Sales Advice Hits the Spot in April Inc. Magazine

I wouldn’t normally recommend Inc. for your Sales Force but the April 2010 issue actually has some helpful articles.

Their Trio of stories, beginning on page 83, have some good quotes.  The first story is about a nuclear power plant salesperson who sells the right way.  Here’s a great quote from him that your salespeople can use if they’re selling something complex or very expensive:

“I never ask for money. I ask for an emotional commitment.  I let someone else nail down the details of the contract.  Then I come back in to get everyone feeling good again.”

Here’s another one that all of your salespeople can use:

“Never worry about how you’re doing in a meeting.  Focus on the other guy.  Otherwise, it’s like watching your feet while you’re running.  And be emotionally prepared to be slaughtered – it helps make you bulletproof.”

Quotes don’t get any better than that!

Their second story has advice from a psychoanalyst.  He identified the best salespeople as happy losers! He said “A Sad loser goes down and never comes back.  A happy loser comes back.  The first ‘no’ stimulates them.”  Here’s a good quote from him:

“We’ve had regular meetings with salespeople and asked them, ‘how many nos did you get this week?’  The ones that got nos got points.  Then, after a month, we made the correlation: The more nos they had, the more sales they had made.  Because they were trying more things, taking more chances. The response was almost Pavlovian.  The more mistakes, the greater the reward.”

 The third article in the trilogy contains sales tips from the world’s toughest customers. While some of it is common sense and some of it is nonsense, there are some good points.  Here’s one quote I liked from the director of supplier diversity from UPS:

“People will say, ‘I’ve got this really exciting proposal I want you to look at.’  I’ll say, ‘send it to me.’ Then they send it to me by FedEx. It happens every day. Just be smart. Know the company you are pitching to and know their likes and dislikes.  You get such brownie points with me when you come in with a UPS envelope and have an account all set up.  It’s just the little things like that, the icing on the cake.”

The common theme among all three articles is that there wasn’t any mention of low pricing.  Isn’t that exciting? Here are some call-outs to a few of my friends and clients:

Joe, UPS is looking for printing services…
Matt, Coca-Cola is looking for packaging materials…
Deborah, Intuit is looking for Marketing Services…
Phil, Dell, Northrup Grumman and Intuit are looking for IT services…
Chris, Dell is looking for staffing services…
Howard, let our friends know that Valero Energy is looking for beverages…