PART ONE
The Choice ā¦ the Chart ā¦ the Challenge CHAPTER 1
Making the Choice
Itās 11:45 a.m.
A coworker walks into your office or peers over your cubicle wall and says, āIām hungry.ā
āMe too. Letās go to lunch,ā you say.
āWhere do you want to go?ā
āI donāt know. Where do you want to go?ā
āWhat are you hungry for?ā
āNothing special. You decide.ā
Chances are you have had this conversation recently with a coworker or spouse. With so many restaurants, narrowing the choice to just one becomes a daunting task.
A comedian once joked, āPeople donāt go to Dennyās restaurants. They end up there.ā
They end up there precisely because they begin without a plan. They react to the hunger pang instead of anticipating it. It doesnāt occur to some people that theyāve been getting hungry every four hours of their waking lives. When they finally choose a place to eat, a long line or waiting list often confronts them. As a result, they āend upā settling for something less.
But weāre still hungry, so letās get back to the restaurantāany restaurant. Have you ever watched people order? Some people summon the harried waitperson and want her to act as arbiter.
āIf you were me, would you have the steak or the fish?ā theyāll ask, as if one or the other of these portion-controlled entrĆ©es would give them a memorable culinary experience.
āDo you like steak or fish better?ā says the waitperson, who is forced to do a customer needs analysis to get her 15 percent ācommissionā out of this sale. Taken to its logical conclusion, the wait-person could be forced to make the choice for the person. āHow is your cholesterol, sir? If itās over 200, may I strongly suggest the broiled fish?ā
Meanwhile, other customers wait impatiently for their second cup of coffee and mentally deduct a few percentage points from the tip they are planning to leave.
It happens all because it is so hard for some people to make a choiceāany choice!
Try this little experiment. Choose a restaurant for lunch a day in advance using just two criteria: 1) Choose a local favorite that is not a chain. 2) Choose a place that takes reservations. Make one choice. Then tell (donāt ask) a customer (not a coworker) that you want to take her to lunch. Say, āIāve made reservations and I want you to join me at 12:15 p.m. tomorrow afternoon for lunch at The Edgewater, if you donāt have other plans.ā
When you get to the restaurant, look at the menu for five seconds or ignore it altogether. Say, āIām going to have a cup of the baked onion soup, half a club sandwich, and an iced tea with extra lemon.ā (Order whatever you feel like having. Just do it decisively.) Prediction: Nine times out of ten your luncheon guest will order two out of the three things you ordered, just because your decisiveness is so comforting and eliminates any need to deliberate further.
Choices are hard for people because they already have too many. There are too many channels on television. There are too many sizes of detergent, too many brands of mustard, too many websites to surf. Itās hard enough to choose where you are going to have lunch. Think how much harder it is to choose what you are going to do for a living. The hardest part of all is committing to the choice youāve made with all of the career options still available. By making choices quickly and firmly, you position yourself as a decisive, take-charge person.
Making the Choice
When you were a little kid, you probably didnāt long forāor even imagineāa career in sales. Ask some local elementary school kids what they want to be when they grow up. Youāll find more future firefighters than prospective salespeople. How many children are anxiously anticipating a career of cold-calling, rejection handling, dealing with price-sensitive procurement officers, coping with delayed flights in center seats, and spending ninety nights a year sleeping in different hotel rooms all next to the same ice machine?
For some of us, it just sort of worked out that way.
You may have āended upā in sales as a second or third choice when something else didnāt work out. You may still be wondering if a career in sales is right for you.
Whether you are an engineer or shop foreman, CEO or account executive, your job increasingly requires excellent sales skills. When I told my neighbor, a prominent veterinarian, I was writing a book called The Accidental Salesperson, he said, āIāll buy a copy.ā No matter how you got into sales, this book is going to show you how to sell on purpose. It will guide you through the entire selling process and show you how to move your prospects through that process without skipping any steps.
It takes an accidental salesperson to know one. I was an accidental salesperson just like you. Sales, it seems, is the final frontier for liberal arts graduates who have learned how to learn but donāt know how to do much else.
As a 1972 graduate with a B.A. in political science, I had three ways to use my degree and maximize the investment my parents had made in my education. I could go to law school, take a job in a politicianās office, or become a journalist and cover the political scene.
Although my grades in school had always been great, my score on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) was the lowest on any standardized test I had ever taken. The score barely would have qualified me to attend an unaccredited night school. I took that as a signal that law probably wasnāt right for me.
After graduation, I landed a job as a summer intern for my congressman. There I was, two weeks out of college and working on Capitol Hill in the Cannon House Office Building. But instead of catching āPotomac Fever,ā I was appalled by the political process as it is played out in real life. The pace is agonizingly slow, and bills become laws by a series of compromises and political favors.
Having eliminated law school and a political career within six weeks of graduating, I decided to pursue that career in journalism. Reporting on the political process I so despised seemed like a good career. I would become the next Walter Cronkite.
At the end of my internship, I returned to my parentsā home and began my job search. Since Newark, Ohio, did not have a television station and I didnāt have any money to move to a big city, I figured I would start my journalism career by landing a job in the news department at the local radio station. Then, after establishing myself in the business, it would be a fairly simple thing to move to Columbus, Ohio, and be a TV reporter. That would lead to local anchor on the ten oāclock news and then to the network level.
There was only one thing standing in the way of that master plan. The general manager at the local radio station announced during my first interview that he already had two newsmen.
āChris,ā he said, āI could put you on as an advertising salesman.ā
āBut you donāt understand, Mr. Pricer,ā I said. āIām a political science major.ā
āChris, my offer still stands.ā
My inner dialogue went this way: āIāll do anything to get into broadcastingāeven sell.ā My reasoning was that once I was in the door, I could work my way into the news department.
āIāll take it,ā I said.
It took two weeks for me to disabuse myself of the notion that working my way into news was a good plan. The sales manager left every afternoon around four. The news director worked some nights until eleven, covering the city council meetings. The sales manager drove a Cadillac. The news director drove a beat-up Chevy Vega and constantly bemoaned his fate and income. He often berated the salespeople for making too much money. From an income and status standpoint, I learned quickly that you donāt āwork your way into newsā in a small-market radio station.
At that point, I made āThe Choiceā to stay in sales. I purchased books on the subject. I attended fantastic seminars and devoured audiocassettes and later CDs on success and selling. I studied selling as hard as Iād studied political science, and it paid off. That choice led to a successful sales career, a promotion to sales management, and radio station ownership in my mid-twenties. In 1983, I founded a company to train radio advertising salespeople. With the publication of The Accidental Salesperson in 2000, CEOs, VPs of sales, and owners of family businesses started calling me. All of a sudden, I was doing sales training for start-ups, software companies, manufacturers, and Fortune 500 companies.
Nearly forty years after strolling into that radio station to get a news job, I have conducted more than 2,100 live seminars and keynote speeches; developed dozens of correspondence/distance-learning courses; and created an online-coached and time-released training program based on many of the principles in this book.
Today, I am in what my wife, Sarah, calls āspeaker semiretirement.ā I work with a few select clients. I am more likely to do thirteen presentations a year rather than the thirteen a month I used to do. But every Monday morning, I turn out a new Knowledge Bite, a digestible three- to seven-minute MP3 file that I upload to my Fuel website, and salespeople worldwide download it. You can get a sample at www.sparquefuel.com.
I was always frustrated with the start-and-stop nature of training programs. Business stopped for a day or two, everyone came to a hotel ballroom and āgot trained,ā and then they went back to work. Some people implemented the training. Others didnāt. But Iāve found that time-releasing training in small bites gains more traction. The idea of continual improvement was a hit in the manufacturing sector, thanks to W. Edwards Deming and others. Today, you can have continual salesperson improvement.
Making āThe Choiceā to stay in sales and become good at it worked well for me. Choosing to read this book and commit to improving yourself and, therefore, your sales will, I suspect, work just as well for you.
But you know what? Even if I had ended up in law school, I still would be in sales. In a law firm, a ārainmakerā is the attorney who brings clients into the firm. An attorney who can sell is also called a partner.
One day, when I was skiing with a friend who is a dentist, I asked him, āWhat is the biggest issue in dentistry today?ā
āSales,ā he replied. āYouāve got to close people on having their wisdom teeth out. You have to handle objections. You have to persuade and convince them to put up with pain, expense, and time away from work. They donāt teach you sales at dental school, but they should.ā
He made the choice to become a dentist and ended up an accidental salesperson.
So you see, you are not alone. A lot of accidental salespeople have learned to sell on purpose. But first, they have had to make āThe Choice.ā
You do, too.
You make The Choice when you consciously commit to your career in selling. In doing so, you gain a sense of purpose. Being able to say, āThis is what I do,ā and say it with pride and certainty, sets in motion undreamed-of opportunities for success. Choosing to focus on becoming an excellent salesperson is liberating precisely because it eliminates other options you are free to pursue, sometimes to your detriment.
You can experience much the same feeling of liberation tonight by choosing to turn off the TV instead of flipping through channels to find something worth devoting your time to. Or, if you must watch TV, focus on one show to the exclusion of all the others, and take comfort in knowing that youāve made the right choice and donāt need to zip through the channels so you wonāt miss anything.
By not focusing, you miss everything.
Thatās The Choice.
Making the Commitment
Is sales right for you? āHey, I was looking for a job when I found this oneā is the mantra of millions of uncommitted workers today. When you make The Choice consciously and commit to your sales career, you gain a new sense of purpose. Adding that focus makes what you do more relevant.
Developing an obsession with doing things better is vital to success. Until you choose to do it better, no book, audio program, webinar, seminar, or personal growth guru can help youāno matter what your career.
Getting into sales accidentally makes it difficult, but certainly not impossible, to sell on purpose. Therefore, a crucial but simplistic step is to make some purposeful commitments:
ā¢ Make a commitment to yourself to succeed.
ā¢ Make a commitment to the company you represent.
ā¢ Make a commitment to your product or service.
ā¢ Make a commitment to your customers.
ā¢ Make a commitment to ādo it better.ā
Bringing Good Ideas to the Table
An axiom is a self-evident truth. It requires no proof because it is so obvious. If you buy the axiom below, you are on your way to a fulfilling and rewarding sales career.
A corollary is something that naturally flows from the axiom and therefore incidentally or naturally accompanies or parallels it. Imagine that the corollary starts with the phrase, āIt follows that ā¦ā
Accidental Salesperson Axiom:
Your clients get better when you get better.
Corollary:
Your clients are praying for you to get better. They want to work at the highest levels with the best salespeople in the business.
You can master all of the sales skills and have abundant product knowledge and industry experience, but you will sell even better when you have good ideas to bring to the table. Ideas that make your clientās business better make you a better salesperson. Let me explain.
One night after dinner, my friend Tom and I were reminiscing about our sales careers. Tom started his career as a wine sa...