everyday ‘how do do it’ manual for the sales management who is paid on an incentive income basis. It’s a paradigm to instant success.

—Joe Adams, former CEO for Encyclopedia Britannica, United Kingdom.

The book is the blueprint for success in the face-to-face industry.

—Michael Batten, president of Learning Technologies, licensee, and distributor of Disney World of English.

Would you like to double, maybe even triple, your income? If so, this book is the definitive manual for helping you improve your recruiting process, generate more leads, and motivate your sales force to perform to their potential. Malaghan doesn’t waste time on theories that don’t relate to the real world. He provides proven, step-by-step techniques you can use immediately to catapult your effectiveness. Read it and reap.

—Sam Horn, author of Tongue Fu! and What’s Holding You Back?

"In direct sales, cold calling is essential; getting over that fear of rejection is a priority. In Making Millions in Direct Sales, Malaghan shares openly, with a genuine desire to teach others the methods that have led him and so many others to success. This book will help you GET SALES AND CLOSE THE DEAL!"

—Stephan Schiffman, America’s Cold-Call King and author of many books, including Cold Calling Techniques That Really Work and 25 Most Dangerous Sales Myths and How To Avoid Them

Mike Malaghan’s book shows how to transfer your dream of building a sales empire into reality with the eight proven steps steps-to-success formula.

Nicki Keohohou, CEO of the Direct Selling Women’s Alliance—www.mydswa.org

"When I managed direct salespeople many years ago, I wish I’d had all the tools and techniques revealed in Making Millions in Direct Sales. The eight essential activities successful sales managers must do every day is worth several times the price of the book for sales managers who want to get the most out of their sales teams. Read it and reap—BIG sales dividends!"

—Dr. Tony Alessandra, author of Collaborative Selling and The Platinum Rule

www.alessandra.com

"Making Millions in Direct Sales is destined to be the dog-eared reference book for any sales empire builder. Hundreds of ideas on conducting sales meetings and training, workable suggestions on prospecting, and a blueprint on building a leadership personality."

—Lisa Jimenez, M.Ed., www.Rx-Success.com

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the remarkable pioneer men and women of Taiwan who trusted me with their future in 1992 as we started to build a $75 million a year business from scratch. Thank you Sophia, Max, Tom, William, Dan, Rhett, and Richard. You took a chance that first week. You were soon joined by Bernie, Amos, Caesar, Monica, Hsiao Hui, Elizabeth, Violet, Jimbo, Judy, Christina, Henry, Marian, Jessy, and Frieda. And Chung Tu, thank you for allowing me to concentrate on what I did best. The watch you all gave me is still on Taiwan time. Finally to my wife, Tomoko, who took care of me so that I could take care of business.

Copyright © 2005 by Malaghan Sales Management Development. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgments

FIRST ESSENTIAL ACTIVITY

SELL

CHAPTER 1 Set the Example

CHAPTER 2 Champion Field Training

SECOND ESSENTIAL ACTIVITY

PROSPECT

CHAPTER 3 Seize All the Market All the Time

CHAPTER 4 Hail the Classics: Door to Door and Telephone Appointment

CHAPTER 5 Furnish Quality Company Leads

CHAPTER 6 Generate Abundant Local Leads

CHAPTER 7 Boost Exhibition Sales

THIRD ESSENTIAL ACTIVITY

HIRE

CHAPTER 8 Exploit 17 Powerful, Proven Recruiting Techniques

CHAPTER 9 Use the 10-Step Job-Selling Interview

FOURTH ESSENTIAL ACTIVITY

TRAIN

CHAPTER 10 Launch the New Recruit

CHAPTER 11 Keep New Sales Associates One More Week

CHAPTER 12 Rouse the Veterans

CHAPTER 13 Liven Up Your Classroom Techniques

CHAPTER 14 Exploit the Power of Off-Site Meetings

CHAPTER 15 Conduct Exciting Sales Meetings

FIFTH ESSENTIAL ACTIVITY

REPLICATE YOURSELF

CHAPTER 16 Start with the First Step: The GL

CHAPTER 17 Delegate

CHAPTER 18 Grow through Key-Person Training

SIXTH ESSENTIAL ACTIVITY

MOTIVATE

CHAPTER 19 Visualize the All-Consuming Goal

CHAPTER 20 Make the Most of the 14 Greatest Motivators

CHAPTER 21 Utilize the Goal-Setting Process

CHAPTER 22 Design Winning Sales Contests

SEVENTH ESSENTIAL ACTIVITY

MANAGE

CHAPTER 23 Improve Time Management

CHAPTER 24 Promote Quality Customer Service and Upgrades

CHAPTER 25 Develop Selling and Prospecting Tools

CHAPTER 26 Take Advantage of the Internet

EIGHTH ESSENTIAL ACTIVITY

LEAD

CHAPTER 27 Avoid the 12 Career-Wrecking Demons

CHAPTER 28 Broaden Leadership Characteristics

CHAPTER 29 Build a Charismatic Persona

Index

INTRODUCTION

If you are not going all the way, why go at all?

—Joe Namath, Football Player

WHY DO YOU NEED THIS BOOK?

Making Millions in Direct Sales is a practical and valuable how to book for sales managers in the direct-to-the-consumer sales industry, written by a veteran sales manager with international experience. If you work in this ever-growing industry, this book is for you!

This simple distinction separates Making Millions in Direct Sales from the rest of the pack. Most other books on sales management are usually written by academics and are primarily directed toward traditional business-to-business selling or are written by a former sales manager for one Fortune 500 company selling to another Fortune 500 company—again, the business-to-business sales industry.

The tell it like it is, show me the money voice and style of this book should appeal to your practical nature. And the useful, bite-sized instructions on how to build a powerful sales force with any product in any location will ring true regardless of your time and experience in the industry.

WHY ME?

In September 1994, I addressed a group of my top sales managers and made this pledge: I will not leave my post until at least 10 of you are millionaires. I kept that pledge, in fact fulfilling it twice over. I was able to do so because, over my four-decade-plus career in sales, I had cultivated an effective system for developing great sales managers.

I’ll admit, when I began my sales career, I had no idea that it would take me and my sales partners to such heights. Like many people who make a career in sales, my first position was humble and, I thought, temporary until I found a real job. I started as a door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson when I was a college student in the 1960s. After a stint in the Peace Corps, I began a direct-sales conglomerate in the Caribbean, setting up direct-marketing groups throughout the islands selling educational programs and waterless cookware. After leaving the Caribbean in 1978 I led face-to-face sales divisions in Japan, American, and England. My big break came in 1991, when I was offered the opportunity to build a full-commission sales force from scratch in Taiwan. I would be able to do it my way, using all the skills I had learned over three decades.

I arrived in Taiwan with an empty office in 1991. Eight years later, 1,100 full-commission sales consultants, spread among four separate companies in Taiwan and Hong Kong, were selling $75 million annually. Based on that track record, the company added Japan to my territory and promoted me to president. Annual sales in Japan jumped from $40 million to $125 million in the next three years.

For 11 consecutive years, my group of sales companies collectively sold more products and services than the previous year. The company’s profits grew in a similar fashion. Even during those times when a country’s economy plummeted, our sales still increased. I believe that the continued success of our sales force resulted from my system for developing and honing world-class sales managers. I had hit on the right formula.

You can use that very same formula. It’s waiting for you to discover within the pages of this book.

WHY NOW?

For 42 years I have looked for a very specific sales management book—one that would tell me how to improve my ability to recruit, train, and motivate a sales team that sold directly to the end consumer on a results count compensation system. I never found that book. So I wrote it.

Don’t get me wrong. I found many worthwhile and respected books with long shelf lives that focus on motivation and salesmanship. A couple of my favorites include Zig Ziglar’s See You at the Top and Joe Girard’s How to Sell Anything to Anybody. They are still best-selling classics in both print and audio. Zigler and Girard learned their stuff in the trenches, both of them having sold on commission and directly to the consumer. Tom Hopkins’s and Jeffrey Gitomer’s excellent books teach the practices of face-to-face selling. Up until now however, there has been no similarly compelling book on managing a direct-sales force. Making Millions in Direct Sales addresses that need.

It is my fondest hope that the more than 2.3 million direct-sales managers in action today, along with the countless people who want to be sales managers, will recognize this book as the manual that they have been searching for, now and for many years to come.

WHY YOU?

No matter how capable you already are, you can always be a more effective leader and a more successful sales manager.

I was well into my forties before I had all the tools I needed to build and manage 2,000 direct-to-the-consumer sales representatives. You shouldn’t have to wait that long.

Every week or month, you receive a double report card—one on your sales results, and the other on your personal income. You make an immediate connection between effort and results. You want to be better. I can help you.

When I was 35 years old, I had been in sales management for 15 years. I was a cocky young buck who knew it all. Yet 90 percent of what I know today I learned after I knew it all. Much of what you will learn in this book is what I learned after I knew everything.

WHY THIS WAY?

Most sales managers do not have time for long treatises on management theory; they just want to know what works and how to do it. They need direct language for direct sales. This book not only shares its advice concisely, but presents more than a hundred human-interest stories to make those recommendations come alive.

Making Millions in Direct Sales can be read cover to cover or used as a guidebook to apply to daily problems and specific situations. Each chapter targets a key function of sales management, allowing the reader to access needed information immediately without having to read through the entire book. It is designed to be the dog-eared reference book that is always within easy reach.

Making Millions in Direct Sales revolves around the eight essential activities that successful sales managers must perform every day. These activities are sequenced to follow a particular logic. However, each chapter stands on its own, as well as being a slice of the greater sum of the parts. You are invited to read the chapters out of order. Pick the area where you need help at the moment; come back to another at a different time.

Here’s a quick preview of what you’ll find in the following pages:

The first Essential Activity: sell. Our industry is a show and tell industry, so the first Essential Activity is to set the example. Do as I say, not as I do may work for parenting occasionally, but it’s a failed strategy for sales management. These first two chapters emphasize why it is important for a sales manager to stay in the field and explains how a sales manager’s field time is quite different from that of a salesperson. Coaching techniques are clearly laid out.

The second Essential Activity: prospect. Facts and belief must collide at the prospecting opportunity to give you the confidence to keep your manpower growing. The number of prospects always exceeds the ability of your current salespeople to contact them all. Few sales managers use all the prospecting tools available. So, at the beginning of this section, you will review how to determine the extent of your immense prospecting base. Once you recognize the greater opportunity, a host of proven prospecting techniques is presented in a how to fashion, so that you can embrace all the market, all the time. In turn, this potent marketing combination gives you the swagger and confidence to recruit an ever-growing sales empire.

The third Essential Activity: hire. Always, always, always recruit. Today may be the day that an eagle needs a new perch. The first of two chapters on recruiting review 17 proven recruiting methods. The companion chapter provides a clear 10-step interview process that will fill your training room with more and better sales recruits than ever before.

The fourth Essential Activity: train. Sales training is a mix of showmanship, planning, and skills transference. You control the training. If your sales partners can’t find customers or close orders, it is your fault. Six distinct chapters address the complete range of training opportunities: the how and why of field training; getting new recruits to their first order; retaining new salespeople one more week, every week; the challenge of training veterans; scores of classroom training techniques; the power of off-site training; and 60 sure-fire ways to keep your sales meetings interesting. You might be tempted to jump to one of these chapters right away if you’re due to conduct a training class soon. Go ahead.

The fifth Essential Activity: replicate yourself. Get ready for your next promotion. Increasing sales is the first step; developing new sales managers to replace you is the second. The first of these management development chapters concentrates on how to find, define, and train the group leader, field manager, or whatever you choose to call that first level of sales management. A chapter on delegation follows, which not only makes the case for delegating, but illustrates precisely how to do it. The trilogy of chapters on replicating yourself concludes by proposing a five-day key-person training course that you conduct to fast-track your managers to excellence.

The sixth Essential Activity: motivate. Four robust chapters tackle this ever-important, ever-illusive, always asked-about sales management skill. Since motivation starts with the leader, the first chapter helps you set the type of goals you need in order to maintain self-motivation so that you will have the credibility to motivate others. The second chapter explains how you can use the 14 greatest motivators to inspire your team members to be the best they can be follows. The third motivation chapter walks you through the goal-setting steps to use with your sales representatives. The final chapter covers how to weave sales contests into your total motivation matrix.

The seventh Essential Activity: manage. Peter Drucker’s famous assertion, Management is doing things right; leadership is choosing the right thing, explains why these two responsibilities are separated in this book. The four management chapters advance focused time-management practices, promote customer service as a referral opportunity, suggest prospecting and selling tools for your troops, and advise you how to take advantage of the Internet age without its taking over your life.

The eighth Essential Activity: lead. The first chapter in this section is the most unusual in the book. It lists the 12 personality or character demons that can destroy all that a sales manager has built. The following chapter helps you recognize the characteristics of leadership that you already possess, encourages you to determine what leadership attributes you would like to develop further, and gives you specific suggestions on how to upgrade those targeted leadership abilities. This chapter closes with 50 ideas on how to build a leadership persona. Charisma need not be limited to a chosen few. You can cultivate magnetism and assure your recognition as a leader by practicing these techniques.

There it is, all laid out for you so that you can pick and choose your path to the sales management success you crave and deserve.

The following is a sample of how we will go about building up the leadership skills you already have.

WHY ASK FOR THE GOOD NEWS?

Most great men and women are not perfectly rounded in their personality, but are instead people whose one driving enthusiasm is so great it makes their faults seem insignificant.

—Charles A. Cerami, Author

For more than 30 years, I routinely asked my salespeople how they were doing with phrases like How many orders did you get? or How did it go yesterday? I didn’t realize that what the salesperson heard was, How much money did you make for me?

My fiftieth birthday had passed before I started greeting my sales associates by asking, What’s the good news? Let’s face it: More often than not, a salesperson will not get an order on any particular day. Sales managers have more off days than on days. However, there is always good news. If the person got an order or hired a new salesperson, she will tell you immediately. However, the respondent can also let you know about the new referral program that produced three leads, the new newspaper ad that added more sales recruits, the big selling event scheduled at the mall this coming weekend—you get the drift.

When I converted most of my conversations to start with, What’s the good news? the effect was immediate. Most people were eager to tell me something positive.

Making Millions in Direct Sales advocates successful sales management practices to build on the success you have already achieved. You have already proved that you have the personality and the work ethic to be successful in the direct-sales industry. As your career progressed, you received training to enhance the skills and potential that you already had when you entered this industry. You have already faced and conquered obstacles. You have overcome the fear of failure and rejection. In short, you have what it takes to be a successful sales manager.

You have the raw material to become a millionaire. What you may not have are all the skills it takes to be successful. However, the skills and competencies of successful sales managers can be learned by anyone who has already come as far as you have. That is very good news indeed. You can become a millionaire by managing commission salespeople and/or sales personnel whose salary and bonuses are directly tied to performance, because you can acquire all the practices and habits of successful sales management. There is no skill or habit that is beyond your competence.

Making Millions in Direct Sales covers all those tools and shows how to use them to build your sales empire.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The writing of a book is a lonely exercise; getting it done right is a community project. Never again will I gloss over an acknowledgments page in a book. Now I understand how important so many others are to a completed project.

First, volunteer readers reviewed my early drafts. Jimbo Clark, who had helped me train for a decade, asked, Where are the stories? to bring my recommendations alive. Former president of Encyclopedia Britannica, England, Joe Adams, sharpened my attention on my direct-sales audience. Housewife Martha Cooper provided hints on tightening my sentence structure.

My first draft of the book proposal was appraised by Bob Scott of Writer’s Digest. My next stop was the Maui Writer’s Conference, where Sam Horn took me under her wing and sharpened my proposal so that an agent would see the promise in it.

David Trunzo, an accountant by profession, was an early reader who sent back memos that resulted in an easier read. Patrick Antonio, a young sales manager in the telecommunications industry, helped broaden the book’s scope.

Fletch Shipp helped organize the book in a more logical order. My final personal editor, Vicki McCown, spent four months of her life sending drafts back and forth to hone a shorter, punchier manuscript.

My agent, Roger Jellinek, and my editor, Donya Dickerson, gave this project an enthusiastic boost. Their belief in this book gave me the motivation to spend the extra hours making the final manuscript a much better read than those earlier versions.

Finally, I want to acknowledge all the sales managers I have been privileged to work for and learn from over four decades. This book represents the successful ideas we used to build sales empires. It’s your book too.

FIRST ESSENTIAL ACTIVITY

SELL

Successful selling. That’s what earned you the opportunity to see if you have what it takes to be a good sales manager. To make the most of that management opportunity, you must continue to sell. Sales managers double their selling effectiveness when members of their team can watch them in action.

In an early scene in the movie Troy, Achilles destroys a Goliath-sized soldier in personal combat to settle a war. As a general in the army, Achilles did not have to participate in the actual fighting. That the soldiers in his regiment gained renown as Greece’s fiercest warriors is a testament to the power of his leading by example.

Shakespeare brings Henry V to life with his St. Crispin’s Day speech. However, Henry V doesn’t just tell his men what to do; he personally leads the charge in the assault on the French castle at Agincourt.

Alexander the Great has gone down in history as one of the most successful conquerors of all time. Reports of his scarred and battered body, earned by his fighting in the trenches with his men, were legendary. His Greek legions fought with unparalleled loyalty and passion to protect their fighting king.

These are all dramatic examples of leaders using their own dynamic acts to motivate their followers. Sales managers who employ this style of leadership will enjoy enduring success through the achievements of the people they lead.

CHAPTER 1

SET THE EXAMPLE

Industry is a better horse to ride than genius.

—Walter Lippman, Journalist

Selling sales managers lead by example. If Missouri is the show me