Other essays in this series:
This essay is part of a book I'm writing on sales. I can't tell you when
or if this will be published in book form, but I thought you might enjoy
watching it emerge in real-time.
It's not that there aren't a trillion books out there on selling. There are (well, certainly hundreds). So if you're thinking about jumping to another page because you're pretty sure you've read everything there is on sales, I understand. But having been at selling and teaching others to sell for nearly 25 years, I've convinced myself that I have something useful to say on the topic, particularly if you're new to selling.
This is the second chapter I've posted. I wrote it to act as an introduction to get across some of my basic philosophies on selling.
The First Rule of Selling . . .
. . . is that there is no first rule of selling
Selling can be a financially and psychically rewarding profession. It can also be a miserable slog. How you experience it is entirely up to you. Combining what is uniquely you with some decent content knowledge, sales process, and interaction skills is the key to your personal success.
There are over 13 million people employed in the United States in “sales and related occupations.” Some make minimum wage and do little more than enter orders and take money. Others work on car lots or dial for dollars during your dinner time. Others go to work every day in fancy cars and nice suits and make pots of money. And that’s just some of them.
I haven’t met even most of those 13 million people—but I’ve met and trained some thousands of them—and I’m willing to bet a month’s paycheck that the following statements are true:
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Almost none of them grew up thinking they were going to go into sales.
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Almost none of them had any schooling or training that prepared them for a job in sales.
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Almost none of them got the training they needed to succeed at their first job. (Reading a telemarketing script doesn’t count as proper training.)
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80% of them could enjoy selling a whole lot more—and would sell more—if they found a style, tool set, and discipline that worked for them.
I’ve spent over twenty five years selling, and nearly as much time consulting with sales organizations and training sales people. I’ve worked with some of the biggest and best known companies in the world, and some of the smallest. I’ve trained, or written programs that others have trained, that tens of thousands of people have used. If I could say just one thing about what I’ve learned it would be this:
Lesson 1: Be the best version of yourself that you can be. The rest takes care of itself.
What does that mean? If you have perfect technique and hate what you’re doing, you won’t be successful. If you have terrible technique but believe passionately in something, anything, and you communicate that passion and conviction to your customer, you will be successful more times than not.
Passion and commitment can be fleeting qualities, so it makes sense that the best answer would be the whole package: Great skills, knowledge, and process along with confidence and positive energy. On the days you’re feeling off, your skill can often keep you in the game. On the days you’re all thumbs and elbows, your conviction can do the same. On the days you bring it all to work, there’s nothing that can get in your way. I can’t help it if that sounds like inspirational goop. It’s true.
So which comes first? I believe it begins with finding some rock of self-confidence you can stand on. Everything else builds from there. Everything else is second place. You have to believe in something, something that’s relevant and related to what you’re getting paid to do, or you should do something else. The good news is that you get to choose your rock: You get to make the links between what you do and who you are. You are the source of your own relevance.
Recently I had a chance to work with a group of young (well they were younger than me), smart, highly educated people who were just informed that they were now expected to forage for themselves. They now had to sell and they didn’t have a clue how to go about it. This didn’t make them bad, but it did make them scared. And scared means they’re going to be ineffective. It means they won’t be the best versions of themselves that they can be.
Like so many other people new to sales, they got thrown into the pool with the expectation that somehow they’d figure out how to swim. Most of them won’t make it to the deep end. They won’t even know where and how to start. And to the extent that their failure at selling makes them feel like failures as people, they’ll be chipping away at the one thing they most need to be successful which is . . . to be the best version of themselves that they can be.
I wrote these pages for those young people and the millions like them who attempt to make a living selling without really knowing what it takes to succeed.
I also wrote this for the me I used to be twenty-five years ago, a “young guy looking for a leg up.” Yes, I actually said that once to a prospect. It’s the book I wish someone had given me when I was starting out. Everything you’ll read here I tried and validated. That doesn’t mean it will work for you, but it does mean it’s a place to start.
Is There Really A Unified Theory of Selling?
Talking and writing about selling requires that you be willing to live with a paradox of substantial proportions:
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There are millions of sales people, types of selling, and sales circumstances. The differences and variations are staggering.
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It’s just people dealing with people. The differences and variations don’t really matter.
Personally, I subscribe to the later point of view, but I’m very aware that on a Friday afternoon when you’ve gotten through to no customers and you’ve sold exactly nothing all week, it can feel like nobody has it as tough as you do.
But you’ve picked up this book [or chosen to read this essay]. So somewhere inside you is the thought—maybe the hope and prayer—that there is some universal set of principles that can help a new, or eager-to-learn-more seller to sell more. I think there is, but you’ll have to be the judge of that.
In claiming that I know something that even remotely resembles the “secret to selling” I’m crashing into all the books that others have written before me on this same topic. You may even have read some of those books. I know I have. If you haven’t, here’s what’s out there.
Most sales books are written by ex-sales people. The authors carried a bag for a living, had some success doing it, and now want to pass what they know along to you. Many of these people don’t necessarily know why they were successful, but they can usually describe how.
There are also books our there by academics who have decided to—usually because they were hired to—have a look at what makes good sales people different from average sales people. Most of these people couldn’t sell something if their lives depended on it. Most of these people can’t tell you how to be successful, but they can tell you why.
I'm not an academic, so I guess I fall into the first category, but I'd like to think I understand both the how and the why.
The general flow of a typical sales book goes like this:
My name is Bill and I have some credentials I’d like to tell you about. I’m successful and I’ve made pots of money. Or, I’m smart, I understand how people work, I can throw around big words and names of famous thinkers, and know how to properly use footnotes.
As a result of my credentials, I have something important to say about selling. You should pay attention. If you do, you’ll be successful.
Before I do, let me point out that everything that’s been written before on this topic is wrong unless of course I wrote it or someone I know and still like wrote it. The only exception to this rule is material that is at least 50 years old; particularly material that can be credited to some luminary like Jung or Plato. [There are solid reasons for this later point. 1) Most people haven’t read Jung or Plato so they won’t really know one way or another. 2) Although they haven’t read Jung or Plato, they’ve heard of them in a good way, so referencing them adds weight to your arguments and shines your credentials just a bit more].
Everything I have to say works. If it doesn’t work for you, it’s your fault. You’re either dense, lazy, or both.
The key is practice and application. I can’t help you there because this is a book. So you need to make lists, review them every day, and do what you’ve written. Or, come to my workshops. Or get your company to hire me.
Happy selling. [They all say that.]
Let me get right to the part about trashing the competition. As a general rule—and I’ll cover this later—it’s a bad idea to badmouth a competitor. Having said that, let me point out what I hope will be obvious to you.
Some of the sales books out there are really quite good, assuming your circumstances match up to the experiences of the writer. That’s an important distinction. Personally, I’m a real fan of human psychology so I tend to head in that direction. So in my experience, the most useful tend to be books that are solidly based on an understanding of what makes people tick: as learners, sellers, and buyers. But that’s just me. You’re different. You might think some other framework is superior so you’ll put different books in this category.
Some of the books that I like might not fit well with your style or circumstances. They might be useful to me or someone else, just like tub-calk or drain cleaner is useful, but if you don’t happen to need either of those things then they’re kind of worthless. For example, I don’t believe in hard closing, so I don’t read those books anymore. I know this because I’ve tried every type of closing there is, and I find most of the techniques to be bad for business if you ever plan on seeing the customer again. But again, that’s just me.
The key thought here is that in almost all cases, what makes a sales book good or bad is your fundamental willingness to believe, or at least to suspend your disbelief.
Almost every possible technique has worked for someone at some time. There are plenty of sales people out there who believe fervently in hard closing and have houses full of new furniture and fancy home electronics to validate their faith. There are also highly educated and highly skilled people out there making themselves miserable day after day as they try and fail at implementing some sales system that is guaranteed to work. There is every permutation in between.
This leads me to my second lesson.
Lesson 2: Just because some expert says it’s so, doesn’t mean it’s going to be true for you.
Just because some experienced seller or credentialed academic says that this is the way to sell, it doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you in your circumstances. There may be truckloads of evidence to say that it should, but that doesn’t mean that it will. I don’t care how universal a principle appears to be, if you don’t buy into it, it might as well not exist.
In saying this, I’m not suggesting that you should throw yourself off a bridge because you think this whole gravity thing is way overdone. I’m not talking about that sort of principle. But if you think that asking questions is a waste of time, and you do it anyway, I can assure you that you’ll get nothing useful out of the exercise.
Why You Should Read This Book
In writing this book, I wanted first of all to boil out what I thought were useful lessons that most sales people could apply most of the time. These lessons come from my own experience, my non-scientific observations from watching lots of very good sales people in action, my experience as a consultant and sales trainer for over twenty years, and my deep and broad reading on human behavior. In some cases, what I have to say is my own. In others, I’m standing on others’ shoulders, but that’s not a bad thing. We all do it.
Before I go any further, let me point out what should be obvious to anyone who has spend more than ten minutes in sales. If you live in the US, you live in an incomprehensibly large economy. Unless you sell multi-million or billion dollar goods or services, you have a huge margin of error . . . and so do all the other sales people in the country. If you have enough "at bats", you can make any approach work. But neither you nor I want to work that hard. You’re looking for a way to make your selling time more effective, perhaps more efficient, more lucrative, and more rewarding emotionally. At least that’s what I’d be looking for if I were reading a book like this.
With that in mind, let me point out the second obvious fact: There are many types of selling ranging from tending a retail counter to peddling multi-billion dollar capital projects. Nobody knows everything about all of them. I know a lot about some types of selling, some about a few more, and nothing about a lot of others.
The kind of selling we are going to focus on here is the kind where you spend time talking with the customer. This could be on the phone or in person. You do this because the price point of what you sell is significant to the customer and what you and the company gets paid is enough to justify the investment of sales time.
The kind we’re not going to spend time talking specifically about boiler room selling (big rooms of people telemarketing), working in the family market, or selling across retail counters, though I think much of what I have to say applies.
We’re also not going to spend much time on the strategic elements of big-ticket selling. We’re also not going to cover off the intricacies of selling to public agencies. Those are books in themselves.
Finally, we’re not going to spend time on the ethics of selling. I sleep well at night and I do so because I’m convinced that I do the right thing by my customers. I call many of them “friend” and see many of them socially. I think everyone should behave according to the edict that shows up in virtually every religious or ethical system: Treat others like you want to be treated. If you don’t think that applies in commerce, please don’t read this book. If you don’t and do read it, don’t tell anybody about it. I don’t need that kind of publicity.
There are lots of lessons sprinkled through the pages to come—or at least a lot of ideas. It’s tempting to try and net the many out to the few. Doing that risks trivializing the rest, but I’m going to do it anyway. I’ve already mentioned two:
Lesson 1: Be the best version of yourself that you can be. The rest takes care of itself.
Lesson 2: Just because some expert says it’s so, doesn’t mean it’s going to be true for you.
Here are a few more that are worth highlighting.
Lesson 3: There’s nothing separate about selling. Selling comes from what you are. From who you are. If there’s something you don’t like about selling or about how you feel about selling or what you’re selling, it’s because something is crashing up against your sense of self. When that happens, it’s time to make a change.
Lesson 4: People buy from people. It’s easy to forget this, but you do so at your peril.
Lesson 5: You’re afraid they won’t buy, and they’re afraid they will. Dealing with that dynamic will deliver a happy outcome 95% of the time.
Lesson 6: If you don’t believe in persuasion, get out of sales. You can dress it up all you want, but at the end of the day, selling is about influence and persuasion.
Lesson 7: What you’re worth has nothing to do with what you sell. If someone says “yes,” it doesn’t make you a better person or intrinsically more valuable. If someone says, “no,” it doesn’t mean you’re bad, worthless, or worse. In fact, yeses and no’s mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Lesson 8: Focus on what’s important. Particularly when you work for someone else, you’re going to get loaded down with expectations, activities, processes, information, meetings, and more, more, more. Most people do a crummy job of setting priorities. When they become managers, they don’t magically get better at it, so now you have people who want it all telling people who can’t prioritize what to do. Madness. Figure out what really matters and do it. The rest takes care of itself.
Lesson 9: It’s your life, live it. When you’re in your twenties, that sentiment seems like a nice thing to put on a T-Shirt. It’s intellectually appealing but largely irrelevant. You have your whole life ahead of you and you’re invincible. You keep telling yourself those two things until you wake up one day and you realize neither point is true. Life is not a practice run (sorry, that’s a cliché but it’s true). You came here to do something. You have a purpose and it’s not to be the living version of a Dilbert cartoon. If selling isn’t for you, or working for some dim bulb selling dim bulbs isn’t it, do something else.
Lesson 10: Treat your customers like adults. This is just another version of the golden rule—treat others like you would like to be treated. You will never go wrong.
Lesson 11: Everyone has intuition. Find yours and follow it. If you’re one of those people—like I was—who lives his life in his head, you may be unfamiliar with the idea of gut, heart, or intuition. You may think that all that matters is thinking and that everything is logical. Once you get past that silly but understandable set of ideas and learn to trust your gut, you’ll really be onto something.
There are more of these lessons in the pages that follow. Read them all, grab onto the ones that seem to ring true for you right now, and go give them a try. Give them a fair try. If you feel like they’re helping you be the best version of you that you can be, keep what you’ve learned. If not, go back to the well and grab something new. If you do this, you will succeed.
Oh, and happy selling!
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Last modified:
05/03/06