Many sales techniques are probably not as effective today as they once were, but there are certain principles of selling, a kind of commandments for the good salesperson, that remain unchanged over time.
When I came across The Art of Closing the Sale by Brian Tracy, one of the world’s top sales trainers and author of the bestseller The Psychology of Selling, I noted down several of these commandments, which over time I’ve adapted in my day-to-day work training sales reps and sales teams.
Each of these points could be developed into an article of its own, but I think they are very clear as they stand.
The commandments of the good salesperson
1. The best news for a salesperson is that every skill needed for selling can be learned, and is learned
If you can learn to drive, you can learn to sell, as long as you take an interest in learning.
2. Becoming an excellent salesperson is an inside job
It starts within you. In sales, your personality matters more than your product knowledge, and is even more important than your sales skills and the product or service you’re selling. Your personality determines 80% of your success as a salesperson.
3. A good salesperson will achieve high sales volumes even with an expensive product, against strong competition, in a depressed market, while a bad salesperson will struggle to sell an exclusive product in a booming market
In other words: “Mediocre products with great sales teams always beat great products with mediocre sales teams.”
4. The biggest mistake a salesperson can make is to think they work for anyone other than themselves
When you choose sales as a profession, from the day you start to the day you retire, you work for yourself. You’re the president of your own “personal brand” (a one-person company). Your business is selling the highest quality and quantity of your services or products throughout your working life.
5. As president of your own company, you’re 100% in charge of everything that happens in your business
You decide on your training, your personal and professional development, and the constant improvement of your sales skills. You’re directly responsible for the number of sales you make.
6. Everything you have in your life today is the result of the decisions you’ve made so far
What you earn today is down as much to what you’ve done as to what you’ve failed to do. Sometimes the things we stop doing once we start working have a bigger impact on our future than the things we actually do.
See also: Why you should know your PER (visits-to-sales ratio) as a salesperson
7. The difference between winners and losers in sales is very clear
Winners always accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Losers never do; they always have a good excuse to explain why they can’t sell. Winners know that if they don’t sell, it isn’t because of bad luck, a bad patch, the customer and so on. They know that the sale depends solely and exclusively on their skills as salespeople.
8. The biggest difference between a successful salesperson and a mediocre one is that the first works harder than the second
That’s all there is to it. The average salesperson wastes 50% of their useful selling time.
9. Ambition is a fundamental quality of every great achievement, including sales
The successful salesperson’s ambition far exceeds that of the mediocre one. Good salespeople are hungry for success, and then more success, while mediocre salespeople are content just to hit their quota and pay the bills.
10. Great salespeople have high levels of empathy
In other words, they genuinely care about their customers. When ambition and the desire to succeed in your career come together with empathy, a successful salesperson is born.
11. Put another way, successful salespeople don’t make sales, they make customers
12. The most successful salespeople know that every bit of success they aspire to has to be paid for in advance
They know they won’t get something for nothing, so they know that the only way to succeed in their careers is to work hard and consistently over a long period of time.
13. There’s no quick, passive way to make money
“Get rich in 30 days” courses only work for the people who sell them.
14. The best salespeople believe deeply in themselves and in the product they sell
If you don’t believe in the product you sell, you’ll be deceiving the customer. And the customer will sense it. If you can’t put your heart into what you want to sell, you won’t sell much.
15. The salespeople with the highest sales volumes have impeccable integrity, with themselves and with others
In the sales business, there’s nothing like integrity. If you lack integrity in sales, your career as a salesperson will have a short shelf life.
See also: 4 truths about the art of negotiation
16. The most common emotions among underperforming salespeople are envy and resentment
A terrible salesperson tends to be jealous of other people’s success, while a successful salesperson tends to feel admiration and the urge to emulate them, knowing that if they can do it, so can he, and that they have a lot to teach about how to achieve what they’re already achieving.
17. One of the biggest obstacles to selling is negative expectations
This happens when salespeople, because of their attitude or past experience, don’t expect to succeed. What they end up doing is anticipating the very outcome they themselves bring about. It’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy.
18. All customers hesitate before buying
They’re sceptical, because they’ve been fooled many times by other salespeople. As a result, they tend to raise lots of objections to buying, but a good salesperson should know that most objections aren’t real reasons not to buy. Most of those objections disappear if you build trust from the start.
19. If you’re not constantly learning and improving your skills as a salesperson, somewhere another salesperson is, and when you come up against them, you’ll lose
See also: 15 habits of successful salespeople
20. Stay away from negative people; avoid those who spend most of the day complaining and criticising successful people
In sales, as in other professions, there are eagles and there are ducks. If you want to fly like an eagle, stop surrounding yourself with ducks.
21. Never fight a customer (try to win them over by force); lead them instead
As an old sales proverb has it: “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” If you insist on winning an argument with a customer, when you win, they’ll tell you: “You’re right, but I’m not buying.”
22. When you’re with a customer, always keep your personal opinions on sensitive subjects such as politics and religion to yourself
They’re the perfect excuse to put off someone who thinks differently from you. And if a customer doesn’t like you, they won’t buy even if they need what you’re selling. They’ll buy it from someone else.
Continue with: 14 secrets and truths about selling
Featured image: Daniel Wikberg, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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