The Four Pillars of Sales

Honesty, Integrity, Knowledge, and Genuine Interest

Savage Gerry

• Publisher: Gerald E. Savage
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781646490295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

There are countless books about sales and success, but none except The Four Pillars of Sales takes you on a real life journey that gives you the tools necessary to reach the success you desire.

Learn to quickly adapt your own personality style to that of your customer and find yourself reaching career heights you never dreamed possible.

“The Four Pillars... should be in every professional’s library.” —ROBERT LEOPOLD, Regional Sales Director, 3T Medical Systems

“The blueprint for building a successful career… and lasting personal partnerships.” —STEVE deBREE, President, Performance Possibilities Group Inc.

Part One

Getting Ready

Chapter 1

The Four Pillars

“Live, love, laugh, learn, and leave a legacy.”

~Stephen Covey

The foundation of this book is built around what I like to call the “Four Pillars of Sales.” If you are standing on a firm foundation ready to build your sales career, or even remodel it, renovations can be a good thing. But what’s holding up the roof?

The inspiration for the Four Pillars came from the awe-inspiring Parthenon in Greece. Built almost 2,500 years ago as a temple to the Goddess Athena, it has stood the test of time and is the most visited archeological site in the world.

Metaphors are everywhere in life and I’m sure you have heard that “your body is your temple,” and “you are what you eat.” I believe this all to be true, and the more good things you put into your body, the more good things will come out. If you eat right and exercise, your body will become fitter, you will feel better about yourself, you will have more energy, and as a result you will do more. When you do more, you feel more accomplished. The benefits go on and on.

We all need to take care of the foundation—your body and your mind—because everything you do, achieve, accomplish, and learn is housed inside. What’s holding up the roof makes all the difference.

The Four Pillars of Sales are honesty, integrity, knowledge, and genuine interest, and these will not only hold up your roof, but will protect your firm foundation and allow you to fill your house with everything you need to enrich your sales career—as well as your life—and cement your legacy for generations to come.

The pillar of honesty is something people will see in you as a result of your actions on a regular basis. Everything we do is noted by those with whom we interact. Honesty means telling the truth, but it also means doing what you say you will do. The actions have to follow the words.

Years ago when I was in automobile sales, my general manager told me something that has continued to resonate. “The mark of you is what you do... not what you say you will do.” Lip service will never get you anywhere and it will catch up with you sooner than you think.

We all get pressed for deadlines and—even with good intentions—we over-commit and under-deliver. Being honest starts with being honest with yourself. It means accepting responsibility for your actions and not placing blame on others. We can all come up with a story about why we failed at something or why something didn’t go our way, but deep down we know whether we gave it our all, doing the best we could possibly do. We have no control over outside circumstances. The only thing we can control is how we respond... and that starts with being honest with ourselves.

The second pillar of integrity is often referred to as “doing the right thing when no one is looking,” but it’s much more than that. Integrity is a bold word and when you see someone that you know has a lot of integrity, how do you feel about them?

For me, I feel like I can count on this kind of person. If they have high integrity, I am more likely to trust them. I know they will do the right thing when no one else is looking, and I know they will do what’s in the best interest of everyone involved. This goes for every person they come into contact with... at work, home, in a volunteer group, or anywhere there is a responsibility, whether it be completing an action or representing the best interest of others.

Someone of high integrity also automatically treats others the way they would want to be treated. There is no in-between. They believe everyone has something to offer. One person is just as important as the next. A friend of mine and former colleague at Zimmer Orthopedics epitomizes this. He is someone who listens intently to understand, has always been there for sound advice, and has never said a cross word about anyone. You can already begin to see why someone of high integrity is well thought of and looked up to by others, especially this individual.

The third pillar of knowledge is critical. You have heard before that “knowledge is power.” You can have all the other pillars intact but without knowledge, your house will not be fully supported.

There are more ways to increase knowledge today than ever before. Just thirty years ago I accomplished this by listening to cassette tapes in my car. We didn’t have such things as podcasts, or the internet. We didn’t have Kindles, and you couldn’t Google a quick fact about anything in a millisecond. You actually had to read it somewhere, and probably look it up.

Times sure have changed. Now we have even less room for excuses than ever before. It is almost easy to increase our knowledge on a daily basis. Truly amazing, there is so much right there at our fingertips. All we have to do is reach out and touch it.

The more you learn each day, the more you will be able to use this knowledge. You will be surprised how much of what you consider random facts can come up in everyday conversation, as well as in sales calls. Used respectfully in any conversation, such knowledge in a particular area can set you apart, and in a sales situation, it will give you an edge above all the competition.

If you continue to increase your knowledge of the world and your industry on a daily basis, I can almost guarantee it will make a difference in how others perceive you.

The fourth pillar of genuine interest is the one that will connect you with more people than you ever dreamed, and the more you connect, the more you will learn. It will perpetually increase your interest in people, expanding your horizons and areas of interest tenfold.

When people sense you are genuinely interested in them, they will become more likely to embrace you and your thoughts and ideas in return. It’s reciprocal. People will not only sense that you have genuine interest in them, but they will sense that you are genuine as well.

Everyone has something to offer and taking the time to be genuinely interested in a person will open the door to relationships you never imagined.

What is SALES?

Did you ever stop to wonder... just what is sales?

Is it someone agreeing to buy something? Is it exchanging one thing of value for something else of value? Is this transaction getting the customer something they need, or merely fulfilling what another person wants?

The definition of sales gets pretty convoluted, but it also means helping a customer realize there are products or services available that can make their job easier. Sales then becomes the process of helping a customer decide how to fulfill this need they have with a particular product or service.

But that product or service has a potential value as well as a perceived value based on the buyer’s need, the seller’s product availability, and market pressure driven by similar products/services (the competition).

When I was a kid back in the early 1970s, my dad sold orthopedic soft goods as part of his product portfolio. These included things like slings for fractured arms, knee immobilizers to keep a patient’s leg straight after surgery, and cervical collars for neck injuries. He would try these things on me to make sure he knew how to demonstrate them to the nurses and staff at his hospital accounts. It was pretty comical at times standing there with a cervical collar on my neck, a sling on my arm, and a knee immobilizer wrapped around my leg.

Back then these soft goods were worth the time to demonstrate and sell because they were high-volume items—and commissions were good. Fast-forward just ten years later and the market for these types of products drastically changed. How? Soft goods became a commodity. Price became dictated by what the market would bear—driven down by standardized mass-market products, and many companies who produced the same thing.

Eventually if a salesman was able to get a soft goods contract at a hospital, it was for nearly the entire line of soft goods... but at a low price. These soft goods became a loss leader for a company, and so the salesman earned very low commission rates. Demon­strating or detailing these products has since become a thing of the past.

Many experienced salesmen will tell you that sales has always been a relationship business, and this holds true over time. Even in today’s price-sensitive world, relationships are the key to gaining new business, sustaining current business, and protecting future business.

Other factors in many industries have inched their way into the sales environment. In the medical device world, value analysis committees at the hospital level, as well as group purchasing organizations that partner with several hospitals to leverage price, now play a major role in determining what pr...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• PART ONE
• Chapter 1: The Four Pillars
• Chapter 2: It All Starts with a Dream
• Chapter 3: Ready to Take Action
• Chapter 4: Beliefs
• Chapter 5: Preparation
• Chapter 6: The Power of Purpose
• PART TWO
• Chapter 7: Understanding Personality Styles