When you entered the profession of selling, you learned your product. You learned some sales techniques, you got out there among your potential clients and put your knowledge to work, and you started to make some money. Then all of a sudden, you got smart. You quit doing what your company asked you to do. And you started to slip.
You might finish reading these words, put this book down, and in six months double your income. Then you’ll stop doing what I’ve asked you to do. You’ll stop doing the things that caused your income to double. Your income will begin to fall, and you’ll wonder why. There’s a way to keep that from happening.
Don’t stop.
Instead, do what professional athletes do. There’s a lot of similarity between the professional athlete and a professional salesperson.
You know that high school teams practice. That doesn’t surprise you—the kids have to learn the game. You know that college teams practice. Okay, they’re still quite young. But before every season starts, the pros are out there sweating it up. The first string is out there. The star quarterback is out there. He’s making a chunk of money but he’s running. He’s perspiring. He’s spending some of his time on new plays, certainly, but most of the time he’s drilling on fundamentals. Reviewing the basics. In fact, what’s interesting is that the more professional and talented an athlete is, the more that athlete—man or woman—practices and trains. This comes back to that neat little thing called discipline. It calls into play that business of making yourself do what you know you should do.
Jump ahead in your calendar. Put a note there to review this book a year from now. When the time comes, I know there’s a good chance you’ll say, “I’m not going through that stuff again. I know it. I’ve milked it for everything it’s worth.”
I hope you won’t say that. I hope you won’t limit the effectiveness of your learning. I hope you won’t put a ceiling on your income-earning potential. I hope you won’t decide to slip back into the quagmire of mediocrity. Reinforce your learning. Do it at least annually. Preserve your hard-won skills. Enhance your knowledge. Add to it.
Reinforce.
Keep your greatness.
Instead of letting your greatness wither, fertilize it regularly to make it grow. You’ll find this true of all learning that’s important to you: Every time you review the material in depth, you’ll see things you never saw before and discover concepts you weren’t ready to use before. Whenever you review effective knowledge, you reinforce your previous insights with richer insights.
Your Primary Tool
Let me ask you a question. If the professional golfer uses a club, the tennis player a racquet, and the carpenter a hammer, what do we professional salespeople use? We use something that’s gotten us in lots of trouble, don’t we?
But is there a pro on the golfing circuit who hasn’t used a club to drive the ball into a sand trap? Is there a tennis player who hasn’t used the racquet to feed an opponent a sure winner? Is there a carpenter out there who hasn’t used a hammer to smack a thumb? Is there a salesperson who’s never used his primary tool to say something that lost an account?
Your primary tool—the opening in your face called a mouth—must be used with confidence. But it can malfunction. The words you speak can destroy sales as well as create them. That’s why you should think of your mouth as a sharp-edged tool that has to be used intelligently if it’s going to do you more good than harm. But set reasonable goals. You can’t reasonably expect to never say the wrong thing to prospects and clients.
Hitting the ball wrong in tennis is much like saying the wrong thing in sales. Every year at Wimbledon, the eventual winners use their racquets to feed a few easy shots to their opponents, and they lose the point every time they do. But far more often, they use their racquets to hit winning shots for themselves.
In both activities, you can learn to avoid making the common mistakes. But in the profession of sales, you’re constantly involved in new and unique situations which means that you’re faced with a steady stream of opportunities to make new and unique mistakes—usually by saying the wrong thing.
The good news is that if you learn enough right things to say, and if you concentrate on warmly saying them to your prospects and clients, there’ll be very little time left for saying things you’ll regret. And there’ll also be less chance that you’ll lose any vital point if you do happen to let out an unfortunate remark. Work toward having the relaxed, cheerful, and confident manner that comes from dwelling on what you know you’ll say right rather than worrying yourself into a tense, gloomy, and fearful attitude because you’ve occasionally blundered in your choice of words or topics. Accept the fact that what you say will sometimes come out badly. Then cultivate an honest respect for all people, and learn all the right statements to make. Do that and you’ll never cut yourself with the sharp edge of your tongue.
Accentuate the positive through knowledge. That’s my program for developing your primary tool into a reliable instrument for winning success in the profession of sales.
My life is working with people who have the desire but not the skills to earn more. Usually I work from a seminar stage—just now I’m working in a quiet room on this book—but the object is the same: to deliver that needed training. After I’ve done that, it’s up to you.
I know that I can do my part because I’ve been fortunate enough to have trained thousands of the top salespeople in this country and abroad. They had the desire but not the training or the income. They came to the seminar. They learned the material. They used it daily. And then, all of a sudden, they not only had the desire and the training, but also had the income they wanted.
The highlight of my life comes when people take my training, go out with it and win whatever amount of success they need, and then tell me about it.
Now let me tell you about some of the Champions who’ve done that. Here’s a Champion whose actions may startle you. Until he was eighteen, Robert Burns worked on his father’s ranch. It was dependable work, but he wanted more from life than he could lift with a pitchfork, so he decided to enter the profession of selling. He took my training. When Robert celebrated his twenty-third birthday, his sales earnings were headed over the half-million mark for the year.
I don’t know any better word for it than excitement. It’s exciting to know that if you learn the material and then go out and do what you know you should do, there’s no ceiling on your income. People often tell me that they’re too young for sales. Robert Burns wasn’t too young. Today, he’s a major developer and multimillionaire.
And other people say they’re too old. Let me tell you about Gertrude Nunn. I met her years ago, not too long after her former employer had said that she was getting too old for the job and should retire. She walked out, puttered around for a month, and decided that she wanted to be where the action is. Gertrude had no background in sales but by happy accident she heard about our training and took it. At seventy-five years young, she was earning over a hundred thousand dollars a year.
Jimmie Walker is another Champion. He started learning about professionally selling insurance when he was sixteen. He dedicated himself to greatness in the field and succeeded. How many people do you know at any age—let alone their early twenties—who earned enough money to acquire a major professional sports team? Jimmie Walker did.
Our next Champion, David Bernstein, became one of the top four in luxury car leasing at a very young age. For years, I’ve preached the importance of sending thank-you notes, but I’d never seen anyone use this technique more effectively than David Bernstein did. Within a week of meeting him as a prospect, a member of my staff and I received four of these notes from Bernstein, all of them well-written, sincere, personal notes that made