Sales Coaching You Don’t Need

I’m really great at selling, just not very good when it comes to talking about price or asking for the order.

This little gem came from somebody whose name’s long forgotten. It resonated with me, not because she didn’t like closing – lots of people feel like that – but because that particular forum was full of her comments telling other people how to sell.

Obviously she’d been reading the wrong books, believing the wrong ideas and slamming open doors firmly shut.

It appears she’s not unique. A recent visit to LinkedIn drew me to a forum discussion with a title something like “What is the Secret to Successful Selling?”. If you spend much time over there you’ll know most discussions receive between 5 and 15 comments. This one had 88.

Checking the responses was an illuminating experience. Every comment was different. And every comment related to some daft motivational concept the contributor had read in a book somewhere. The whole conversation suggested there were 88 different special secrets, and 88 experts who obviously made so much money selling they could waste time in that particular snake pit.

“Why” you could rightly ask “are these guys not out there making even more money, instead of hiding on LinkedIn?” Excellent question – let me know when you’ve figured the answer.

Meantime we publish stuff in this blog which doesn’t come from books. The insight comes from experience of trying to do the job properly. We don’t talk about that motivational garbage – just straight forward common sense. We don’t charge for the advice and we don’t expect slavish commitment to our ideas. We simply want to help people get a clearer picture of what’s going on in the sales process – knowing when to “hold em” and when to “fold em”.

The best advice we can ever give anybody is “sell like you’d like to be sold to”. After all, we’re all somebody else’s prospect most of the time. We know what being a buyer is like. It’s not a big leap to deciding how a seller should act.

There’s a bunch of stuff in this blog that relates to integrity – the sales guy’s biggest asset – and doing the job properly. You might find some interesting ideas about

• the worst mistakes sellers can make
• why my customers are smarter than me
• selling is about people
• why we should never mislead customers

plus a whole lot more common sense explanation of sales strategies and tactics.

And on top of this great insight about the real world we offer you some fantastic software as well – all of it for free.

Selling does seem a crappy job a lot of the time, but it’s a lot better than most of the jobs people have to do. Our best stand by thought when things go wrong (as they always do) is we’re the professionals around here.

Best of luck with that next deal.

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