Double Your Income in Sixty Seconds!

Back in the late 1980s, on my way to work on Saturday mornings, I used to stop at a donut shop to get a cup of fresh coffee. Every Saturday, the person serving me a medium-sized coffee would ask, “Do you want a donut?” Each Saturday, I would reply no, and each Saturday, as I walked out of that shop, I wondered what the owner would pay me to double his donut sales—which I could have easily have done in a 30-second meeting.

The counter employees had the wrong approach. Rather than asking if the customer wanted a donut, they needed to change the question to,?“What kind of donut would you like today?”?Sales would have doubled. Most replies would have been positive if they had assumed that customers wanted a donut to go with their coffee. The difference is just a few words, but a few words can hugely impact being a great salesperson.

Let me give you another example, only this time, it isn’t some kid working for ten dollars an hour, but a golf professional. I recently took lessons from two different PGA golf pros.

When I booked a lesson at my country club, I was asked, “Would you like to pay for one lesson or take a series of?five?”

At the local driving range, I was given the same option, although this time, the pro stressed the discount if I chose five lessons instead of one.

For the record, the situation is more or less identical in Florida, New York, California, and around the world. It’s as if someone appeared from the heavens at some point in time and decreed that golf pros could only offer lessons in increments of one or?five. While there may well be a handful of pros who use other numerical combinations, the self-limiting principles are the same. None of the golf pros I visited ever asked me how good I wanted to be. It never crossed their collective minds to ask me how much I was willing to pay. Even worse, some actually seemed embarrassed to ask me for money.

Finally, I sat down with one of them and told him how much I was prepared to invest if he could reduce my handicap by four shots and return my game to where it was seven years ago. He sat and stared at me in amazement. He never thought anyone would pay him that much money for lessons in all his dreams. Of course, he had never asked.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for More.

Before I left, I persuaded him to try an experiment upon returning to the range where he worked. I challenged him to offer the next new student ten lessons or twenty instead of one or five. Despite his protests that people would not pay for that many lessons, he asked.

To his utter astonishment, the very next student choose ten. So did the next and the next. Three students had chosen the twenty-lesson option by the end of the second week. Suddenly he was busier than he had ever been in his life. Students who might normally have taken one lesson, never to be seen again, were now booking ten or more lessons simply because that’s what they were offered. This is a far better situation for the golf professional, but it’s also a far better situation for the student. After all, whoever heard of anyone significantly improving one’s golf game in a handful of lessons? It just doesn’t happen!

Both parties win by structuring your sales presentation to encourage a longer commitment and a bigger sale!

But you have to actually ask!