Soft Selling in the 21st Century

Hard Core Out-Soft Core In

Linda Mcdonald

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781662435966
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Skills
• Index: Business

Linda McDonald has extracted the essential gems from her renowned sales training seminars and concentrated them all in one pure diamond of a book. Soft Selling in the 21st Century is an easy-to-follow prescription for sure-fire sales success. Linda covers essential preparation to sell, from goal-setting to eliminating the competition. Then she lays out a clear "Blueprint of Sales" that will guide any reader, from beginner to seasoned professional, to foolproof closings. Throughout she emphasizes the new musts for 21st-century sales: educating the client and stellar service.

Soft Selling in the 21st Century

Linda Mcdonald

Copyright © 2020 Linda McDonald

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the
author or publisher.

Edited by Carol Gaskin at Editorial Alchemy

Cover and interior design by Lynn Stuart Graphics

ISBN 978-1-6624-3595-9 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-3596-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Where Do I Start?

It’s All About Goals

Tools for Success

Eliminate Your Competition

Marketing to Your Client

Blueprint of Sales: Preparing to Sell

The Introduction

The Presentation

The Closing

Closing Basics

Overcoming Objections

Conclusion Be a Soft Selling Success Today!

This book is dedicated to my loving grandmother, Ludie Kirkpatrick; my aunt Edna Calhoun; and my cousins Wanda Tuenge, Laurence and Betty Calhoun, and Hazel McCarthy. Without their support and guidance this book would not have been possible.

Introduction

Introduction Journey to Success

How does destiny start us on the path that will become our life’s road? What determines or drives our successes or failures? The answer to the first question is a great mystery. But as for the second: We are all formed by our experiences, good and bad, and if we so choose, we can use the many lessons life deals us to feed our success. I did—and so can you!

My road has been a bumpy and a smooth ride since my conception. We all must have a starting place, and mine was just after Pearl Harbor, with a mother and father who loathed each other. The only people they detested more were children. But destiny has a way of not caring, and voila!—they had me: Linda Carol Layne.

I was lucky that my father stuck around just long enough to take my mother to the hospital. He was even inventive enough to tell the hospital that he was a minister of the first order and to give my mother the very best of everything. Then he walked out of the hospital, never to be seen again. To this day I don’t think he ever knew whether he had fathered a girl or a boy.

Voila! I enter the world. Me with my great-grandfather.

My journey started bumpy. I was seven weeks premature in the early forties, when the survival rate of preemies was very slim. But I was a fighter and a survivor, and several weeks later my mother took me home.

This was the end of the Great Depression, and World War II was underway. Although our home was in Oklahoma, my mother decided that Oklahoma was not where the action was, so she packed us up and moved to Hollywood, California, where she worked in the movies and formed a Country-Western band.

My mother in her stage outfit, early 1940s.

Now, say you have a six-month-old baby but you want to go out and perform at night. What do you do? Well, you simply leave the child alone all night in a one-room apartment in Hollywood. At least that’s what my mother decided to do. This created a problem with the landlord, however. He quickly tired of listening to a baby whimpering and crying all night long, till the little voice was so sore it could only whisper out a cry.

Thank God for grandmothers with big hearts. The landlord notified my mother’s grandmother, who immediately came to California and took care of me. This was my first rescue in life, and believe me when I say there were a lot more. In fact, I soon had a second rescue when, on my first birthday, my mother called my great-grandmother and told her that she had arranged for an orphanage to come and get me. My great-grandmother said “No way,” moved me back to Oklahoma, and then legally adopted me. From then on she raised me for six months a year and I spent the other six months with a great aunt and other relatives in Nebraska. My mother’s reaction? She went out and bought herself a Spider monkey to take my place. Go figure!

For the next fifteen years I traveled back and forth between Oklahoma and Nebraska. Not only was I never able to stay in one school for an entire school year, but for the six months I lived in Oklahoma I was Southern Baptist and for the other six months a devout Catholic in Nebraska.

Children and their parents in both states made fun of me for having been abandoned by my parents. In those days it was strange being raised by a great-grandmother and great aunt who were both well into their sixties. I learned at a very early age to sit in a corner and listen to the adults talk about the world, people, and life in general. This may have been instructive; but nonetheless, I felt as if I were a little freak of nature. I found it hard to fit in and suffered from such low self-esteem that later, in my early twenties, my adopted song was “Born To Lose.” But my road in life was just starting, and after all, I was a survivor and a fighter.

A Born Salesperson

While still in grade school I started a little business for myself by selling salve door-to-door. I was inspired to take up this very early entrepreneurship by an advertisement I saw in a local magazine. The job did not pay money, but instead handed out prizes for the number of cans of salve you sold. I won a ceramic panther, a lace tablecloth, and a cuckoo clock—all gifts for my great grandmother. Since our family was quite poor, I was very pleased that I was able to give these gifts to her.

It wasn’t too long before I decided that I should get paid in cash for my services so I got myself a paper route. Now, rather than being paid in cuckoo clocks or tablecloths, I was actually making money. My great grandmother would get up at five AM every morning to help me wrap rubber bands around the papers. On sunny days I delivered the papers by bike, while in inclement weather she drove me. What a saint she was!

A few months later I had a chance to get into the homing-pigeon business. I convinced my great grandmother that we could keep the pigeons caged up in our backyard. I actually sold twenty or thirty at a dollar apiece. When it came time for us to move, I sold the business along with my paper route for $25. I was nine years old at the time, and $25 seemed like a fortune.

During the summers, starting when I was eleven, my grandfather, who owned a fleet of trucks, would take me with him to Texas, where we would pick up Black Diamond watermelons to haul to supermarkets from Texas north to Nebraska. When all the deliveries were completed, my grandfather would usually leave about thirty watermelons on the truck and allow me to sell them for extra money. One year I even got my great aunt to load some of the watermelons in the back seat and trunk of her new DeSoto. We drove out into the countryside, selling the watermelons to the local ranchers. I made a whopping one dollar per watermelon! By the...