Sales Sucks, But So Does Everything Else
I read this next chapter immediately after completing the labor of boredom that was “Self-Discipline & Business” — a chapter that could have been surmised with one sentence: “Owning a business is hard, takes work, and your chances of failure are pretty high; be ready”. Chapter 11, “Self-Discipline & Sales” got my cheeks hot, and my heart started to speed up. It was a mixture of frustration with the trajectory of this section’s “practical uses” of self-discipline, and reflexive reaction to a storied past.
I have been in sales in one capacity or another my entire career. From point-of-sale, to over-the-phone, inside- to outside-sales; I’ve done it all. I’ve had good training and some terrible training. My story, as if you were looking to hear it, starts with a job I got in college — my first “office job”. I was hired to work as a Leasing Consultant at the property I lived my junior and senior years. My focus was roughly half administrative tasks, half greeting, qualifying, touring, and closing prospects — I didn’t know it then but I was getting on-the-job training in sales. By the time I graduated, I started working for a much larger company, one that didn’t cater to students. This was my first foray with monthly quotas and goals — and end-of-the-month hysteria. Win, lose, commissions, incentives; all became part of my regular vernacular.
It was in that first job out of college that I first was offered regimented sales training. We got the “hold all the cards” speech, where you keep asking questions to get all the prospect’s “cards” so that you realize when you have them all, you have all the answers and can close. I was also shown a book that has since formed the foundation of my professional philosophy: the Go-Giver, by Bob Burg. (I’ll get more into specifics on this book in a second, just suffice to say that it breaks the mold). I also learned here about bad sales managers who think too much of themselves and read too far into their own success; and I met my very first sleazy salesman, promising myself never to become so shady.
Next, I worked for a company whose focus was the bottom-line. Yes, I do understand that without a healthy bottom line in the black, your business is going to fail; but I got a quick lesson here that businesses may be run by people, but people are usually the last priority of poorly-run businesses. I learned here, too, about NOI (net operating income), profit and loss sheets, and a little about managing a team. In the end, this company functioned like a cult of personality with the big boss sitting high up like the Sun King and everyone dancing around facts and figures so he’d be happy. The truth, so long as it was pleasing to the head guy, reigned supreme.
My first job over-the-phone was like a head-first plunge into a dark pit. I was one of many — hundreds — and I was a piece of machinery. This job was all sales, all the time. Pound the phones, qualify, pitch, close, repeat. You were deemed a “veteran” by three months, and usually by the fourth month realized that everything you were taught in the lead-up was either completely wrong, or at best misdirected. I was trained more on product than advancing skills so that I could just throw up enough volume in the hopes that 20% of what I called closed. Exhaustion reigned supreme, and that meant that alcohol was the juice to relax my tense muscles.
Brian Tracy talks about mimicking the best so that you can become the best; in this company, the “best” may have been the ones closing the most, but they were also the ones who overwhelmingly used devious methods, powered by lots of cocaine, to close the most sales. Mimic them I did not.
My most recent sales job was also over-the-phone, but working for a company with both of its feet firmly planted in the 20th century and a broken sales process was like trying to paint a wet fence. (Granted I by this point was so burnt out, I gave a half-assed try at being successful, but I read the writing on the wall). Working for a company with a “hundred million dollar idea” who was trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist in an industry most people know nothing about was not what I wanted. I took the lessons from each job I held, and have only recently started to autopsy my career. Though I worked in sales, I can unequivocally say, I am not built for this game. Every role where “closing” was my raison d’etre ended with me feeling like I’d lost, or failed. I was a square peg trying to squeeze into a round hole. I didn’t know how I would be successful in life — I still don’t.
Brian Tracy does what all the sales books I’ve ever been handed do: he discusses what sales is and how important it is to the health of any business, but what he fails to do is teach the reader how to sell. You can learn everything you can about a product, all the tricks and gimmicks, but if you don’t have the core pillars of what make sales happen understood, you’ll fail 100% of the time. I’ve had leaders (loose usage of that term) tell me that they want to run an organization of “talented, empowered sales reps” who are the best in their field and consistently “crushing it”. Leaders like that ultimately give no time of day to the little guy who falls in the middle, and tries to rise above his own challenges…
You want good sales people closing sales that will last? Train them in people: namely psychology. Not just why people buy, but why people are. Teach them about good listening, not overcoming objections. Teach them to care about people first and closing second. Stop sharing what I call “if only statistics”; things like, “if only you’d make 110 dials, that’s ten more chances to close”, or “if reps would only focus finding the need and leveraging opportunity, they’d win all the time”. It’s rhetoric, and it’s empty.
Makes sales about helping people, I always tried to. To some, that seems counter-intuitive, but when people feel like they aren’t being sold to, but are being helped, they will open up. I’m sure there are seasoned salespeople reading this saying, “I do help people!”. To that I ask, what if truly helping your prospect was sending them to a competitor? Would you do it? You’re squirming, and there’s a knot in your stomach. If you didn’t say, yes, without hesitation, you don’t care enough to help people for real — you’re focused on helping yourself first. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you’ll always be chasing the car. No one-liner will help you build the respect and rapport you need to close. Things I heard and regurgitated in the face of objection were things like: “I’d hate to put a price tag on an empty shelf” to overcome pricing questions; “I haven’t sold you anything, yet” when asked about whether this was a sales call or not; “A lot of other [insert business type] I talk to have said the same thing, what I can do for you is…” when asked why I’m so special.
One-liners are flat, fake, and give you false hope of working. If they sound witty, chances are they are just bad dad jokes disguised as good sales tools. Listening for the sake of listening, help for the sake of helping. This, above everything else, is what the Go-Giver is about.
When you help for the sake of helping — knowing fully that there’s a chance it’ll earn you business — you build a relationship with someone. Relationship-building, interpersonal skills, networking, problem-solving. These are the things salespeople need to be taught, not “100% of calls you don’t make, don’t close”. Bob Burg follows up the Go-Giver, which itself is a challenge to the sales favorite “go getter”, with Go-Givers Sell More. He doesn’t hide the fact that sales are important, or are the reason why salespeople make money, but when you don’t hunt the sale, only guide it into place…that’s when you win. (Read those books, not flat attempts to dazzle you with promises of doubling your income).
The post-chapter “exercises” I found were just calls-to-action to solving 20th century problems. Throwing enough things up, hoping something will stick, is the fastest way to burn out, lose yourself, and question everything you’re doing. Saying things like, determine how many sales you need to make to “be successful”, and determine how many prospects you need to call to make that many sales, and commit to be the best are just all ways of glazing over the fact that sales suck. Wanna be good at sales? Learn how to be good with people first, and be able to sniff out bullshit sales tactics! Sooner or later, the world of sales will understand this.
I picked up Brian Tracy’s No Excuses, and have decided to learn something about self-discipline. This page is going to keep me honest (mostly) as I tackle this book over the next 21 days! This is Day 10 of 21.
