Professional Selling: Why 1 out of 5 Salespeople Make 4 out of 5 Sales

By Carl G. Stevens

Why do 1 out of 5 salespeople make 4 out of 5 sales?

That's the question Carl G. Stevens, the 95-year-old sales professor, spent decades of his life answering. After researching and interviewing more than 10,000 salespeople, he documented their experiences into a repeatable seven-module framework for anyone to sell anything.

The sales profession has long needed the same business methodology other recognized professions have: a field-tested body of knowledge, and a structured process to guarantee success.

In Professional Selling, Stevens uses case studies from his sales career—back to the Great Depression—to lay out a clear process for new and experienced salespeople in every industry to:

Find your prospects' hidden buying urges (chapter 7)
Earn your prospects' trust through proven communication principles (chapter 3)
Ease your prospects' deepest fears about your products and services (chapter 5)
How to use "picture language" to arouse your customers' desire (chapter 7)
How to identify and overcome the most common customer objections (chapter 9)

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781544503226

Book preview

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Copyright © 2019 Carl G. Stevens

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-0322-6

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This book is dedicated to Miss Jean. I love and miss you every day. Convincing you to be my wife is the best sale I made in my entire life.

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Contents

Introduction

1. Selling Unveiled

2. Preparation

3. Attention

4. Examination

5. Prescription

6. Conviction

7. Motivation

8. Completion

9. Overcoming Objections

Bonus

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

A College Education in Selling

Everything in life is selling.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

Why do 1 out of 5 salespeople make 4 out of 5 sales?

That’s the question at the heart of this book.

Now, 90 percent of your success as a salesperson will be determined by your attitude. The other 10 percent? That’s what we’ll cover in these pages: how to develop the qualities of the 1 out of 5 salespeople who make 4 out of 5 sales.

And there’s no point in dancing around the subject. I’m ninety-five years old.

That means I can barely spell internet, let alone use it. I use a cell phone that flips. And I’m a little slower moving from point A to point B than I used to be.

Yes, I’m chronologically enhanced, but before we get started, let’s get one thing straight: I’ve been in sales since I was a nine-year-old boy biking the hills of Old Hickory, Tennessee, selling the Denominational Baptist Reflector for a nickel a copy.

So before you discount me, saying I’m about as useful as an old hickory tree myself, take a step back and think about it.

History has exposed me to a thing or two about selling in my near-century of practicing the art. Enough to distill it all into the unique and repeatable framework I’m about to share with you in this book.

One friend described sales as the most important three feet in business. Those three feet between you—the salesperson—and the customer, are where your company’s marketing, advertising, promoting, recruiting, and prospecting all culminate.

So, yes, it’s bodaciously important. The number one need for success in today’s world is the ability to sell yourself and your ideas. Better to learn it from a near-centenarian like me than some young buck who hasn’t been there and paid his dues!

I know that those three feet between you and your customer often exist online or over the phone now, whereas in my heyday, you met face-to-face with people. Even so, the principles in this book apply to you all the same.

Lazy Selling

For something as integral to business as selling, you’d think we’d be very good at it. We should be very effective and efficient by now, right? Not so. Salespeople are no better today than they were in the Great Depression, when I earned my stripes. I read a headline recently that said, We Are No Better at Selecting Salespeople than We Were Sixty Years Ago! I can tell you, with eighty years as a road warrior under my belt, it’s true.

We’ve gotten lazy in sales. People and organizations at every level of society need goods and services, so they make certain purchases no matter what. In turn, someone needs to sell these things to them, whether that salesperson did anything right or not.

But that’s not the kind of selling we’re interested in sharing. This book is focused on professional selling. In short, you will be exposed to a scientifically proven, seven-step framework for creatively selling goods and services under highly competitive conditions.

The sales career field is full of unskilled people who skate by on the 80 percent of transactions that people would have made either way. But what about the other 20 percent—the people who don’t realize they need your products? How do you sell to them?

It has been my challenge to answer that question over the course of five decades, on six continents, to thousands of people across fifty-one countries. I have been invited to teach sales seminars at Oxford, Princeton, Vanderbilt, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and others.

Just like the students I taught all those years, I will also attempt to make you more efficient, more productive, and more cost-effective.

There’s a reason the sales field is woefully ill-equipped to sell. It’s bereft of several things:

A specific, repeatable method for improving sales (not only what to do but also how to do it)

A more complete understanding of the principles and techniques of selling (and how to apply them in day-to-day sales challenges)

Readable, down-to-earth educational material that is explicit, short, and repeatable

In short, salespeople need the equivalent of a college education in professional selling. That’s what I will share with you in this book.

All professions seem to have four things in common:

There is a place to teach it, such as a university.

There is accumulated, documented knowledge, such as med school books.

There is a means to develop and share the skill, such as an internship or residency.

People are willing to pay the price, in time and money, to learn the documented knowledge and skill.

Most of today’s professional salespeople don’t have easy access to those four elements. That’s part of the reason why this book exists, because although I can’t give you that first element or the last one, I can share with you the second and third based on real world experience and experimenting.

A 114 Percent Increase in Sales

Twenty percent of salespeople make 80 percent of the sales. I spent a lifetime trying to discover why. To that end, we have interviewed more than ten thousand super-revenue producers over the course of decades. What we discovered shocked me at the time, but it makes perfect sense in retrospect.

Most successful salespeople don’t seem to know what makes them superior. They put in the blood, sweat, and tears, and it just works out. But they all seem to do the same things, even if they aren’t conscious of it.

Based on that research, it was my delight to develop an early version of this framework, and I taught it to forty-three professionals at a comprehensive three-day seminar at Vanderbilt University. After they left the class, we had no idea what to expect. Could selling even be taught? Was I crazy for trying to develop a specific methodology for selling that could be taught and scientifically documented?

We tracked their progress for the first ninety days following the seminar. Those students documented a 114 percent increase in sales, on average, following the event.

Wow! we thought when we received the numbers. We’ve struck gold.

Are you ready to strike your own gold and receive your college education in selling?

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Chapter 1

1. Selling Unveiled

Henry Ford was once asked, What would you have done if you hadn’t been an automobile man?

He said, I would have found another need, satisfied it, and built my millions all over the course of years. What’s the next question?

Henry Ford knew that you can’t force a customer or prospect to do anything. You have to find what they lack, need, or want and satisfy it. You have to guide them to your product through charm and persuasion, not brute force. In this chapter, you will learn my seven scientifically researched, field-tested, and documented modules of the selling process, which you can use to harness your own charm and persuade people to buy what you’re selling.

But first, some groundwork.

A Healthy Dose of Skepticism

Regardless of your business or profession, your prospect will be skeptical of you. We used to make house calls to prospects, where we knocked on front doors and asked if we could come in. Times have changed. If you tried that now, you might have a lot of confused and angry people slamming doors in your face.

Now you either cold-call, cold-email, or attract people through your marketing (mostly online). Even so, they still ask the same questions of you as they did of a door-to-door sales representative in previous times:

Who are you?

What do you want?

What company do you represent?

What are you selling?

Those are their first questions and objections when you get them on the phone or give them your presentation. Then, once you go into your presentation, their questions shift. They think to themselves, What’s in it for me?

If your product or service doesn’t make them money, save them time, or make them happy, you have a real challenge.

Therefore, your opportunity as a salesperson is quite simple: anticipate and be professionally prepared to answer their unspoken questions

Reviews for Professional Selling

[Robert Huddleston · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Must read for non-sales professionals (accountants, engineers, educators, government administrators) who need to be productive in sales. Includes Who, What, Why, and How. Don't waste your time and lose sales because you "know your subject." Master the basics and "know your prospect." Go Satisfy a new Customer. (Retired Research Chemical Engineer.)