Soft Selling in the 21st Century

By Linda Mcdonald

Linda McDonald has extracted the essential gems from her renowned sales training seminars and concentrated them all in one pure diamond of a book. Soft Selling in the 21st Century is an easy-to-follow prescription for sure-fire sales success. Linda covers essential preparation to sell, from goal-setting to eliminating the competition. Then she lays out a clear "Blueprint of Sales" that will guide any reader, from beginner to seasoned professional, to foolproof closings. Throughout she emphasizes the new musts for 21st-century sales: educating the client and stellar service.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662435966

Book preview

cover.jpg

Soft Selling in the 21st Century

Linda Mcdonald

Copyright © 2020 Linda McDonald

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form

or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the

author or publisher.

Edited by Carol Gaskin at Editorial Alchemy

Cover and interior design by Lynn Stuart Graphics

ISBN 978-1-6624-3595-9 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-3596-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Where Do I Start?

It’s All About Goals

Tools for Success

Eliminate Your Competition

Marketing to Your Client

Blueprint of Sales: Preparing to Sell

The Introduction

The Presentation

The Closing

Closing Basics

Overcoming Objections

Conclusion Be a Soft Selling Success Today!

This book is dedicated to my loving grandmother, Ludie Kirkpatrick; my aunt Edna Calhoun; and my cousins Wanda Tuenge, Laurence and Betty Calhoun, and Hazel McCarthy. Without their support and guidance this book would not have been possible.

Introduction

Introduction Journey to Success

How does destiny start us on the path that will become our life’s road? What determines or drives our successes or failures? The answer to the first question is a great mystery. But as for the second: We are all formed by our experiences, good and bad, and if we so choose, we can use the many lessons life deals us to feed our success. I did—and so can you!

My road has been a bumpy and a smooth ride since my conception. We all must have a starting place, and mine was just after Pearl Harbor, with a mother and father who loathed each other. The only people they detested more were children. But destiny has a way of not caring, and voila!—they had me: Linda Carol Layne.

I was lucky that my father stuck around just long enough to take my mother to the hospital. He was even inventive enough to tell the hospital that he was a minister of the first order and to give my mother the very best of everything. Then he walked out of the hospital, never to be seen again. To this day I don’t think he ever knew whether he had fathered a girl or a boy.

Voila! I enter the world. Me with my great-grandfather.

My journey started bumpy. I was seven weeks premature in the early forties, when the survival rate of preemies was very slim. But I was a fighter and a survivor, and several weeks later my mother took me home.

This was the end of the Great Depression, and World War II was underway. Although our home was in Oklahoma, my mother decided that Oklahoma was not where the action was, so she packed us up and moved to Hollywood, California, where she worked in the movies and formed a Country-Western band.

My mother in her stage outfit, early 1940s.

Now, say you have a six-month-old baby but you want to go out and perform at night. What do you do? Well, you simply leave the child alone all night in a one-room apartment in Hollywood. At least that’s what my mother decided to do. This created a problem with the landlord, however. He quickly tired of listening to a baby whimpering and crying all night long, till the little voice was so sore it could only whisper out a cry.

Thank God for grandmothers with big hearts. The landlord notified my mother’s grandmother, who immediately came to California and took care of me. This was my first rescue in life, and believe me when I say there were a lot more. In fact, I soon had a second rescue when, on my first birthday, my mother called my great-grandmother and told her that she had arranged for an orphanage to come and get me. My great-grandmother said No way, moved me back to Oklahoma, and then legally adopted me. From then on she raised me for six months a year and I spent the other six months with a great aunt and other relatives in Nebraska. My mother’s reaction? She went out and bought herself a Spider monkey to take my place. Go figure!

For the next fifteen years I traveled back and forth between Oklahoma and Nebraska. Not only was I never able to stay in one school for an entire school year, but for the six months I lived in Oklahoma I was Southern Baptist and for the other six months a devout Catholic in Nebraska.

Children and their parents in both states made fun of me for having been abandoned by my parents. In those days it was strange being raised by a great-grandmother and great