Everyone knows that 95% of businesses fail within 5 years. Not so many people realize that even in the top 500 businesses in the world, within 2 years if history is any indication, more than 50% of them won't be there!

So even the size of a business is no guarantee of survival, let alone success. To survive, a business must continually grow its sales, and the only way it can do that is to remain relevant to the market, and retain the capacity to communicate its relevance in a meaningful way.

Whereas one of our previous reports covered this question from the business marketing perspective, this short report now looks at how the sales person should integrate his/her own activities in order to leverage the whole sales process!

It's true that the notes provided in this report are necessarily simplistic - such a subject demands a book! Nevertheless you'll see the steps that are required, and you'll certainly be able to make positive changes that will result in a better understanding of what it takes to achieve your sales goals, together with some solid steps to get there.

Step 1: You Need to Understand, Much More Precisely, What Parts of What You Do Actually Work

We have shown over and over again that in every business there is a Unique Selling Equation (USE) that provides a kind of secret recipe for success. Via brainstorming, either in-house with your team, or with members of your Mastermind Group, or perhaps even by sitting alone and analysing the return on each of the sales activities you engage in, you too can discover that predictive USE.

This automatically achieves 2 important agendas. Firstly, most sales people find they save an enormous amount of time that they were previously spending on unproductive activities. It's very important to literally dump activities that don't "earn their keep"!

Secondly, once you have an equation that gives a predictable result, you have complete control over sales levels.

Step 2: Do the Important Things More Often

This might sound simple but in fact it actually describes a cycle: Schedule it >>> Track it >>> Analyse it >>> Refine it >>> Schedule it, etc. For this to work, it means that there must be a documented system and that system is inviolable.

For instance if you have scheduled in a crucial activity like networking, you don't go booking a client for that time! Why? Because if you keep allowing clients to book over the top of scheduled selling activities, you'll soon run out of clients! A client who doesn't understand that is sabotaging your business, and that's as bad as winning a client who doesn't pay!

Whilst selling appointments (and your performance at them) are certainly important, you will quickly run out of them if you don't put your attention where it really matters: the building blocks to getting those appointments in the first place!

Sure, from time to time it's necessary to change your scheduled activities around those building blocks, but only in an emergency, such as a client leaving the country and needing to see you NOW. Don't allow your schedule to be upset because you'll literally "ruin the recipe" for reaching your sales goals.

Step 3: Do it Better

To be more effective you must, without doubt, commit to being a learner. In particular give your attention to:

1 Learning more effective ways to describe your product or service.

This means getting inside the mind of your client and really understanding the true reasons he or she is buying from you. It also means understanding and using the exact same language as the client. To get a better handle on this, take a look at our free report "Why Better Marketing Strategies Add Up to More Customers Calling YOU".

2 Learn to understand body language and other non-verbal communication from the client, so well that you can

· Gain fabulous rapport even with tough clients

· Identify an objection coming even before the client is aware of it and "cut it off at the roots"

· Respond appropriately to more and more subtle buying signals

3 Dump "closing" and substitute "wrap-ups" instead. These are much more natural and respectful ways of completing the sales transaction. Trust me, people are sick to death of closes, which often didn't work anyway. In addition many of them were quite offensive to the intelligence of the listener!

4 Learn how to replace cold calling by finding out how to get masses of interested and qualified clients calling YOU.

There are so many strategies to achieve this, and I recommend the above report, as well as our article on intelligent networking, also available free from our web site, in order to achieve this step. It's much easier than you think!

Good News! It Doesn't Have to Cost a Fortune to Get This Knowledge!

Believe it or not, you can now get help on-line, totally free, to make each of those steps a reality, to start making the sound, proven changes that already have led to an average increase in sales of not just double in 30 days, but 598% in 90 days.

How is this achieved? Through a brand new innovation which you could think of as the corporate alternative to MySpace. It's called "My Speed Business Network" and you will never believe the powerful business development resources that are available to you as a FREE Member of My Speed Business Network.

Not only can you get help to develop strategies to build sales, develop your business or solve business challenges, but you can:

*** Network
*** Search for people by name, company, title, occupation
*** Put up classifieds
*** Announce seminars or other events
*** Join common-interest clubs or start your own
*** Run your own company blog
*** Download free business development audios and videos (coming soon!)
*** And much, much more!