There is no greater goal professionally than learning to sell. Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki both said it, together in their own book and Robert did so separately, having first joined Xerox himself.
Harvey McKay wrote whole books about it. Dale Carnegie and Earl Nightingale both did it and preached it ... and countless others. All getting to the core of what it means to be a professional sales person.
Most of what gets kicked around here, in this forum, and in new age selling ideas, is predicated or based on expereince with poor and unprofessional sales people (this begins with 2nd hand experience, like that of your parents) and individual values built on these experiences. No wonder we are held in such low esteem.
J. Douglas Edwards, perhaps the greatest sales speaker of all time said; "No wonder there are so many poins in this industry!"
Selling has not changed. Marketing and technology have but that does not mean sales skills have.
You don't need a CRM or Contact Manager to make huge bucks in selling. You don't need to send billions of emails or ever write even one for that matter. What you need is to learn how to interact with people, how to read them so that you can help them get what they need, want or desire.
You can lay on me that sales people use techniques that are unprofessional if you want to. And that we, as an industry need to change because people now know better, but I can tell you in reply to both of these points that most sales people don't know what they are doing and that influence can be used for good and evil. Pros obviously use it the good way; to help people buy. And, for those people who have it, it is the same sort of feeling or non-trusting attitude toward sales people now that existed about sales people for approximately 80 to 120 generations, since the beginning of trade caravans and market squares. The reality is, this is lost in time. The only way you can understand this is not through surveys, because we are individuals are not aware of how are values became set, it is through the study of human nature and how core beliefs (values) come to be in the first place.
Are you good enough? Will you stretch yourself into becoming all you can be and learn to master this thing called selling? Or will you twist and turn away from what is as evident as the nose on your face - that selling is something you have to actively work at improving at for your whole career.
The perception of our industry has not changed. Writers and speakers will tell you it has to sell their materials but the reality is that they are simply carrying on with a pattern. And that pattern is to look for something else that is the root of the problem other than the fact that they never truly mastered this performing art. Naturally, the answer is the "old way" no longer works. What they miss is that there have always been those who did not know what they were doing and those who were really masters.
Why study those who know not what they do?
Few do (master sales). Will you?
