Preface
This book is for ambitious salespeople who are eager to increase their sales and boost their incomes immediately. It is written for those who are, or intend to be, in the top 10 percent of their fields in selling. Every idea is aimed at the sales superstars of today and tomorrow.
Salespeople are primarily motivated by two things: money and status. They want to be paid well, and they measure their success by the size of their incomes relative to others’. In addition, they want to be recognized and appreciated for their efforts and for their successes. This book will show salespeople how to make quantum leaps in both areas.
Most salespeople have never been professionally trained in selling. Fully 95 percent of salespeople can increase their sales with additional knowledge and skill. Sometimes you are only one skill away from becoming a sales superstar. This book will help you to identify that skill and begin the process of mastering it.
Occasionally, I begin a seminar or talk by asking, “How many people here today are in sales?” Invariably, only a few hands go up. I pause and wait for a few seconds and then I ask, “Who here is really in sales?”
Suddenly, they get it. More and more hands go up until almost every hand in the room is raised. I then go on to say, “That’s right. Everyone is in sales, no matter what you do. Your entire life is a continuous process of communicating, persuading, and influencing other people. The only question is, How good are you in these areas?”
Your ability to “sell” others on your ideas will determine your success in your life and career as much as any other factor. If your income and success actually depend on selling, what you will learn in the pages to follow can change your life.
I wrote this book to give you, a busy sales professional, a handbook that you could refer to quickly to pick up key ideas and techniques that would immediately increase your effectiveness and boost your results. As it happens, more than 4,000 books on selling are available today and almost all of them are valuable and worthwhile.
What makes this book different?
The answer is that this book is short and straight to the point. In 144 pages, you will learn twenty-one of the most important principles for sales success that I have discovered in the training of more than 500,000 sales professionals in twenty-three countries. Each of these strategies is tested and proven to work. Any one of these ideas can boost your sales and income immediately.
When I began selling, knocking on doors, going from office to office, cold-calling, I learned a concept called the “Winning Edge Principle.” This is one of the great insights to success in every area of life, including selling.
The principle says this: Small differences in ability in key areas can lead to enormous differences in results.
Small improvements in important sales skills, such as prospecting, making persuasive presentations, overcoming objections, or closing the sale, can lead to huge increases in sales results. This book is designed to show you specific techniques that will enable you to make those jumps in performance, to give you the “winning edge.”
Here is another key idea for success: Your weakest important skill sets the height at which you can use all your other skills and determines your income.
In other words, if you are poor in a key skill area such as prospecting or closing, that one weakness alone will determine your sales results and how much you earn. A single deficiency in your ability can hold you back from succeeding, no matter how good you might be in every other area.
Put another way, your strengths have brought you to where you are today, but your weaknesses are now holding you back from progressing further and faster.
This book is designed to give you sales tools you can use to overcome any critical weakness you may have – first, by identifying it and second, by giving you practical exercises you can apply immediately to strengthen yourself in that area.
This book deals simultaneously with both the inner game of selling, the mental component, and the outer game of selling, the methods and techniques of actually making the sale. When you begin to improve in both areas together, both your sales and your self-confidence will increase at a rapid rate.
Only small differences in attitude and ability separate the top salespeople from the average. When you learn and apply the twenty-one great ways to be a sales superstar, you will quickly move to the top of your field. Your future in selling will become unlimited.
Introduction: Think Like a Top Salesperson
This is a wonderful time to be alive and working in the profession of selling. Regardless of the ups and downs of the economy or temporary changes in your industry, there have never been more opportunities for you to achieve more of your goals – and enjoy a higher standard of living – than exist today by selling more of your products and services in the marketplace. And if anything, as you continually upgrade your skills, your situation is going to get better and better in the months and years ahead.
The better you become at selling, the more opportunities will open up for you. According to Dr. Thomas Stanley, coauthor of The Millionaire Next Door, fully 5 percent of self-made millionaires in America are salespeople who have sold for another company all their lives. The way they became millionaires was quite straightforward. First, they became very good at selling. Second, they earned an excellent living as a result. And third, they saved and invested a substantial part of their incomes as they went along. So can you.
My personal story in the field of selling is similar to that of many others. I started off with limited opportunities. My parents never had very much money. My father worked as a carpenter and my mother was a nurse, but they were not always regularly employed. I didn’t graduate from high school. In fact, I behaved so badly in high school that I was suspended and eventually expelled from three different schools.
When I left high school, the only work I could get was laboring jobs. I washed dishes in the back of a small hotel, stacked lumber in a sawmill, dug wells, and worked as a construction laborer, carrying heavy materials from one place to another. I worked on farms and ranches and as a galley boy on a ship in the North Atlantic. Finally, when I couldn’t get a laboring job, I drifted into straight commission sales, selling office supplies from door to door.
I wasn’t afraid to work, but hard work alone didn’t seem to be enough. I made hundreds of calls without making any sales. I used to run from office to office and from door to door so that I could see more people. But I was just barely hanging on by my fingernails.
Then one day I began to ask, “Why is it that some salespeople are more successful than others?” I heard that the top 20 percent of salespeople in every field earned 80 percent of the money. The top 10 percent earned even more. So I did something that changed my life.
I went to the top salesman in my company and asked him what he was doing differently from me. And he told me. He told me how to ask questions and how to develop a sales presentation. He told me how to respond to objections and to ask for orders. I then went out and did what he told me to do and my sales went up.
Then I learned that there were books on selling. I bought them one after another and began to study the subject of selling one to two hours every morning before I started out. And my sales went up even more. Then I learned about audio programs and sales seminars. As I listened to audio programs continually and attended every seminar I could find, I learned what the best salespeople had taken years to learn. And my sales continued to increase.
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