Selling is So Easy It's Hard

77 Ways Salespeople Shoot Themselves in the Wallet

Dr. Gary S. Goodman

• Publisher: G&D Media
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781722501945
• eBook ISBN: 9781722522933
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Sales

Most sales training programs offer the same old pointers: Always be closing, keep it simple, stupid, and ask for referrals. You know these clichés. Selling Is So Easy, It's Hard is the first program to focus on the 77 correctable selling mistakes that novices and veterans make. Without conscious awareness, these errors, snafus, miscues, and blunders keep the typical seller from earning at least 25% more business. This translates into millions of dollars in lost income over the course of a career, according to best- selling author and speaker Dr. Gary S. Goodman.

77 Tips to Keep from Shooting Yourself in the Wallet

Tip 1: Find the Right Sales Opportunities for You!

Many salespeople fail to reach their potential because they’ve taken on an inappropriate sales job. It’s a bad fit for them.

You won’t find this point in any of the sales books I’ve read or written. Nobody talks about it, but it is exceedingly important.

My first sales job was at age ten. I delivered newspapers. Of course, it wasn’t a good sales job. It was pretty much all you could get if you were ten. Still, it was a bad fit because I didn’t see it as selling. I believed it was about delivery, about balancing papers on my handlebars and getting them delivered without plunking them into puddles.

The real money was in tips. If you could figure out a way to get a nice tip, especially around Christmas, you could be in clover.

Some of my friends did it. They would sweet-talk their customers whenever they saw them. In some cases, they asked where the best place was to put the paper, on the porch or in the mailbox. “Would you like me to ring your bell to let you know it’s here?” they would inquire sweetly. All of these touches led to big tips.

I would not do any of it.

You could say customer service wasn’t my strong suit. It is ironic that this would become one of my career interests. (Read all about it at my website: www.customersatisfaction.com.)

Back to newspaper delivery: if my customers didn’t complain, and I got home before dark, I was just fine.

A much better fit was selling papers on busy street corners, when the products were literally hot off the presses. That’s when you made tips from the big spenders looking for how their stocks performed at the close of the market. I could also choose my clients by walking up to them or by striding into their office buildings.

There were definite ways I could leverage my time and my effectiveness—a key to winning in any sales work.

Tip 2: Choose the Best Sales Medium for You

My first real sales job was at Time-Life Books, when I was nineteen. It played to several of my strengths and interests. I was working my way through college, so the hours were great. In fact, I heard about the job at the school’s employment board.

It was also a phone job. I’ve always had a mature voice, but for my first few decades I also had a baby face. The latter didn’t help me to interact with older buyers, but my voice enabled me to relate well to everyone.

Choosing your selling medium is critical. Later, I would sell in person and on the phone. I’d take airplanes to visit clients when necessary. But my first love was and still is the phone.

Where are you at your best: in front of people or at a distance?

I ran a telephone sales seminar in Chicago in which a fellow strode to the podium to share a secret with me. He said he was a great seller outdoors, at people’s offices. But whenever his sales manager planned a phone blast, where field salespeople were brought together in a bullpen to contact prospects, he broke into a cold sweat.

He suffered from phone fear. It’s like stage fright, if you have to act, or speech anxiety, if you’re delivering a talk to a group. It is a special form of situational shyness, and in extreme cases, it can feel so threatening that you become deskilled. Your mouth fills with cotton, and you fail to summon the right words.

If you know this about yourself, it makes sense to avoid a sales job that requires heavy phone work.

But isn’t that admitting a weakness? Yes it is, but this is a lot better than gritting your teeth and suffering.

Play to your strengths. If you’re great in front of people, maybe you should hire a sales assistant to place your calls and to set your appointments. This will be a person who loves phoning, right?

Tip 3: Be Sure Your Pay Plan Makes Sense to You and Feels Right

I know a salesman who tried to sell precious metals—gold, silver, and platinum—from a breathtakingly beautiful office facing the superblue Pacific Ocean. This place was so gorgeous that he didn’t want to leave, even to have lunch. There was a terrace with director’s chairs and a table so employees could bask in the California sun.

The problem was there was no money to be made. The market for metals was dead. Worse, the stock market was soaring, giving prospects for metals real returns that made headlines every day.

On a straight commission pay plan, my friend had to eat, and this meant making sales. But the only leads available were old and weak, not worth pursuing. No one bought.

He couldn’t believe that he made zero sales, and it took him ten weeks without pay to admit that he had chosen the wrong sales job. Making matters worse, the straight commission pay plan drove him nuts. He was one of those people that need a guaranteed salary. It can be a salary plus commissions, or a draw against commissions, but there needs to be definite money that will go toward paying the bills.

Are you this way? How much security do you need? How much income risk are you willing to bear?

I mentioned someone that failed under a straight commission compensation plan. But there must be others that succeed, correct?

One of my financial-industry clients in Houston sold government bond funds to major banks, universities, and other institutional investors. All of its salespeople were on a straight commission pay plan.

Within a month or two, the great majority of them brought in their first orders. They had been cold-calling and sending out brochures and prospectuses, so their pipelines were filling with prospects.

Accepted wisdom holds that if you fill your pipeline and keep making calls and presentations, you will earn your share of sales. Then you might experience a gusher, like an oil well that bursts into being and keeps pumping commissions into your pockets.

But one fellow had been diligently feeding the pipe for ten months, and not even a drop trickled out the other end. He earned no sales—nada. Where others had sales numbers to post at the front of the room, he was the not-so-proud owner of a big goose egg.

How would you feel if you labored for ten months and hadn’t earned a penny? You would have left the scene long before that, right? That would have been logical and rational, don’t you agree?

He stayed.

One day, when I was there, doing some training of new recruits, the spell was broken.

He earned his first sale. It was a major Japanese bank that awarded this gentleman with his first deal and his first commission.

How much did he make?

He made $1 million. Let me repeat that. He made 1 million bucks on his first sale!

This story is of course about patience and perseverance. It is about believing in yourself and in your product. It is about 1001 things. But the main insight I want you to have is to ask, how much are you like this fellow? Could you hold out for ten months until earning your first dollar in that company? Would your family and friends let you do it? Do you have the funds to stay afloat in case your ship is very late in arriving?

I’ve had my own consulting and training business for decades. I am paid on a straight commission basis as well. It is a feast or famine situation. I can handle it if I am a prudent planner and otherwise financially responsible.

Are you? Most people are not. They live from paycheck to paycheck. They would like to see fatter paychecks, but they must see steady ones. That’s how they’re wired psychologically. They would settle for a much lower income, providing it is steady and it feels safe.

The great behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner said that when it comes to rewards, “the schedule of the reward is more important than the amount” in determining our performances.

You may like the “juice,” as some call it—the thrill of not knowing what your pay will be during a given interval. This is the same juice that gamblers find so appealing, and it is the juice that creates addictions.

Be honest with yourself. How are you wired? If you were on a straight commission pay plan would this be OK, would it excite you, or would it eat at you, riddling you with uncertainty and anxiety?

Sales compensation is often negotiable. You can negotiate how much you are paid. You can also negotiate when you’re paid—daily, weekly, or monthly. You can also negotiate the proportion of fixed versus variable pay, the parts that are guaranteed and the parts that are based on sales outcomes.

Some of the wisest companies give sellers a choice. You can get a set salary, nicely and predictably, although your commissions will not be as generous as they would be if you elected a straight commission formula. But it is your call.

Every so often, you can even have a chance to jump from one plan to the next. Say you are just starting, and you don’t know how much you’ll earn. You could select the salary plus commission. After several pay cycles, you might make the leap to a straight commission, because you will have experienced success the other way.

Whatever you do, don’t work under a pay plan that is demotivating.

Tip 4: Script Your Success

I mentioned that selling is easy, and it can be, if you have a proven plan for getting prospects to say yes. If you don’t have a repeatable routine, then you’re definitely going to shoot yourself in the wallet.

You need to script your success, because scripts work. If you’re using one and it doesn’t get more sales than improvisation accomplishes, then it is a poor script and you should improve it.

Make changes until it is a money machine.

One of the best reasons to follow a script is that it is usually the shortest path to a sale. There are countless ways to NOT earn an order, but a script delivers one that consistently achieves positive outcomes. It eliminates a lot of fluff from your conversation, reducing the chance that you’ll inadvertently blurt out something stupid that will kill a sale.

Known as the KISS method, a script requires you to Keep It Simple, Salesperson.

I consulted for a company that brought aboard a half-dozen salespeople who were all allowed to say what they wanted and to make up their sales talks on the fly. In every case, they failed. Each one overtalked, making what should have been a brief and pleasant walk in the park into a painful slog through the brambles.

I came in and streamlined the process. I tested my call paths and made sales quickly. In fact, my first deal landed the most profitable client in the firm’s history.

Why guess when you can know?

The shortest route is a direct line between two points, correct? Why would anyone want to take detours, most of which lead to dead ends?

If they’re self-defeating salespeople, that’s the best way to get their secret wish, which is failure and frustration.

Salespeople fight scripts by coming up with a lot of bogus objections to using them. They say:

Scripts sound phony!

A script will make me sound robotic.

If you feel this way, I have news for you. You are probably using a script now without realizing it.

Certain words and phrases are being repeated from presentation to presentation. But they haven’t been tested and proven objectively to work for you instead of against you.

For example, by overtalking, one of the reps at the company I just mentioned would repeatedly produce interruptions and objections. Then he would ask: “What are your specific concerns about developing a relationship with us?”

He evoked a general objection to continuing the conversation, and then he asked people to offer even more specific reasons for resisting the offer and him. He would repeat this self-defeating process call after call. It was a script, but it was a prescription for failure.

If you don’t have a winning script, observe someone who is selling what you’re selling and doing a great job of it, earning tons of dough. Write down what you’re hearing, and then refine it. If you don’t have a great role model on the scene, hire a coach or consultant.

Tip 5: Avoid Secondary-Gain Traps

Our job as salespeople is to earn as much money as we can, for ourselves and for our companies. This is our primary gain, our chief objective. Anything that we do on the job that feels rewarding but doesn’t contribute directly to making said profits is a secondary gain.

For instance, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 77 Tips
• Epilogue