You Gotta Ask for the Order: Life as a Successful Salesperson, Business Owner, and Entrepreneur

By Steve Cina

Reach your potential as you pursue your success in Sales, Recruiting, Hiring and Training. Get what you want without the other side realizing it. Discover the secrets of pursuing the sale, and successfully applying strategies of the sale. Learn how to handle objections and negotiate closing the sale. 

Find yourself more capable to Ask

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Cina
• Release date: Apr 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734835700

Steve Cina

Steve Cina is a successful business owner and entrepreneur. He has started numerous businesses that have led to his success in sales and business. He resides in Las Vegas, Nevada with his wonderful wife, Virginia. He keeps busy during retirement by traveling, golfing, and watching his grandson, Brady, play baseball.

Book preview

1

Have a Support System

Cookies and candy started my career in sales, but that isn’t where it ended. I have had a successful sales career for over 47 years, and my experiences will help you to the top of your sales career, ultimately helping you get what you want out of life. If you learn from my experiences, you can reach any of your dreams and goals. It’s all about dealing with all kinds of people, using common sense, making smart decisions, and listening to what they say.

You will need to have an executed plan that will help you adapt to any person’s personality and situation to make a sale. I had a plan, and I followed it for over 47 years. I taught it to the salespeople I worked with. It worked for me! It worked for most of those that I trained, and it still does.

When I started my first business, I was 100% broke, but I knew that it would be a success. I just wasn’t sure of just how fast and how large each business would become. There was never a doubt that I would succeed! My businesses in the chemical industry wouldn’t have succeeded without my wife Virginia (Gine) and her influence in most of the decisions I made.

Virginia’s boss, an acquaintance of mine, introduced me to Virginia. Well, Richard didn’t really introduce us; he gave me her phone number and told me that his executive assistant was single and very beautiful. Like I always did, I went after the sale instead of waiting for it to come to me. I decided to go by his office and window shop her. I called her that night from my mother’s home. Yes, I lived with my mother and stepfather George at the time. I asked her out for a drink. We met at a local restaurant on Interstate 5 and Newhall Ave. A short drink turned into dinner and a night of visiting. We started dating, and the rest is history. Virginia had a son, Morgan, who was 18 months old at the time. After a while, I adopted Morgan, and he became our number-four son. My family was, and continues to be, an important motivator.

Virginia was aware when there were important things going on and always helped me decide which way to go. In most cases, Gine did not tell me what to do, but she defended, respected, and supported all the decisions that I made. When we got into the specialty chemical industry, Gine worked the accounts receivable department. More importantly she built a rapport with the sales and office employees, and there was trust and respect. Over the years, people would frequently go around me and approach Virginia directly. Of course, she never got involved until consulting me, making the point that most of the time I was right. I ran the daily operations of the businesses and made most of the decisions based on the information that I had.

I once told Virginia that we were going to have a great life. We have had a great life, and in retirement, we still are. Retirement; what a joke! We are busier now than before, and it’s fun. Thanks to the many people that have been our partners in business. Any successful business takes strong relationships and determination. Surround yourself with good people that can support you and help you achieve your goals.

2

Top Guns

It may be my Jewish or Italian heritage, or maybe it’s both, but I always had an intense work ethic. Everything has to be done now! It must be done now, with the office team and sales team members. There was no doing it later; if you wanted to do it later, then you could do it with someone else-not my company. Whatever it was, if you were returning a phone call to a vender, or a sales-rep or a customer if you worked for me it was to be done now not later. This was the way it was. It worked!

If you were in the sales department, we gave you the tools and the support that you would need to be the best. We had a plan and a sales manual that explained in detail how to sell out products, most importantly our managers and trainers worked in the field with you calling on and helping you sell to your customers. We demanded that in the beginning you did it our way because our way worked. We promised to you that we would do whatever was possible for you to succeed, and we gave you 100% all the time, as long as you did the same. We knew if you weren’t, and if you weren’t, it was sayonara.

This was the way it was. It worked!

Flexibility came after you learned and mastered Our Way. Then the sales team member added their own personality to the client relationship.

Every great sales company must have a tract (sales presentation) for you to run on, and ours was the best. We had the plan! All we needed was the right people to execute it, and over the years we found them again and again.

I looked for Top Guns. These were high performing salespeople who consistently brought in 80% of our sales volume. These people have high ethical principles, professional behavior, and they are fun to be around. They have an instinctual work ethic that can’t be learned. Although they are rare, these people always stand out from the crowd.

If you want to find these natural leaders, follow these steps:

Don’t hire sheep. We are looking for sheep herders.

Sheep just fill a territory or slot. I have said in the past that most people are sheep. They are in a flock that moves from one place to another and follow the leader (herder) anywhere he may go.

Most companies today are content to hire people who have very little potential. We never hired just to fill a territory. When that’s done, you will end up with salespeople who are mediocre at best. Howard Heller once told me, Hire a piece of crap and you end up with a very well-trained piece of crap. Then we are stuck with them for longer than we would like, or we would be consistently turning sales reps. If we truly wanted the very best sales force, we knew that we had to coach them and provide the support necessary to make them the best they can be.

If we hired one of these mediocre people, after the initial training period had passed and they are not performing to our expectations, all the time you’ve spent training, educating, and sweating for that person is time taken away from searching, finding, and training a genuine top gun. Meanwhile, there is a top gun out there being hired by someone else. If the individual is not going to make it, make the change earlier than later.

Make sure your sales team can meet the demands.

I was very demanding and expected you to work and go the extra mile on the job every hour and every day.

I also had the ability to recognize how far I could push each person and know when to back off. Some could not take it and left. It was not the right job for them. They may turn out to be good salespeople in the future with another company, just not with ours.

Conduct a thorough interview.

If I interviewed you, within an hour into that interview I knew more about you than most people did after knowing you for years. I knew in that interview if you had a very good chance of succeeding with us. I have been told that I have the ability to pick the right person for the job most of the time. I tried to pass this instinct on to others.

In the interview, do the following:

Ask good questions.

See if you can get them to take over the interview.

Ask why they think this is the right job for them?

Ask them how they handle customer objections?

Give them an object and have them sell it to you.

Ask them what is their least favorite part of the sales process?

3

Know Thyself

Some of you have gone to college and worked hard to earn your degree. Congratulations and good for you. Now that you have your degree, what are you going to do with it? Most of you are not sure. Some take a job in the field they thought they wanted to be in, but then after a while, they say to themselves, I am not happy. This is not what I thought it was going to be. I really want to do something else.

After family and friends tell you that you’re a people person, you may say, I want to go into sales. For those of you that said that, do me a favor and do something other than sales. Being a great People Person will not make you a great salesperson. I can’t tell you how many people over the years I interviewed and hired that later changed their minds about what they really wanted to do. I worked in sales for all my life. I have had successes, and I have had my share of failures. It has been quite a trip that has taken me to many places, meeting people that have enriched my life. We all think about the short term that we have in this world, and at one time or another we all want to leave something. Be wise about what you change to and make sure it is something that you are passionate about.

Why is this coming out? I always said, This business and job isn’t for everyone. If it was, it would be easy. It’s not easy; any sales career can be very difficult, and not everyone succeeds at it. But it is fun, especially when you have three sales in one day that total 3,500 dollars and you earned 1,120 dollars commission for that one-day working for us. It’s rewarding when you discover your talent and how it can be put to use.

It is important to understand yourself and develop a passion for your work if you are to succeed.

4

I Chose to be a Salesman, or did it Choose Me?

I never liked school very much, and as a result, my grades were not very good. I just didn’t care. I liked gym and math the best, but the best class that I took was in the 7 th grade. It was typing. Typing helped in just about every job I ever had, and I wouldn’t be writing this if it weren’t for the typing.

I was a high school dropout. I dropped out after going to three high schools in the Los Angeles area, and I did not make it out of the 11 th grade. I certainly was not proud of this, but for some, school is not the most important thing in life.

When