As you begin to learn how to sell you learn at a conceptual level. At that point everything you read and hear sounds pretty good. You know these ideas have worked for other people so they should work for you. That's only partially true. It is a fact that those ideas have worked for other people. It's also a fact that you aren't those other people and what worked like magic for someone else may not work at all for you.

The unsuccessful experience you may have had trying to implement the idea doesn't mean you are a failure, or that you can't sell. What you can learn from your experience is that you haven't learned how to adapt that concept to fit your particular situation and your particular attitudes and skills. Your experience just means that you're having trouble translating a concept into actions that work for you.

Start by making sure you're very clear about who you want to attract and what you do. In my experience, if you're currently having problems implementing sales ideas in all likelihood your problems start here. You need to be very clear about who you want to sell to and you need to learn enough about those people to know exactly what they want and why. The more clarity you have about who and what the better job you'll be able to do communicating to your prospects in terms of the big thing they want to get when talking about what you do.

When you lack this clarity yourself it's impossible to convey your value to prospects. And prospects don't care a whit about products, so you should never talk to them in terms of products. You should talk to them in terms of desired outcomes. If you're using a prepared presentation provided to you by the source of your products the focus is on the product not the prospect, and that puts you in a bad position with your prospect to hold a selling conversation.

Instead of focusing on your agenda and what you want focus on the prospect. As you learn about a new selling concept ask yourself how you would feel if you were on the receiving end of this idea. If you don't think you'd feel comfortable you won't feel comfortable when you try to translate that concept into action.

As you implement sales ideas when you see your prospect reactive negatively you'll know for the way you've implemented the idea isn't right for you and your situation. Recognize you don't have it right yet because when you do it will feel like you and the prospect are in step moving together to the closed transaction like an army marching in cadence. So how do you need to adapt the sales idea so it does feel right for both you and your prospect?

What can you do to adapt this sales concept to better fit you and your prospect? Usually there are parts of your prepared sales presentation that have value and that you can effectively work into your sales conversation at the appropriate time, but unless you're holding a group sales presentation don't use prepared presentations. Instead learn how to translate selling concepts into selling conversations. When you're doing all the talking or following a script you aren't having a selling conversation. A good selling conversation involves having the prospect do most of the talking while you guide them along the path to the end they want.