your preference for yes will make no at least a little frustrating. The
low price makes almost everyone a potential customer. Also, the low
price makes the sales cycle—the time lapse between initial contact
and completing the sale—very short. This way you receive quick
feedback on the effectiveness of your efforts and can make changes
quickly, if needed.
When you are first learning to sell, what you need most is prac-
tice. At first it seems there are not enough customers. However, if
you stay with this, perhaps advertise a little, and ask each satisfied
customer for a referral or two, very soon, instead of potential cus-
tomers,timewill become your scarcest resource.Moving beyond the Low-Cost Item
Carrying around a supply of a low-priced item and offering it to in-
dividuals, one at a time, is probably not the best long-term business
model you can invent. However, by a huge margin, it the best way to
learn how to sell. It takes about 30 days to master the low-price sales
item. Present your item to 10 people every day and be willing to
learn from the people who buy. If you also are willing to learn from
those who say no instead of feeling upset about the rejection, then
30 days is a lot more than you will need. Most of us spent many,
many years in school learning things far less useful than selling.
Mastering your low-priced sales item offers a wide variety of pos-
sibilities that you probably haven’t considered before. Some of our
clients know beforehand the kind of business they want and use the
low-priced item as a warm-up for that business. Other clients have
no clear plan until they master selling the low-price item. Acquiring
the ability to sell in this manner opens the mental door so you can
conceive a practical six-figure project. Fear shuts down your creativ-
ity. So, before the 30-day sales training course, back when you were
still afraid of selling (can you remember back then?), your mind
may have been saying, “Are you kidding? A six-figure project? Why
bother coming up with one of those? No matter how good the idea,
my fear of selling will get to me anyway, so why bother?”
In my experience with Money Is My Friend, I (PL) took the same
item and repackaged what I was selling in several steps, as I will ex-
plain. Each step was objectively more difficult because the dollar
amount increased, but it didn’t seem that way to me because of my
success with the previous steps. After selling books one at a time to
individuals, I took them to bookstores, where I offered them to the220 Learning to Sell the Easy Way