Cutting-Edge Sales Insights … from 1968

The truth in sales, as in life, can often be deceptively simple: Sometimes to look ahead, you have to look back. As in five decades back.

While it’s tempting to think that apps and gadgets alone can catapult your sales career into the stratosphere, you might also want to consider as another effective tool a book that debuted 45 years ago, The Greatest Salesman in the World.

First published in 1968, Salesman is one of those books that never should’ve made it to the list of all-time greats. Its author, Og Mandino, was an insurance salesman and an unknown writer; this tome was his first. It’s set in the Holy Land some 2000 years ago, not exactly the most exciting locale a neophyte author can pick. And if you follow Mandino’s prescription for reading the “Ten Scrolls”  within the book, it will take you about 10 months – a snail’s pace for a volume that’s only 110 pages long.

And yet, Christian Science Monitor books and culture writer Molly Driscoll didn’t hesitate to put Salesman on her list of the 10 best self-help books of all time. Driscoll told me that as she researched her 2012 article, she kept coming upon enthusiastic testimonials about careers and lives changed by Mandino’s effort. Even actor Matthew McConaughey, in this Austin Chronicle piece, talks about how the book propelled his film career more than any other.

“It was oblivious that this book had a huge impact on so many readers, and it’s still having a huge impact,” Driscoll said. “The format is so interesting, it really appeals to people.”

The clever conceit of Mandino’s book is that you don’t read it passively, but experience it actively. It concerns a young man named Hafid, who wants to learn the secrets of a successful trader who is dying. Those secrets rest in the Ten Scrolls, but the mysterious parchments instruct Hafid (and you, as the reader) to review them morning, noon and night for 30 consecutive days, without skipping a word.

It’s at that point that the book becomes not just a story, but rather a program you follow to supercharge your attitudes and thinking. The scroll themes say it all: “I will greet this day with love in my heart,” “I will live this day as if it were my last,” “I will multiply my value a hundredfold.”

Like McConaughey, I read “The Greatest Salesman in the World” at a key juncture. I was stuck in my awkward post-college years, waiting tables and unable to zero in on any future career prospects. That was in the mid-1980s; at that point my father, a career salesman and sales trainer, recommended the book to me. After completing Mandino’s work, I embarked on a path I couldn’t have envisioned before encountering the scrolls. I sold my work successfully to several major news organizations and indeed “multiplied my value a hundredfold.” For the next 20 years.

Does Mandino’s book maintain its relevance in today’s fever-pitch sales culture? Driscoll isn’t alone in arguing a strong affirmative. Thomas Corley, the president of Cerefice and Company CPAs, in Rahway, N.J., was working on his own book Rich Habits (available through his Rich Habits Institute) when a friend sent him a copy of Salesman.

He read the book and was floored. “I trashed my manuscript and used Og Mandino’s book as my template,” Corley said. “I’ve since read every book he has written.”

Of course, there are many things Mandino didn’t address, technique being one of them. “The Greatest Salesman in the World is best for being motivational and directional,” Corley said, “but it doesn’t tell you specifically what you should do to increase sales. It provides a broad roadmap on achieving success in life. They help salespeople focus on the important things. They narrow what you need to focus on to succeed.”

How To Sell Without Selling Your Soul

John Bracken is a founder and CEO of Speek, which offers a new kind of conference call. 

The days of using words like “hard” and “cold” when discussing sales tactics are over. You can sell your product with confidence and turn a profit while still feeling like a human. Many sales-based teams will admit that commission and quota pressures force them to sell products quickly and often carelessly.

Sales teams feel best about the products and services they stand behind. Here are some of the best ways to sell like hell, without feeling like you’re going there.

Use Your Network (When Appropriate)

Take every reasonable opportunity to expand your network. When you meet more people, you begin to understand their needs. When you better understand the needs of businesses, you fit your products inside their niches. Using your network alleviates the dreaded and largely ineffective cold-calling method, but remember to use your network only when appropriate. Overstepping your boundaries will not only diminish your sales opportunity, but can also potentially damage valuable relationships.

Never Use Fear

Fear-based selling may be effective sometimes, but it’s unethical. Jennifer Beever argues you should treat your customer like you treat your friend. You wouldn’t take advantage of your friend’s anxieties to push him or her towards a decision. Besides, using this as a sales tactics shows desperation and ignorance.

Instead of tapping into their deep-seated fears, learn more about what makes your customer’s business productive and angle your approach in a way that makes your customer feel positive and empowered.

Leverage Your Emotions

Good sales professionals understand the importance of tapping into the emotions of their customers, but every amazing sales professional understands how to tap into their own emotions. The trick is to find a balance between showcasing your passion and belief in your product while remaining professional and in control. If you truly believe in what you are selling, your excitement will shine through and substantiate your sales approach.

Today’s technology and the sales shift towards honest, innovative products makes selling enjoyable and successful. By knowing your products and services, believing in them and using your emotions to leverage them, your sales will triumph — as will your reputation as a professional.

Tracking Co-workers for Fun and Profit

Yesware makes it easy to see who has interacted with your emails.  Starting today, we even tell you explicitly when you or a co-worker (a Yesware user that shares your email domain) is the one that opened or clicked on your email.

To view all of your recent tracking events, just click on the Yesware dashboard at the top of your Gmail inbox.  On the right of each event, you can see whether it was an external party, you, or a colleague  that opened or clicked  your email.  (Note: if you have an @gmail.com email address, colleague tracking is not available).

Hiding Sender and Colleague Events

Most Yesware users only care to track people outside their organization.  To stay focused, you can easily hide tracking events generated by you or your colleagues.  Just click “Stop tracking yourself” or “Stop tracking colleagues” in the yellow bar at the bottom of your Dashboard.  When you choose either or both of these, you’ll see a lot fewer notifications from Yesware

To change your notification settings, click the Yesware menu at the very top of Gmail and choose “Preferences”.  Under “Compose Options” you can change whether sender and colleague events display.  Regardless of these settings, your Yesware Reports will always filter out sender and colleague events from their statistics.

The most sales prospects … or the best sales prospects?

Most of us at some point in our sales career were told that activity equals results and were forced to make 50-100 dials a day until our ears fell off.  Many of us were even forced to use scripts and read them verbatim when trying to manage a call or leave a voicemail.  Brutal.  This is a pure quantity approach to sales that relies on the laws of averages and luck.

As we gain more experience in our careers, those quantities go down as we try to increase the quality of our approaches.  We spend more time digging into each lead and researching it before making the calls or sending the emails. We often abandon the phone and focus our efforts on email because we feel we can craft the perfect message in a safe environment. Many of us even stop prospecting altogether because our leads are given to us and we get comfortable.

Regardless of your role in sales, you should constantly be prospecting to keep a thick and healthy pipeline at all times.  A healthy pipeline solves a lot of problems at every other stage of the sales process.  For example, if you don’t like to discount, the best thing you can have is a big fat pipeline. When a client tries to squeeze an extra discount out of you at the end of the month, you can push back because you have a bunch of other clients who are willing to pay close to rate card.  The “walkaway” close is one of the best and most powerful closes in sales, but can only be done if you have the confidence that comes with not needing the deal.  This is just one reason why consistent prospecting is so critical.

So what is the right mix of quantity vs. quality? It depends on what your role is and how much prospecting you must do to hit your target.  Regardless, it should be a mix.  We shouldn’t do all quantity because we would quickly run out of people to call and most likely annoy the majority of them.  We shouldn’t do all quality because we may only get out a handful of emails each day.

To help with time management while determining which prospecting approaches work the best, we recommend a four-step process: Define, Focus, Track, and Measure.

1. Define your approaches

Write down a few different prospecting approaches you will try and make sure there is a mix of quantity and quality.  An example of a quantity approach would be to developavery specific value proposition to CFOs in the financial services industry, calling every one of them in your territory, and saying the same thing to see if the message resonates.  An example of a quality approach would be to research someone’s website and a trigger event you can tie the value of your solution to.

2. Focus on one approach for a period of time

Block off an hour of time on your calendar to focus on prospecting with one specific approach.

3. Track your results

For each approach you should track how many emails you send, how many of them were opened, how many were responded to, and how many turned into meetings.

4.  Measure to see which approaches work best

By comparing conversion ratios from different approaches, you should start to see some approaches working far better than others. So now you know what to concentrate on.

Four Ways Salespeople Can Beat Call Reluctance

If you’ve ever experienced call reluctance–as I did during my cold-calling days–then you know that feeling. You’ve felt that dull throb in the pit of your stomach, that inability to pick up the phone or make the day’s first appointment, that awful dread in which you obsess upon rejection, rejection, rejection.

Call reluctance hits sales rookies and seasoned pros alike, and its impact is well documented. In The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance, Shannon Goodson and George Dudley found that 80 percent of new salespeople fail because of call reluctance, while 40 percent of veterans stop prospecting because of it.

What causes call reluctance? How can you beat it? For answers, we turned to two experts. Connie Kadansky has coached salespeople in overcoming call reluctance for more than 14 years, while Todd Cohen, the author of Everyone’s in Sales, has 20-plus years in the training field. Here’s how they see and solve the problem.

Major causes of call reluctance

Your culture shames the salesperson. Kadansky says that in many cases, call reluctance stems from a corporate culture where salespeople are painted as the pushy, disreputable cousins of used car peddlers. She recalls a Las Vegas company she consulted where “the message was, ‘Get out and sell, but don’t be a salesperson.’ So the sales force started out with role rejection–and that’s a major source of shame.” It didn’t help that the gag prize for top salesman of the week was a foam rubber pink pig. 

You’re unprepared. Cohen emphasizes that memorizing a cold-call script isn’t nearly the same thing as preparing to meet the potential customer where their needs are. Many sales organizations, he adds, don’t provide the proper support. “You need the coaching from a peer or mentor,” he says. 

It’s not in your blood. Some people, Cohen and Kadansky agree, are simply more introverted than others. For them, initiating contact with a stranger may be intimidating. “It’s a personality predisposition, and it can be passed down through DNA,” Kadansky says. Still ,this type of person, she insists, can overcome call reluctance–and if they can, anyone can.

Here’s how:

1. Bosses must respect the salesperson. With the Las Vegas company, Kadansky had a strong message for the CEO: Ditch the Pink Pig Award and stop treating “sales” like a dirty word. The 20 people manning the phones went from high call reluctance to much lower levels. The pig, by the way, was replaced by a trophy. “It made the whole culture for sales more honorable and respectful,” she says.
2. Reframe fear of rejection into embrace of value. Fear of rejection stems from internal causes. But when salespeople focus outward–on how their product or service helps the person on the other end—they become evangelists. In a recent coaching call with an experienced-but-stuck salesman, Kadansky says: ” We drilled deep, deep down, beyond the financial benefit [of the product] to the emotional and spiritual benefits. Now he knows the value, and he has a responsibility to reach out and make that call.”
3. Use essential oils. That’s right. If call reluctance has a smell, it’s not that of your favorite dessert, or a scent that brings back powerful, positive memories. Essential oils can trick the mind into moving beyond fear and into a place of positive power. “We had a golfer who, when he’d hesitate to make a call, would smell the essential oil of cut grass,” Kadansky says. “It made him happy, he picked up the phone, punched that number ,and made that call.”
4. Don’t invest everything in the outcome. Some salespeople regard a call that doesn’t net a sale as a failure, but that’s exactly the sort of thinking that breeds call reluctance. Take positives where you can, Cohen says. “If every call results in something where the process takes a step forward–even if it’s a baby step–that gives you confidence to make the next call.”