PDF Summary:Ninja Selling, by Larry Kendall

If you're in sales, you've probably experienced the frustration of chasing leads and pushing products. In Ninja Selling, Larry Kendall presents an alternative approach that focuses on building relationships and solving problems rather than hard selling. He argues that managing your energy and mindset is fundamental to sales success, and that sustainable business comes from people who know, like, and trust you.

Kendall explains how to cultivate what he calls "Ninja energy" through daily routines and practices. He outlines a system for maintaining client relationships through consistent communication and introduces a four-stage consultation process designed to help clients reach clarity and confidence in their decisions. This guide covers Kendall's methods for managing your time, building a database of contacts, and conducting consultations that prioritize understanding client needs over presenting your credentials.

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(Shortform note: To incorporate the Ninja Daily Routine into your everyday life, consider using the “if-then” planning technique from Atomic Habits. This method involves creating specific plans that link a particular situation (the “if”) with a desired action (the “then”). For example, you might plan, “If I wake up in the morning, then I will write down three things I’m grateful for.” This approach helps you establish clear cues for your new habits, making it easier to integrate them into your daily routine.)

Kendall recommends starting your workday ready and dressed for financial success. In the morning, concentrate on your business; in the afternoon, work within it. Research indicates that the majority of property showings and listings happen later in the day. This means you should use the first part of your day to drive business and manage your flow systems, which is the top activity you can undertake. If your afternoon is free, give yourself the rest of the day to focus on yourself. The system is effective, and you'll generally get plenty of business in the afternoons.

(Shortform note: This routine may be less effective if your clients are only available for showings and listings in the early morning or late evening. If you’re not a morning person, you may not be able to focus on your business in the morning, and if you’re not a night owl, you may not be able to focus on your business in the evening. In this case, you may be wasting your time and energy by reserving the afternoon for showings and listings.)

Next, we'll examine how effective directing your attention to your desires is.

Purpose & Focus: The Power of Life Lists & Activity Goals

Kendall teaches that concentrating on your desires and goals will foster their expansion. Your brain makes you aware of whatever you decide to concentrate on. It can't distinguish between good and bad or positive and negative, so it may rapidly initiate a cycle of positive or negative feedback. Therefore, ensure you're concentrating on desires like being thankful and prosperous, rather than feeling fearful and lacking.

(Shortform note: Kendall’s claim that your brain can’t distinguish between good and bad or positive and negative is at odds with current neuroscience. In How Emotions Are Made, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that your brain is constantly evaluating whether your experiences are pleasant or unpleasant. This ongoing assessment of good versus bad is a fundamental part of how your brain constructs emotional experiences.)

The Ninja System: Methods and Plans for Client Success

According to Kendall, Ninja Selling aims to help salespeople achieve client success. It's founded on four essential tenets:

1. Personal Mastery, which involves learning to manage your thoughts and energy to bring out the best in yourself and others.

2. Stop trying to sell! Start Solving!, which involves learning to offer valuable solutions for clients.

3. Ninja Business Strategy, which involves building relationships with individuals who are familiar with, fond of, and confident in you to keep customers coming in consistently.

4. Make connections and communicate, which involves understanding clients' priorities and their decision-making process.

SPIN Selling: A Different Approach to Sales

Kendall’s four tenets of Ninja Selling are not the first attempt to create a comprehensive approach to sales. In 1988, Neil Rackham published SPIN Selling, which was based on his research of over 35,000 sales calls. Rackham’s research focused on large, complex sales, which he defined as sales that involve multiple decision-makers, a long sales cycle, and a high price tag. Rackham’s research found that traditional sales techniques, such as closing techniques and objection handling, were not effective in large, complex sales. Instead, Rackham found that successful salespeople used a different approach, which he called SPIN Selling.

Next, we'll explore the Ninja System and how it functions.

Establishing the Ninja Selling System: Database, Flow, and Mastering Time

Kendall believes that regularly communicating is essential for maintaining relationships and staying visible in your field. Flow is how often you interact with people—face-to-face, over the phone, via email, texting, traditional mail, and social media. It's your business's lifeblood. If you sever it, your company begins to decline. Maintain a steady stream, and your enterprise will flourish.

(Shortform note: Kendall’s concept of “flow” is similar to the idea of “permission marketing” in Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. Godin argues that in permission marketing, you earn the privilege to communicate with someone, and you must continually re-earn that privilege. Your messages should be anticipated, personal, and relevant. If you abuse that privilege by interrupting people or bombarding them with uninvited or excessive contact, you stop building a relationship and become just another spammer, destroying trust instead of creating it.)

Kendall also teaches that mastering time involves prioritizing both directly and indirectly fruitful tasks. Productive activities involve you, a client, and a contract or a strong chance of getting one. Indirectly productive activities are those that create productive activities, such as making customer service calls, calls to follow up after a deal, property reviews, conducting live interviews, sending personal notes, and managing your automatic flow system. Increasing your time on indirectly productive activities will lead to more directly productive ones. You can't control productive activities, but you can control indirectly productive ones.

(Shortform note: Indirectly productive activities are lead measures, and as such, they’re the only way to increase your directly productive activities. For example, if you make 10 follow-up calls and send 10 personal notes, you’ll have 20 people who are more likely to think of you when they need a real estate agent. If you do this every day, you’ll have 100 people who are more likely to think of you when they need a real estate agent. The more people you have in your pool, the more likely it is that you’ll have a productive activity.)

Kendall recommends tracking your time for 30 days, noting the total number of hours you worked and the amount of productive or indirectly productive time. After a month, you'll identify a trend and can connect your productive and indirectly productive times. You'll also realize how much time you're wasting. Redirect your wasted time toward activities that indirectly generate productivity. You could additionally hire assistance to manage your wasted time.

Is Wasted Time Actually Productive?

Kendall’s advice to redirect your “wasted” time toward activities that indirectly generate productivity or to hire assistance to manage your wasted time may have unintended consequences. In Rest, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that periods of unfocused, off-task time are essential for creativity, decision-making, and long-term productivity. He explains that activities like walking, daydreaming, napping, and engaging in quiet hobbies allow your brain’s default mode network to process information and generate insights that focused work alone can’t produce.

The Actionable Ninja: Client Consultations, Negotiations, and Engagement

According to Kendall, the Ninja Consultation involves four stages: Connection, Information, Solution, and Proposal. The initial stage, Connection, mirrors the conventional three-step sales presentation. The second phase, Information, is an essential transition step. The third phase is Solution, where you come up with possible options. The fourth step is Proposal, in which the customer decides. Kendall explains that customers prefer to collaborate with people they find trustworthy and likable, and they determine this in the initial minutes.

(Shortform note: Research supports the idea that people form judgments about others’ trustworthiness within the first minutes of meeting. In one experiment, participants were shown a series of faces and asked to rate them on trustworthiness. The results showed that participants made consistent judgments about trustworthiness based on facial features alone, even when the faces were shown for only a fraction of a second.)

With the usual three-part sales method, you'd currently be presenting your features and benefits. Many salespeople enjoy this stage because it gives them the opportunity to showcase their skills. They enjoy the spotlight. However, this method presents two issues: To begin, you're trying to fulfill your customers' wishes without understanding what they desire; and you dominate the conversation. A short time later, the customer tunes you out, disconnects, and your connection fades. Since the conventional three-step approach is so entrenched in the field, this phase is the most challenging to unlearn when applying the Ninja Sales method.

(Shortform note: When you present your features and benefits and dominate the conversation, the customer is more likely to tune you out and let your connection fade because of the generation effect. This is a psychological phenomenon where people remember information better when they generate it themselves rather than just passively receiving it. When you dominate the conversation, the customer isn't actively engaging with the information, so their brain doesn't encode it as strongly. This makes it easier for them to tune out and forget the interaction, weakening your connection.)

Research explains how buyers determine the best solution for them. Two important factors are their clarity (rather than confusion) and confidence (as opposed to being afraid). The four-part Ninja consultation and a series of questions help them do that. As a Ninja, your role is to present possible solutions. You're offering solutions, not sales. Understanding the way individuals absorb and retain information is crucial for effective consultations. In Ninja Selling, rather than diving into your presentation, you begin collecting details through a structured series of questions. The purpose of these questions is to ensure the customer stays engaged, establish a base of trust and build confidence, and identify pain points and desires (what they're hoping for). Next, you can start mentally crafting possible solutions.

The Origins of the Four-Part Consultation

The ideas of clarity, confidence, and a structured series of questions are part of a long tradition of sales research. In the 1980s, Neil Rackham and his team at Huthwaite Corporation conducted a massive study of over 35,000 sales calls across 23 countries. They observed and coded the behaviors of successful and unsuccessful salespeople, looking for patterns that correlated with sales outcomes. One of their key findings was that successful salespeople used a specific sequence of questions to guide clients through the buying process. This research-based approach to sales, known as SPIN Selling, emphasized the importance of understanding the client's situation, identifying problems, exploring implications, and helping the client see the value of the proposed solution.