How Not to Sell

A Sales Survival Guide

Rashad Daoudi

• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781640084698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

"How Not to Sell offers every level of salesperson useful tips and strategies to make mediocre salespersons more effective and superior salespersons really effective.A must read." ~Michael Farmer CEO, Innova-Learning

Throughout my career I’ve read many books about sales, and I often find myself thinking about the differences between what authors write and reality as I know it. I have yet to come across anything that provides a realistic characterization of the field. No sales person is admitting what they did wrong and certainly none are writing about how a majority of the time success has as much to do with luck and circumstances than art and skill. No one is writing about reality, until this book. If you have ever posted something to social media about your sales job like #winning or #hustle, this book will surprise you. Because for me, being in sales has never been about waking up, grabbing a protein bar and energy drink, and following one of the so-called sales guru’s 15 steps. To me sales is about survival. In some jobs it’s been week to week, in others year to year, but nevertheless, survival. Rashad Daoudi has lived the game and understands the grind that sales is. His book reflects this and his ability to separate fiction from reality. ~Todd Svec Vice President, K-12 Solutions

Chapter 1: Get Experience

The only source of knowledge

is experience.

-Albert Einstein

When starting a sales career, or any career, it’s essential to get your first job to gain experience. It might not be the best job but you need it to eventually get a better one. More importantly, that first sales job will help you determine whether you are good at sales and if you like it. You might not realize either thing right away but as you progress you’ll naturally think and feel if it’s a career path you want to continue. The challenge with sales, like most new endeavors, is that you will run into resistance early. You will be rejected and often feel lowly. You might also do things you don’t feel are ethical, as I talk about in Chapter 12. But you could make sales, feel great from the praise you get from others, and be accepted as a part of a community. The important part is to stick with it for long enough to where you can honestly say whether it is right for you.

The start of it all

I had the makings of a salesman as far back as senior year of high school when I sold credit cards for MBNA Bank. I’ll never forget going into their office at 17 and selling a product I wasn’t old enough to have. The goal was to get one person an hour to sign up for the card I was selling that day. I had a 1.5 card per hour average, which was better than many others that had been doing the job for much longer than me. Not only was I successful, but I also had a lot of fun. My earliest memory of the hilarity of sales was the day I was selling the NFL credit card, which had a logo of whatever team a person wanted and got them extra benefits to use towards team merchandise and tickets. I was given a script that had a blurb to say about each team as I called into their respective city. When I got to the San Diego Chargers, I read “pretty uniforms,” and burst out laughing thinking about calling some drunken guy in San Diego and saying, “How about those Chargers and their pretty uniforms!”

I also had my first taste of failure in sales at MBNA. I called a guy in Texas who said he was very interested in a card. As we went through the application his enthusiasm for it kept growing – to the point where he was celebrating. When we got to the annual income section he yelled out “$250,000!” I was so excited that I was going to get him to sign up. Little did I know he was pulling my leg and at the end of the call, right before he was to agree to the terms and conditions, he hung up the phone. I felt stupid but learned not to tie my personal worth to whether I made a sale (a lesson I wish I followed more later in my career).

The experience working at MBNA gave me my first cases of closing a sale, losing a sale, and everything in between. It was just a pretense of what was to come.

How to get there

The job with MBNA was an important step for me in becoming a salesman. In addition to letting me know that I liked sales and was good at it, it also helped build my resume to get my next job. My sales career started before it even began, even though I didn’t know it at the time. It’s important for you to do this too. Building up a resume and list of experiences will be what will lead to the next step. It doesn’t even have to be a job. Whether you are still in college or looking for a job at 40, it’s important to immerse yourself in different activities. Not only will you be doing what you love, but it will also open you up to new opportunities. You’ve got to put yourself into things you enjoy to lead to what you eventually want. But it also takes some luck.

As I’ll explain in the next chapter, success in sales has a lot to do with luck and circumstance. I believe this because I’ve experienced it and seen it with others my entire life. My first taste of it was at the end of my junior year of college. I had no idea what I was going to do that summer. I had changed my major to Communication Systems Management (CSM) and was considering switching back to Political Science when just a week before summer break, WorldCom, then one of the largest telecommunication companies in the country, called me to do an internship in Dallas, TX. While I was there I was getting paid $18 an hour and the internship solidified my resume to get a job after I graduated.

How did I get that internship? The manager in charge of selecting the intern was an Arab Muslim. I’m sure from my name he mistakenly assumed I was too and picked me from a stack of resumes because of that. I was an average, first year CSM student who had no contact with WorldCom before learning I was chosen. There was not much that made me stand out or worth being chosen over others aside from Anwar’s preference to help a fellow “Muslim.” I can’t say this is bad since people usually want to take care of those they identify with, but it shows how luck and circumstance had as much to do with me getting it as my resume.

Upon graduating, working at WorldCom was not an option since the company went bankrupt shortly after my internship and the telecommunication industry went down with it. With few options, I went to Chicago to interview for different sales jobs. I didn’t know what I wanted to sell but I knew I wanted to live in Chicago. I was open to selling anything since I liked sales and could make good money doing it. And whatever I was selling, what I really wanted was more experience. Several opportunities didn’t work out but I remained optimistic. Towards the end of my stay in the Windy City, I visited and accepted a sales job with Thermal-Chem, a small, privately owned business in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park. Little did I know where that job would lead.

Get that first job

Thermal-Chem manufactures epoxy coatings used to repair and resurface concrete floors. It wasn’t the most glamorous job. My salary was $2,000 a month plus minimal commissions and I spent two hours in traffic every day. I was selling to blue-collar businesses and contractors in the Chicagoland area. Two of those contractors, Louie and Ray, might have been part of the mafia or at least acted like it. It was a dirty job, literally, that often had my hands in glue-like substances and my nose inhaling chemicals. But I liked the job and continued to enjoy the dynamic nature of sales. I also gained a lot of experience that taught me how to sell and kept me in the profession. Many of the valuable lessons I learned I didn’t always follow later in my career, including the following:

Learn to walk away

Later in the book I write more about how walking away from certain opportunities is something salespeople need the strength to do. It’s equivalent to poker where the best players can fold a hand they could win because the reward is not worth the risk. An early example of this came from calling on Sauk Machine Works, a contract machining company in Wheeling, IL, which has since been purchased by another company. The owner Michael needed to coat the floors of his brand new 20,000 square foot warehouse to protect it against wear and tear but he didn’t want to pay full price to do it. I brought in a contractor who felt $2 per square foot, or $40,000, was a fair price, which it was. But not to Michael. He wanted $.50 per foot and after much back and forth we settled on $.85. The job turned out to be a disaster. Because the contractor had to use less material to make a profit, the floor ended up uneven and discolored. Michael was furious and demanded we come back to finish the job properly. The contractor did and we ended up losing money on the project.

I wish I could go back to this deal more than any other in my career, just to walk away. I would tell Michael to his face how shortsighted he was being. He just invested in a warehouse that was going to be the center of his operations for decades yet he wasn’t willing to put in a little extra cash to properly protect it. But instead of standing up to him by saying what he needed to hear and creating some tension (something important to do as I’ll explain in Chapter 6) I curled my tail between my legs and gave him what he wanted. I was excited to get a sale and scared to confront him. But I knew what he was paying was not fair, and I learned that cutting corners is not good in sales even if it does make you a commission.

See the job through

I write more in Chapter 9 about working deals beyond the point when the sale is made. I first learned this at Thermal-Chem. I landed a deal with G&K Services, a laundromat with several locations across Chicago. We were tasked with coating the floors of one location to reduce the amount of dust. We inked the deal but I stopped doing anything after that. On the day the contractor was doing the work, I was sitting in my apartment hanging out with friends. I got a call from the customer who came to see the work and he was yelling about how the yellow lining that directed people where to go was misapplied. I was completely reactive to the situation and had to call the contractor and drive out to the location to see what they had done. The problem was not resolved quickly and the customer was so disappointed that I did not get the business at any of the other locations.

This is a basic lesson that when you make a sale the work is not done until you’ve seen the project all the way through. I should have known what the customer wanted and been on location to meet the contractor to ensure everything was done correctly. I should have been there to meet the customer after to walk through everything to ensure he was happy. If a mistake was still made at least I am there to smooth things over and to try and fix it quickly. This was my success on the line and I didn’t do the required work beyond closing the sale.

Don’t give a price

Chapter 7 covers not being so quick to give a price. It’s better to find out the customer’s budget and establish value for your product before you throw out a cost. This was a mistake I committed many times in my career that I should have learned once at Thermal-Chem and rarely done again. My manager had given me a sweet lead that should’ve been an easy close. In talking to the customer, he asked me what the cost would be for the project. Since I hadn’t seen the work I didn’t have enough information to give an accurate cost but he pressed me so I went ahead and told him what to expect. When my manager found out he was incredulous that I gave a price before seeing the job. Sure enough when we went to see the work it was going to cost more than the high end I estimated. But the customer worked to hold us at our price before we negotiated somewhere in the middle. We got the deal but had I waited to see the project I could have started at the higher, correct price and held there.

Take a risk

Thermal-Chem also taught me about taking risks, which salespeople will do, for example, in taking a new job, as I’ll talk about in Chapter 10. A year into Thermal-Chem I was making decent commissions but not as much as I could have because it was Thermal-Chem who paid me and not the contractors. The contractors paying me was forbidden by Thermal-Chem since they were worried it would make me partial to specific ones and cause bidding wars. I knew I could make more money if the contractors paid me so I approached my boss and told him I wanted to forgo my base salary and negotiate a deal to collect commissions from both Thermal-Chem and the contractor. He agreed.

This was a risky move since I’d no longer have any guaranteed money. Looking back, I can’t believe I gave up a base salary. But it did allow me to work from home and not need to spend time and money commuting to an office. The results were initially disastrous because I decided to do this in January, which was the slowest time of the year because of the cold weather. It was a good idea with poor execution. I spent the next three months with little income. Thankfully, the move finally paid off once it got warm.

Every salesperson needs their Thermal-Chem. They need that company where they are going to grind out sales and learn what the game is really like. No one in any profession starts at the top and sales is no different. This is just some of what I learned in my first job out of college. The experience I gained at Thermal-Chem was invaluable to starting my sales career. Not only for the lessons I learned and the situations I was exposed to, but to add to my resume to get my next job; one that launched my career to the next level.

The big time

Without the experience of Thermal-Chem I would not have gone on to get a job at Pearson Education. Pearson is the world’s largest publisher of educational materials and jobs with them are not easy to get. It was a stroke of luck that I even got an interview. I had no idea textbook publishers existed let alone that they had jobs for 24 year olds to travel to college campuses and sell books to professors to use in their classes. A close friend got a job with Pearson in another city through Craigslist of all places and lucky for me I got a referral from him. I still had to do the work to get the job and I prepared as thoroughly as possible for the interview. At this point I had $200 in my bank account and I was desperate to get the job.

My bank account went to $50 after I purchased a $100 suit and $50 shoes from Aldo to wear for the interview. It went well but I was informed the next day that I would not be getting the job. I went to return the shoes that now had huge creases in the front. The store refused to take them back so I emailed the corporate office to complain, and, fortunately, they took the shoes back. That’s how low things got for me but at least my bank account was back to $100.

As further luck would have it, Pearson called me a few days later and told me they liked me and now had two jobs they could offer. One was for a territory with the inside sales team, which would allow me to stay in Chicago. The other was for an outside territory that would require me to move to Northwest Ohio, two hours from where I grew up but a very rural area. It was a tough decision since I didn’t want to leave Chicago but I chose the outside territory because it offered a car, higher salary, the ability to work outside of an office, and I figured, like working at Thermal-Chem, it would lead to something bigger. Also, although I didn’t know it at the time, that option had way more upside than the inside job. It was one of the best career decisions I’ve ever made, as I’ll explain in the next chapter.

Diversify yourself

Throughout this book, a lot of the examples come from the education industry, which is where I spent most of my career. It’s common...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Get Experience
• Chapter 2: Get a Good Territory (and Some Luck)
• Chapter 3: Get a Decent Manager
• Chapter 4: Prospecting
• Chapter 5: Working Decision Makers
• Chapter 6: Don't Rush to Demo
• Chapter 7: Price, Value, & Budget
• Chapter 8: Don't Email the Proposal
• Chapter 9: A Sale is Never Complete
• Chapter 10: Plan to Change Jobs
• Chapter 11: Relationships
• Chapter 12: Ethics
• Afterword: Find a Life to Love
• About Atmosphere Press
• About Rashad Daoudi