1minSales

The One-minute Sales Person Page 7 | Introduction The One Minute Sales Person presents you with a ‘new school’ of selling attitudes and skills that you can use more successfully in today’s marketplace.  It is based on concisely distilled experience, insight and advice from some of the most successful sales people — as well as from the top management of marketing and sales departments from more than one hundred major companies in practically every industry.  This book also includes the wisdom gained by The Wilson Learning Corporation of Minneapolis, USA, a company that has, for the past twenty years, trained more than 300,000 sales people, and has, for the last ten years, collected data on how customers like to buy. This current ‘customer view’ is central to the book’s perspective.  The One Minute Sales Person follows the success of the international best seller The One Minute Manager. We encourage you to read that book as well so you fully benefit from the third part of this book. ‘Selling to Me’: a self-management method for sales people.  We hope you will use what you learn from The One Minute Sales Person, in addition to what you already know about selling, and that you too will soon make more sales with less stress.

Page 9 The Search Once there was a very successful sales person.  He felt more than successful. He felt prosperous!  He enjoyed peace of mind, financial independence, security, good health and an enjoyable social life. He had the respect and admiration of all who knew him.  Many people wanted to do business with him. And even more people wanted him as a friend. However, he hadn’t always been so successful.  He could remember the many years when he tried harder but did no better than most people.  Now he was glad that he knew what he knew. And, more important, that he put it to use. The man smiled as he thought about how easily he had finally learned to prosper. 

p10 The Search  He realised early in life that almost everyone who succeeded was really an effective sales person, whether he or she realised it or not.  ‘Successful business people,’ he observed, ‘sell others on the value of their services. Successful parents sell their children on leading happy and. productive lives. Successful leaders sell their abilities to bring people what they want. Even successful scientists sell their ideas to those who provide the research funds which enable them to do their work.’ .  The man remembered thinking when he was still at university, “Perhaps if I can learn to sell well, then I will do well in whatever I undertake.’

The Search | p11  And so the man had tried his hand at different sales jobs while he was still at university.  The few times he succeeded, it was exhilarating. He thought, ‘It’s like they’re buying me!’ However, when he tried to sell but failed, he felt rejected. He told himself, ‘I’m just not cut out to sell.’  After he graduated with a degree in marketing, he realised he had learned very little about sales. Marketing, he learned, was about doing research to learn what people wanted, creating the products and services that people wanted, pricing them competitively, and then making it easy for people to buy.  But marketing and sales sometimes seemed at odds. In his first real sales job for a major firm, he learned about the importance of product knowledge and about how to ‘pitch it to the prospects’ — to get appointments, to answer objections and to complete a sale. But the more he was involved in sales, the more he got the impression that the underlying presumption was that the customer did not want to buy the product. It was as though a sales person’s job was to be clever enough and tough enough to get people to do what they didn’t really want to do — to buy. And the best sales people, it seemed, found a way to do it. | It didn’t make sense to him.

12 | The Search For a while he enjoyed the challenge. The tougher it got, the more he called on his self-discipline and persistence. He forced himself, for instance, to go out and make one more call each day than he really wanted to. It added up: he made over two hundred more sales calls each year. And it had paid off. He made more sales than most. And more money.  So he decided to add another one hundred calls a year. But a strange thing happened. His sales did not increase much. And he wasn’t having fun. He pushed himself even harder. And then he began to feel the stress. It came from many sources. He had to make so many sales each month — his quota. And it was easy to measure his performance. At times, he wished that he had a job like other people where it wasn’t so easy to tell how well or how poorly he was doing. Often he wasn’t treated well by the people he called on. Many acted as if he were out to get them.  He felt there was too much to do and too little time to do it in. Sometimes he felt unprepared.   He had great expectations for his increasing income, but he had doubts sometimes about making it. Ironically, he knew that if his sales manager didn’t put the pressure on him, he would put it on himself. 

The Search | 13  Selling was going to become more enjoyable soon, but the man did not know it yet. Like other sales people, the man often felt the quiet fear of rejection. Some people would inevitably turn him down. He did not look forward to such times.  To make matters worse, as much as he wanted to deny it, he saw how increasingly complicated the selling process seemed to be in today’s changing world. He had been repeating the same words that had given him his sales for years. Why weren’t they working now?  Then he remembered an unusual story.  From time to time, he had heard the name of a legendary salesman — one who made more sales than anyone else and yet apparently had more leisure time than most people to enjoy his extraordinary success.  Someone said he was called The One Minute Salesman — although the man did not know why. The man thought there must be a better way — a way to restore the sense of fun and success in selling he occasionally had. So he decided to be bold enough to find out for himself. He decided to ask. 

14 / The One Minute Sales Person  The voice at the other end of the telephone took him by surprise. The wealthy and respected ‘salesman’ he’d expected turned out to be the chairman of the board of a large company. ‘I would be very happy to meet you,’ said the chairman, ‘and from the tone of your voice I think I know just what you’d like to talk about.’ The caller felt a little naked. ‘Do I sound that desperate?’ 'No,' replied the chairman, ‘you sound like a man who has taken the traditional approach to selling about as far as it can go.’ ‘I’m not the first, I take it?’  ‘That’s right. And, like others before you, you sound like you’re open and ready to learn, That’s why I’ve agreed to meet you. Drop by any time tomorrow.’ And with that, the chairman hung up. The man began to look forward to the next day’s meeting.

The One Minute Sales Person | 15  Soon after the man entered the elegant offices, he expressed surprise at meeting a chief executive with such a strong sales background. His host pointed out that, in fact, most of the chief executives in his company come from the marketing and sales departments. He explained that he had sold products and services for many years. He now sat on the boards of many other companies because he knew how to sell people on important ideas, too.  Looking around the office, the visitor noticed a small plaque on one of the coffee tables. It read: Production minus sales equals scrap. The executive noted, ‘Even valuable ideas can wind up on the scrap heap just because they weren’t sold.  ‘For example, I am now serving on a panel of community leaders who are concerned with both keeping our nation strong and avoiding the destruction of an all-out war. As good as some of the ideas to solve this problem might be, how much good would they do if either side decided not to buy the answers?’  ‘Not much. I can see you’re still a salesman.’ ‘I think every successful person is — in the best sense of that word,’ replied the prosperous executive.  The man slowly began to reveal his own problem. ‘I used to think I knew what selling was all about, but now I’m not so sure. It seems like I’m doing everything right... but...’

16 | The One Minute Sales Person  ‘You mean,’ the older man said, ‘you’ve read all the books, you go on training courses every chance you get and you work late many nights and at weekends?’  ‘How did you know?’  ‘And now you've reached the point of diminishing returns, working longer hours while your sales figures are standing still...’  ‘That’s right — and I’m enjoying it less.’  ‘Well, I don’t mean to rub it in,’ the older man said, ‘but you might be interested to know that my record sales years were accomplished in twenty-hour weeks.’  ‘Oh dear,’ replied the visitor, ‘but that’s what I need to hear. I’ve heard you’re pretty good. They call you The One Minute Salesman. Why is that?’  His host shot back, ‘I’m called that only by those people who do not understand my success.’  The man wondered what was wrong.  The chief executive smiled. He wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to the visitor. It read: The One Minute Sales Person. ‘Why Sales Person instead of Salesman?’  ‘I once had a great manager,’ said the executive, ‘a man we called The One Minute Manager because he got such great results in so little time — in just a few key minutes.  ‘He taught me a simple principle and then encouraged me to adapt it in my own way, and apply it to sales. ‘Now thinking of myself as a One Minute Sales Person helps me remember the most important secret in selling. It is as simple as this: ***Behind every sale is a PERSON***