Serious about selling – Introduction

This is our way of passing on to all the people who need to be able to sell to make a living the lessons we’ve learned over the years doing exactly that. It’s mostly written as a short cut to the truth, for intelligent people who know there’s a secret to success – they just don’t know what it is. It’s not surprising they don’t know, because they probably haven’t been trained.

Even if they had, the training courses won’t approach the challenge from the same direction. The training guys have to follow the rules. They have to appeal to the widest possible market, and they have to sell to people who know nothing about the subject. This is where the problem comes in. Almost every thing worth knowing about selling is counter intuitive – exactly the opposite of what sensible, right minded people would think. Sensible right minded people – accountants, human resources professionals, general managers – are the people who buy training. They know the customer is always right and they’re not going to buy training which says the customer is always wrong. Sales professionals know the customer is always wrong. If they weren’t they wouldn’t need us. Here’s the good news.

With Serious About Selling we aren’t trying to sell training courses costing $,0000’s so we don’t have to sell to the people who don’t know what they don’t know. We want to sell to the people who know that they don’t know (thanks Donald) and because this book costs less than a good evening with friends we can afford to tell you the truth. The book is written so you can read it in your lunch break (we don’t have publishers telling us it should be 200 pages). You can go back to it and find what you want in seconds. Most importantly, if you read it in the lunch break you’ll get your money back before the day is out, through a better understanding of what you’re trying to do, and you’ll go on getting a return on your investment, with every sale.

Right off the bat, here is my apology to all those women who are great salespersons. I refuse to call anybody a sales person so we are all salesmen, male and female. If we’re good at it we deserve the title, regardless of gender.

Why does nobody want to be called a salesman? Without great salesmen the world wouldn’t go around. No new businesses would emerge, no great new products be introduced and nobody would make any money. The salesmen feed everybody else in the business.

Why are they treated with such distain? Great salesmen are highly intelligent, diligent, honest and sympathetic. They know they don’t get anywhere without customers who pay everybody’s check, without support teams who keep the train on the rails, and without a good chunk of luck. Being lucky has always been great salesman’s finest attribute. But the world seems to think “salesman” is some sort of derogatory word – a bit like prostitute without the fun.

Why? Well that’s because the majority of people called salesman by their employers aren’t sales professionals. They’re amateurs with no training and too much pressure to produce numbers. It doesn’t matter if the product is no good, if the marketing is bad, if the competition has a genuinely better offer, if the customer is too clever to get fooled by a bad deal. The salesman gets told “find me numbers, or find you another employer”.

I’m happy to be called a “salesman”. I’m good at it. Much better at it than I was as the accountant I started out as. I never sold something to anybody when it wasn’t right for them, and I was always there to help out when the delivery went wrong, like it always does. But then I’ve been lucky. Companies trained me, managers coached me and customers supported me. Maybe there is a way to explain to everybody salesmen make the world go around. They should be trained, cherished, supported and rewarded for the toughest job in the game.

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