SALES TECHNIQUES AND GAINING TRUST ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE IDEAS

Anyone who reads  Closing the Whales, will conclude that I am not a big fan of sales techniques training.  The whole idea of learning and applying sales techniques turns me off.  More importantly, most sales techniques with which I am familiar are very transparent, and they turn off the buyers!  My advice to any ambitious salesperson is this: Unless you have the acting skills of Tom Hanks or Julia Roberts and your conscience doesn’t mind the idea of people manipulation, stay as far away from old and tired sales techniques as you possibly can!  Clients and prospects can spot the old sales techniques a mile away!

What is much better in place of sales techniques is a respectful attitude: Serving the client or prospect with good, sound, business judgment.  It bears repeating: The best sales techniques are NO sales techniques!  If, on the other hand, when you say “sales techniques,” you really mean “sales skills,” that is completely different.  For example, a salesperson can learn a new sales skill and still be the same, genuine person.  It’s about relating and communicating with people. In my view, relating and communicating with people is entirely individual dependent.  I can’t be you, and you can’t be me.  The minute we try to switch, heaven help us!

This book is not a book of clever sales techniques.  Instead, it is a book about developing the skill of big-time sales campaign management and sales techniques per se have nothing to do with sales campaign management. The book is simply about a philosophical approach to winning bigger opportunities and managing the accompanying long cycle far better.

In the closest thing to sales techniques you will find in Closing the Whales is an explanation of how the bigger, complex opportunities, and their long sales cycles are different from those that are less complex and conclude reasonably quickly.  The first key to getting a campaign airborne is not about clever sales techniques.  It is about convincing the potential client of the importance of the assessment or diagnostic phase. The potential client must understand that a very thorough assessment is in everyone’s best interest.  How a salesperson convinces a potential client is not an issue of sales techniques.  It is about the logic of how to approach an important decision.  Too, only the potential client is in a position to help conduct that process.  There is no such thing as “consultative selling” unless professional assessments are standard practice, in my view!  Is that sales techniques 101?  In my view that is a sales skill!

Learn to trade in your sales techniques for new sales skills! Get your copy of Closing the Whales today!