Growing Your Business By Maximizing Your Sales Team Effectiveness With Allan Langer

“You become the salesperson that people want to talk to and refer to, rather than salespeople that people run away from. So, that's what I did. After I took all my experience in sales, I wrote a book, and then I started my company, the Seven Secrets Center for Sales and Marketing, to help people with this.”

Allan Langer is an award-winning sales consultant, best-selling author, sales coach, and trainer, and motivational speaker that has sold over 70-million dollars worth of product in my 22-year sales career. He is the author of The 7 Secrets to Selling More by Selling Less. He helps new salespeople, as well as the most experienced, break free of the age-old sales mold of using the sales "pitch," and becoming the sales rep that your prospects will love, and refer.

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Brett:

Our next guest, he's going to talk about the 7 Secrets to Selling More by Selling Less. He has a center for sales and marketing. He's been featured on all kinds of top media and we're going to dive right in. His name is Allan Langer. Hey Allan, how are you doing today?

Allan:

Great, Brett. I'm doing wonderful. Thanks for having me. This is a unique show for me, so I'm looking excited, a little excited to get into this.

Brett:

Cool. Yeah, absolutely. You can find Allan, by the way, at allanger.com. That's our allanger.com A-L-L-A-N-G-E-R.com. Al, would you give us a little bit about your background and your current focus?

Allan:

I've been in sales, I think I just finished my 27th year. I've been in B2B sales, B2C sales,in-home sales. I've done it all, and my basic premise is, I learned over time that. Well, here's a question I'll ask the audience. Do you ever like meeting or talking with a salesperson? If anyone in the audience answered, yes, they're lying because no one wants to meet and talk to the salesperson. That was the premise of my book, is why is that? What has caused the ... Everyone needs to buy something. Why do people not like to meet with salespeople? It comes down to the sales pitch. They don't want the pitch. They don't want data. They don't trust the salesperson, because the salesperson and the training over the years have always been about making the sale. It's always been about the salesperson. It's never been about the customer. So, I've honed my skills, and I've completely changed my whole philosophy, and I came up with the seven secrets, to concentrate on the customer rather than yourself as a salesperson. By doing that, your sales actually explode. You become the salesperson that people want to talk to and refer to, rather than salespeople that people run away from. So, that's what I did. After I took all my experience in sales, I wrote a book, and then I started my company, the Seven Secrets Center for Sales and Marketing, to help people with this. Then, on the other side, I help with some marketing as well, for clarifying your messages, so your sales become easier as well.

Brett:

Beautiful. I love that. Before we dive into some of those secrets, I'm curious, who was Al growing up and really more so, what was the gift that you were given? I believe we're all given these God-given gifts, to be used to bless others, right? So, I'm curious. What is that one gift that really sticks out that you may have found out when you were a kid or a teenager, and how does that help, how you help people today?

Allan:

Well, it's interesting. I think I found my gift later in life. When I was a kid, I was a very shy kid. I didn't have a lot of friends, but then as I got to college, and I started doing some presentations and things, and I started taking PR and marketing classes, I realized that I was pretty good in front of an audience. I actually was pretty good at teaching. I've taught some college-level courses and I absolutely loved it. That's when I got into sales because for me, sales is you want to teach the customer what's going to help solve their problem. You don't want to just give them a sales pitch. That's what I'm really good at, and then honed those skills over the years, so now, I mean, my happy place is, I can be in front of 10,000 people. I freaking love it. I have no fear on a stage. I just love public speaking, but I love training and teaching. I love to sit down with a small sales group. I've been in front of two, three, 50, and just sit down and get into what we can do to help make their business better, increase their bottom line from a sales standpoint, and then if we have to get into the marketing side as well. So, teaching and training is really my happy place.

Brett:

Love it. When did you become fascinated with helping others achieve sales success?

Allan:

As I went through my career, I worked for some different companies and every company is pretty much the same. If it's a larger organization they're going to have a sales process that they train, which you need to. You need to have a sales process. It needs to be trained. But the sales process is always focused on making the sale, no matter what. This is how you make the sale. This is how you handle objections. This is how you close it. This is how you do these things, and it never addresses, well, why did you get an objection in the first place? This is how you handle it, but what, wait a minute, let's look at the actual source of that objection. Where did that come from? So, as I was going through these companies, I would learn the process. I'd usually, in the four different companies I worked for over my career, I finished as the top salesperson at the training classes. Then when I went into the field, I changed into, and morphed into what I did, helping the customer with obviously having the training of the product in my mind. Obviously, you need to know and believe in your product. So, every time I followed a process, I realized the process didn't work. The process is designed, and especially in a larger company, to produce 30% sales numbers. A company normally thinks that if our guys are closing 30%, we're successful. We want to produce a 30% closing team. For me, I look at it from the other side of the glass. If you meet 100 people that week and 70 of them tell you no, I think that's a problem. That's not successful. Why are 70 out of 100 people saying no to your product or to your salespeople? So, 60 or 70 should be saying yes, not no. So, that's why I started figuring out, let me try to teach this. Let me come up with actionable, teachable things that people can do tomorrow that will help them increase their sales.

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