HL February 26,13

Hector is hosting a training day on March 9th from 8 AM to 1-2 PM at Chaffey High in Ontario, California. He will cover topics such as building a business, personal development, sales skills, leadership, time management, accountability, and the fundamentals of success. He also mentions the importance of recruiting and retaining agents who are licensed in securities. Hector emphasizes the need for experience and field training in sales, and suggests modeling and mimicking successful individuals. He shares his own experience of role-playing and providing commentary during training sessions. Hey, good day everybody. Hey listen, I want to give you a heads up. I'm doing something that I haven't done for quite a while, and I think it's time right now. I'm having a training day March 9, 8 AM to 1 to 2 PM. I'm not sure exactly when it's going to end, but right between 1 and 2. Where it's going to be, Chaffey High in Ontario, California from 8 AM to 1 PM or 2 PM, right in that range, you can get tickets at hectorlamarque.com. H-E-C-T-O-R-L-A-M-A-R-Q-U-E dot com. Look, this is what I'm going to be covering. A lot of people think it's going to be, they're unaware of really what I'm going to be talking about. What I'm going to talk about is I'm going to invest 2 to 3 hours on exactly how I built my business from A to Z. How I built my through first from zero in 1984 to $600,000 a month by 1988. How I built and maintained 100 App Bay Shop from 1986 to 2007, which allowed me to build the hierarchy I built. I'm going to talk about personal development, its role in how you grow and develop your business. I'm going to talk about sales skills and the importance of them and what they mean to the development of your business. I'm going to talk about people skills and how critical those are. I'm going to talk about leadership and building leaders who build leaders. Not just leadership, but how to build leaders who build leaders. I'm going to talk about time management and managing you because those are the critical elements for you to build a big business. If you can't manage yourself and you can't manage your time, you have no chance. I'm going to talk about accountability because if you don't hold your people accountable to a higher level of performance, you're never going to build something great. I'm going to talk about mastering the seven fundamentals and its role and its impact on your business. I'm going to talk why to recruit the world and how to recruit the world. After March 9th, you'll have no excuse for not succeeding if you put into massive action what you're going to learn that day. In addition to that, I'm going to have four of our top securities producers who are making big money in securities, who know what they're doing, teach exactly how they get the amazing results that they're getting right now. If you look at what's happening right now, last year the average 401K grew 12% last year. This is a place where people need to be investing. You need to help people invest money. If you want to improve your persistency, you have to have securities attached to it. If you want to grow your income and retain more of your agents, you've got to have people being securities licensed and marketing securities. There's not going to be any hype, no hype, no motivation, except the motivation that you're going to receive from knowing how to make more money in your business. I haven't done this for a long time, but right now I'm seeing things are in perfect alignment for us to explode our businesses, so it's time to teach what really works. No stories, no motivation, no mumbo-jumbo, just flat out how to do it. So if you're interested in learning how to make a lot more money than you're making right now, how to build a business that will at some point in your future allow you to live the life you dream of, if you want to build a business that puts off massive passive cash flow, then you should be there. If not, good selling. All right, this week's call, this is what it's about. I'm putting these calls together from Anthony Lanarios, L-A-N-N-A-R-I-N-O. I think that's how you spell his name, but he's got a great website, lots of great little short talks that he does, and they just apply so perfectly to our business. And what he talked about in this one, I'm going to kind of go through it and add my commentary as I always do. If you want faster results, you need to find a model. Look, selling, recruiting is very much like swimming. You can't learn to swim by reading a book about swimming. You can't learn to sell by reading a book about sales, although reading books after you spend some time in the deep end will help you tremendously. I agree with that. You need to read these books because they're going to help you. When it comes to producing results, there's no substitute for experience, and that's true. You're going to have to get out there. There's an old adage, you have to be bad before you can be good, and you have to be good before you can be great. So you don't go from, like if you're learning mathematics in school, you don't start at trigonometry, right? You start adding, subtracting, and you move to multiplications and division and et cetera, et cetera, and you move on up the ladder. It's sequential, so you don't go from the bottom to the top overnight, and it's also true in sales. A lot of people quit sales way too early because, number one, they don't pay the price to master the different elements that you need to master in sales, so that's a big problem. But they don't do that, and they don't give themselves enough time. They quit before they learn anything. And so you're going to make lots of mistakes. I've made an enormous number of mistakes in learning how to sell, learning how to recruit, learning how to train and develop people, learning how to lead, and you have to jump in and do it. There's no learning from watching a video, okay, like that. You're going to have to do it. That's why field training is such a critical element to our business. When I recruit somebody, one of the things I tell them is I say, look, my objective with you is to get you to the point as quickly as possible where you don't need me, physically need me to help you, where you're completely independent, you're able to prospect, set appointments, do presentations, overcome objections, understand the products, close transactions, recruit somebody at the kitchen table, and then get that person in the field. I want to get you to that place as soon as possible. The best and easiest way to do that, the most productive way to do that, is for you to witness as many real-life appointments where you're with me, you're watching me in action doing all the things that you're going to be doing so you can see it over and over again. The more times you see me doing the process, 15, 20 times would be great, 25 or 30 would even be better. But the more you see it, by the time you get licensed, which I expect you to get licensed in the next 30 to 45 days, I want you to be able to hit the ground running. I want you to be able to go, I know what I'm doing. I know how to get results. I know how Hector does it. I know what he says. I know why he says it. I know what presentation material he uses and how to use that and how to present it the way he does. I know how to answer all the questions. I've heard those questions in areas of concern over and over. I know exactly what to do. I want you to feel really, really confident. The more appointments we go on, the more confident you're going to be and the better results you're going to have and the easier it's going to be for you to duplicate what I've done with you and train and develop other people, which is what's going to allow you to build a big base shop and a big business and make big money. Field training is the most critical element of this whole process. You need to come to the meetings because the meetings are important. You're going to learn a lot of information that's going to help you with the process, but there's nothing more important than you getting field trained properly by somebody who knows what they're doing, and that's someone's me. That's one of the things that's important that people understand, but you don't have to rely on your experience alone. You can learn to produce results faster by modeling people who've already had some of the experiences you haven't, like the field trainer, like me, right? Modeling and mimicking, okay? Modeling and mimicking is looking at the person that's able to get the kind of results that you are hoping to get and then doing exactly what they do, saying exactly what they say in the same order they say it, with the same kind of inflection and tonality and all that, okay? So that's what you want to do. You want to model and mimic people who've already done what you are wanting to do but haven't done yet. You can model people who are already producing the results you want. In Primerica, that's how we do that. That's what field training is. It's an opportunity for you to model and mimic. Another thing that I've done, right, that helps me with that, is that when I did my training meetings, whether they were manager's meetings or especially the Saturday training when I had my whole bay shop there on Saturdays and I would be training, I would always role play. I would have a kitchen table with four chairs, a couple, always have a couple up there, and I would model exactly. I would role play and model exactly what I did, what I said, how I answered questions, my tonality, my body language, my inflection, everything. I wanted everybody in the audience to see me doing it exactly as if they were on an appointment with me in the field. Since I couldn't physically train, you know, I was having 150, 200 people on my Saturday training. There's no physical way that I could go on appointments to every single person in my bay shop. So I turned my Saturday training into a weekly field training session. So I would do different parts, whether it's doing the presentation or recruiting the person or, you know, carrying back an F&A or whatever it happened to be. I would do it exactly as I would do it if I was in someone's home. So the people in the audience could see everything the way I did it. Then also what I would do, I would add commentary. I would add commentary to how I, why I said what I did. You noticed I asked these questions. You noticed the way I responded to that. This is the reason I did that. This is the reason I covered this information. This is what doing it this way elicits and how it affects the prospect. And I would go into a lot of detail about what I was saying, why I was saying it, why I used this particular material and exactly how I did it because my objective, and your objective should be as well, was to get everybody to be doing everything as close to the way I did it as humanly possible, okay, because I was getting amazing results. I was closing eight, nine, ten out of ten people, qualified people that I sat down with. I was recruiting just about anybody I wanted to recruit. I was doing everything, you know, getting amazing results personally, and I knew if I could get people to model and mimic me and do exactly what I was doing, then I could explode my business because then I could have people who were competent and confident, knowing what to do, and those people would then start to get results and their confidence would just grow and grow, and then they could see themselves doing what I did and building a business like I built. And that's how I grew my business. You know, from the time I started in January of 1984 to the end of 1988, folks, I went from zero to doing 600 apps a month through FIRST, you know, and doing 150 to 250 apps a month in my base shop, okay. That's how I did it. It's through that kind of training. I didn't do it through motivation. I didn't do it through hype. I didn't do it through, you know, all the stuff that you think you do it through. I did it through making sure the people in my base shop were highly competent. My objective, and I would tell people, is for you all that are in my business to be the best, most professionally trained people that absolutely know exactly how to get results, that people in Primerica don't get this, what I'm saying right now, has always baffled me to no end. I don't understand why leaders aren't doing this. It works like nothing else. The other thing it does for you, it builds a business that doesn't go up and down like a yo-yo. It builds a kind of business that just keeps on growing. When your people are competent, when they know what they're doing, your business will grow, right. There are three things you need to modeling, right, that you need to understand. It's their beliefs, their behaviors, and their language. So you want to model people's beliefs, their behaviors, and their language, the way they speak. That's why the way that you speak is so important. That's why what you believe is so important. And that's why your personal behavior is so critical because your team, whether you like it or not, just like if you have kids, your kids are modeling and mimicking your behavior not even consciously, subconsciously. So they start doing and talking and acting the way that their parents do. In your base shops, right, in your businesses, your people, the people that become leaders or people within your business, they model your beliefs, your behaviors, and your language. So if you're not paying strict attention to what you believe, how you behave, and how you speak, you're not going to maximize your return on the time you invest with your people. So let's talk about modeling beliefs. Once someone learns how to succeed at a high level in any endeavor, it doesn't matter what it is because you could model athletes. You could model actors. You could model business people. You could model anybody who's highly successful in their chosen field. Those people adopt a certain set of beliefs that enable that success. People who are succeeding at a high level think and believe certain things. And what you want to do, that's why reading autobiographies of highly successful people is such an important thing to do. I've read hundreds and hundreds of autobiographies of successful people. Why have I done that? Because I want to know these successful people, what do they believe, what's their behavior, and how do they speak? Because I want to model and mimic that. Early in my career, he says right here, I had a sales manager ride along on my sales calls. He was horrified by my long, coma-inducing recitation of our entire proposal. That's why when people have these super long, complicated presentations, their presentation should be very direct, question-oriented, to the point, not a bunch of yapping, talking and talking and talking. That's not sales. He said he insisted I ride along with him. I believe our proposal was necessary to winning business. He believed it was completely unnecessary. After I watched him close deal after deal without making a long, detailed pitch, he convinced me to change my belief. So those of you who think you have to give every bit of information to everything, you don't need to do that. There's certain information that people require more information. You give that information, but you don't have to give them all the information. You need to show the high points of everything we're doing, and most important in doing a presentation, what people really want to know is what's in it for them. If they do this, what do they get out of it? What's the payoff for them doing an F&A, number one, and then, number two, implementing that F&A? What do they get? What do they get for doing that? Do they get to be financially independent? Do they get to be debt-free? Do they get to have less stress in their life financially? What do they get? Because people aren't going to do anything unless they can see a payoff for themselves. They're not going to invest their time or their money without some payoff. You need to articulate what that payoff is to the people that you're presenting to. So he says a change in belief always precedes a change in behavior. So what happens is people's beliefs dictate their behavior. So if you want to change people's behavior, you've got to change their beliefs about, like, for example, about selling. Some people have a belief that selling is a negative thing, that there's something inherently wrong about selling, that you have to be this patent leather, white shoes, plaid jacket, talking, talking, talking, yammering, pressuring people to do business. They have this ridiculous idea or belief about what salespeople are and what they do, and you need to change that belief because for me, professional salespeople, what they really are about is about helping people get exactly what they want or need relative to whatever their product or service happens to be. So in our business, for me to sell, to really become a great salesperson, my job, my objective in my job, my agenda, my mission, if you will, is to find out what people want in terms of their life, in terms of retirement, in terms of their debt situation, in terms of career potentiality, all these things. I want to know what those things are, and then I'm going to show them how through my product or through the F&A or through my business opportunity, how I'm going to help them achieve that end. My complete objective with them is to help them get exactly what it is they want regardless of what I think it should be because what I think it should be is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what they want and what they think it should be. Then for me, my job is to facilitate them getting what they want and showing them how they can get that through being involved with me either as a client or either as a client and a recruit. So I want to show them how to do that. Now modeling behaviors, people who succeed in any endeavor, they take a certain set of actions that produce the results that make them successful. So we'll go back and visit the sales manager I modeled. He goes, when I was young, I thought selling meant talking, and that's what a lot of people think, that selling is talking. The reality that professional selling is asking appropriate questions that move people in the direction that they want to go in terms of accomplishing their goals. So asking the right questions is what real professional sales is. It's not talking. A lot of people who are kind of shy, introverted, and quiet like I was. I was very shy. I was very introverted. I'm not a talker. Most of my good friends are talkers because I don't talk a lot. I'm doing these talks. For me to be doing a call like this and getting up and speaking, that's totally not me. That's not who I am. I'm a very quiet, reserved person. I'm very good at asking questions. I'm a very good listener. I pay attention when people are talking. I pay attention to every nuance, every little thing that they do. But I ask lots of questions, and then I shut up and I listen because you learn more through listening than through talking. When you're talking, you're not learning a thing. You're listening. When you ask a directed, pointed question, that's going to elicit information, and then that information is the information that you can use to maneuver or help them move in the direction of where they want to go, whether it's becoming debt-free or whether it's owning their own business or whether it's just protecting their family or investing for the retirement. It doesn't really matter what it is, but it's the asking of the questions. So most of you who think that great salespeople are great talkers, you're dead wrong. I am not a great talker. I am great at asking questions, the right questions. If you listen to my Overcoming Objections CD, which you should 100 or 200 times, pay attention. When you listen to that CD, you can get it at hectorlamarck.com. If you listen to that CD, you'll notice that I ask question after question after question, and I do very little talking. And that's how you become a professional, results-oriented, closing salesperson. When I talk about – and I mean sales – getting people involved in your business or recruiting, if you will, is sales. For you to have a notion that recruiting isn't sales is utterly ridiculous. It is 100%. Instead of selling a product, you're selling an opportunity. You're selling a business opportunity. You're selling them on them being able to do the business opportunity. You're selling them on a future if they get involved in getting in the business, a better future, more income, less pressure financially. You're selling all kinds of stuff when you're recruiting somebody. So for you to think that recruiting isn't selling, you're completely off base. And if your uplines aren't talking about the fact that you have to learn how to become proficient at selling, your upline is clueless. It's critical for you to do well. Everyone in our business who's doing extremely well, I guarantee you, are professional salespeople whether they realize it or not. That's what they are. So he says, when I was young, I thought selling meant talking to sales managers that I modeled thought selling was listening. He spent more time listening than talking. That would be me. He did more transactions with fewer words than I believe was even possible. He listened in a way that proved that he cared about the client. That's what listening does. When you listen intently to somebody, you're honoring that individual. When you really pay attention to what they're saying and you repeat back what they said, am I understanding what you're saying is that you really like to retire sooner than later? Is that what you're really saying here? Whatever the thing is, when you repeat back to them what you think you're hearing so you get clear on exactly what you heard. That's what I want. I always want to be crystal clear that I'm hearing exactly what they're saying. I don't want to make up in my mind what I think they're saying. I want to know for sure what they're saying. I want to understand what they're saying because the better I understand what they're saying, the easier it is for me to help them get what they want. He said he listened in a way that proved that he cared about the client. When the client's answering a question or talking, all you're doing is waiting until you can talk again and you're not listening to them. They're going to feel that. They're going to know that you don't care about them, that you're not interested in their future, just interested in completing a transaction to make a commission or win a contest or get a promotion or whatever. Nobody wants to be part of that equation. He goes, I've never been as quiet as a sales manager I modeled, but I did learn to become every bit as good at listening. It's one of the many behaviors I've learned by modeling someone that was already succeeding in an area that I wanted to improve. So that's one of the reasons why personal development, why read all the books on personal development, like A Skill with People by Les Giblin that you can get at Hexalemark.com or any other book. Why read those books? Why read those books? Because you want to model and mimic behavior that somebody who's very successful at that is doing so that you can get the same kinds of results that those people are getting. Look, modeling language. Modeling beliefs and behaviors will work to help you succeed faster in any human endeavor, but language is particularly important for salespeople. Here's one more from the sales manager I modeled. That's why listening to the audios, listening to people that are speaking. Like I'm speaking to you on this call here, right? You're hearing this. And I'm speaking in a very specific directed way. I'm attempting to speak to you in a way that's very clear, that hopefully makes sense to you, that you can say, okay, that makes sense. I understand what he's saying. I know what I need to do now and to go implement that thing, whatever it is he's talking about. That's one of my objectives is to be clear. Language, the more clear you are with your prospects, your people that you already have, people you're training, people you're talking to about anything, no matter what it is, the more clear you are, the better chance there is that that person will be able to do what it is you ask them to do. It's kind of like when you ask a person to – I'll give you a perfect example to know if you're being clear. If you're teaching your team how to do the business, okay, let's say your Saturday trains, but your people are not closing more sales, inviting more people to meetings, recruiting more people or getting better results. What we can assess from your teaching is that there's no clarity to your teaching. If you're teaching but your people aren't then going out and duplicating what it is that you've done or that you're talking about, one thing we know for sure is your clarity is lacking. When you know you're being clear, you begin to get people, not everybody, but the motivated people start getting results. They start closing more transactions, they start recruiting more people, they start bringing more people to meetings, they start getting results. So if your team's not getting results, what we know from that, and this is not a judgment statement, it's just a statement of observation and fact, is that your clarity in your teaching is not good right now and you need to work on being more clear in transferring the skills that you've developed and the knowledge you've acquired. That's the key to building a great business. If you aren't able to transfer the skills that you've acquired and developed and the knowledge that you've acquired, then you're going to have a rough time building anything of any consequence. So he says, here's one more. He goes, my sales manager produced great sales results by asking great questions. He was older than I was. He had much more experience. He had an arsenal of powerful questions that helped our prospective clients think through their business challenges. Just like when I put together that FNA input form, I have all these questions in there. Folks, those are the questions that I would ask on an appointment. And I put them in that and wrote them out word for word so that you new people could know exactly the appropriate correct questions to ask when they're taking an FNA because most people can't remember, right? But if it's written out, then they just read it, and then over time they do it enough. They've memorized it. They don't even really need to read it. They can just do it. But in the beginning, people can't do that. So what you want to do is you want to get people to be saying and asking the right questions from the get-go. Writing them out is a great way to do that, like I did with the FNA input form, right? He said he had a powerful arsenal of questions that helped him. He goes, I didn't have enough experience to ask these questions. That's why watching, modeling, and mimicking, right? The new people don't have enough experience to ask those questions. They don't even know, aren't aware that they should ask those questions because I didn't have the language either. But by listening and paying attention, I started to capture his language. That's why listening to audios of successful people in Primerica, and there's lots of them, right? You start understanding the language that these people use to get the success that they've been acquiring. Some of it is business acumen as well because I weave them into my sales interaction. When you start listening to the audios, then almost without thinking, you're going to start asking the right questions, talking in the right way to get the kind of results that these people within the business are successful at getting. You're not going to do that with the knowledge and level of awareness you came into the business with. You've got to apply yourself and invest time and energy in listening to the right audios, listening to the right people, modeling and mimicking their behavior. If you have up lines that are really good, you should be asking, would you show me exactly what you do? I want to see exactly how you present, what you talk about, what questions you ask, what material you go over, how you handle the areas of concerns or objections, if you will, that people come up with. I want to see what you do so that I can do that and model and mimic that. Modeling powerful language can help you produce the same outcome as a successful salesperson you're modeling. And you will. If you model and mimic people that have done it and you do exactly what they've done, you're going to get similar results. The better you get it down where you make it your own, where you've memorized it and you don't have to think about what you're saying anymore. That's one of the key things is to go over and over and over and over the material. That's why I say listen to that overcoming objections 100 or 200 times because I don't want you to be me. I want you to be you. I want you to understand kind of the way to do it and the words to use, but I want you to do it the way you would do it. You're you. You're never going to be me or you're never going to be Bill Whittle or you're never going to be Rick Susie. You're going to be you. But you need to know what is the language and how do they speak and what do they talk about and what questions are they asking? How do they do it? In the end, you're always going to be you. No one is asking you to change into someone else. I don't expect anybody to be me. But you still have to look. I've got Rick Susie who's nothing. In some ways he's like me, but really he's not. His personality is completely different from mine and he would tell you that himself. Chris Howard is totally different from me. Now what I did is I taught him all the fundamentals and the questions to ask and what to do. They still do it in their own way, but they have the fundamentals down. If you want to or need to produce better results faster, find a model. Whoever it is, somebody who's getting the kind of results or somebody who's actually already gotten the results that you want. Model what they believe. Model their actions. They take based on the beliefs that they have and the language that they use with themselves and with others. So here's some questions. Who have you modeled in the past? Every one of us has modeled some people, whether it's consciously or unconsciously. We've all modeled some people in the past. Who could you model now that's already producing the results that you want? Just look around. There's tons of people doing really fantastically well in Primerica. Pick one. If you have a model in mind, what do they believe that you don't yet believe? Find out what that is. How are their actions different than yours? That's a key one, right? How are their actions, because actions are what produces results. So how are their actions different from your actions? What language do they use to communicate with themselves and others, folks? So if you want to succeed faster, if you want to move faster, okay, find somebody or find several. It doesn't even have to be one somebody. There might be one person who's really great at recruiting. Model that. And then there may be another one that's really great at sales. Model that person in that area. Then you have another person who's really great at security. So model that person in that area, and then do them all together, and then you make yourself better than you even thought you could be by modeling all the appropriate behavior, okay? So if you want a model, if you want fast results, find a model. That's what I'm saying, man. You do that, and amazing things are going to happen to you in your business. Don't miss March 9th. It's going to be unbelievable. I guarantee you will not be disappointed. I guarantee it.