Most people are always striving to better themselves. It's the
"American Way". For proof, check the sales figures on the
number of self-improvement books sold each year. This is not a
pitch for you to jump in and start selling these kinds of books,
but it is a indication of people's awareness that in order to
better themselves, they have to continue improving their
personal selling ab abilities.
To excel in any selling situation, you must have confidence, and
confidence comes, first and foremost, from knowledge. You have
to know and understand yourself and your goals. You have to
recognize and accept your weaknesses as well as your special
talents. This requires a kind of personal honesty that not
everyone is capable of exercising.
In addition to knowing yourself, you must continue learning
about people. Just as with yourself, you must be caring,
forgiving and laudatory with others. In any sales effort, you
must accept other people as they are, not as you would like for
them to be. One of the most common faults of sales people is
impatience when the prospective customer is slow to understand
or make a decision. The successful salesperson handles these
situations the same as he would if he were asking a girl for a
date, or even applying for a new job.
Learning your product, making a clear presentation to qualified
prospects, and closing more sales will take a lot less time once
you know your own capabilities and failings, and understand and
care about the prospects you are calling upon.
Our society is predicated upon selling, and all of us are
selling something all the time. We move up or stand still in
direct relation to our sales efforts. Everyone is included,
whether we're attempting to be a friend to a co-worker, a
neighbor, or selling multi-million dollar real estate projects.
Accepting these facts will enable you to understand that there
is no such thing as a born salesman. Indeed, in selling, we all
begin at the same starting line, and we all have the same finish
line as the goal - a successful sale.
Most assuredly, anyone can sell anything to anybody. As a
qualification to this statement, let us say that some things are
easier to sell than others, and some people work harder at
selling than others. But regardless of what you're selling, or
even how you're attempting to sell it, the odds are in your
favor. If you make your presentation to enough people, you'll
find a buyer. The problem with most people seems to be in
making contact - getting their sales presentation seen by, read
by, or heard by enough people. But this really shouldn't be a
problem, as we'll explain later. There is a problem of
impatience, but this too can be harnessed to work in the
salesperson's favor.
We have established that we're all sales people in one way or
another. So whether we're attempting to move up from forklift
driver to warehouse manager, waitress to hostess, salesman to
sales manager or from mail order dealer to president of the
largest sales organization in the world, it's vitally important
that we continue learning.
Getting up out of bed in the morning; doing what has to be done
in order to sell more units of your product; keeping records,
updating your materials; planning the direction of further sales
efforts; and all the while increasing your own knowledge---all
this very definitely requires a great deal of personal
motivation, discipline, and energy. But then the rewards can be
beyond your wildest dreams, for make no mistake about it, the
selling profession is the highest paid occupation in the world!
Selling is challenging. It demands the utmost of your
creativity and innovative thinking. The more success you want,
and the more dedicated you are to achieving your goals, the more
you'll sell. Hundreds of people the world over become
millionaires each month through selling. Many of them were flat
broke and unable to find a "regular" job when they began their
selling careers. Yet they've done it, and you can do it too!
Remember, it's the surest way to all the wealth you could ever
want. You get paid according to your own efforts, skill, and
knowledge of people. If you're ready to become rich, then think
seriously about selling a product or service (preferably
something exclusively yours) - something that you "pull out of
your brain"; something that you write, manufacture or produce
for the benefit of other people. But failing this, the want ads
are full of opportunities for ambitious sales people. You can
start there, study, learn from experience, and watch for the
chance that will allow you to move ahead by leaps and bounds.
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