Can you remember a time in your life when you felt the great satisfaction of being able to help someone solve a problem? I mean really change their circumstance? Wasn’t that just the best feeling in the world?
What if I could tell you how to do more of that? Would that be great? Wouldn’t you want to do it?
How about getting some sales training? (Cartoon sound of screeching brakes). What’s that got to do with helping people?
Let’s think about a structured way to help people. It might look like this:
1. Find people who need your help
2. Convince yourself that you can help
3. Convince them to accept your help
Makes sense, right?
But as a young engineer faced with the opportunity to double my salary by taking a job in sales, I felt as if I would be crossing to the “dark side”. As I soon found out though, my new job enabled me to do even more of the problem solving I loved. Even better, I could see how I could play a critical role in finding and solving peoples’ problems!
I had to:
- Find the people who needed my help (prospecting)
- Convince myself that I could help (qualification)
- Convince them to accept my help (closing)
That’s the sales process! Learning how to sell is learning how to help!
Yet sales training is still viewed as somehow “dirty”. It’s for hucksters who phone at dinnertime to make you buy something you don’t need. It’s for crooked politicians and slick used car salesmen.
“Not only do I not need sales training, I don’t want it, because it will make me just like them!”
I could never have been an effective CEO, without learning a structured way to help people. It was through the experience of prospecting, qualifying and closing deals that I understood the power of good sales technique in just about every business situation. But more to the point, the notion of a structured way to help people is a pretty powerful notion in every aspect of life. Isn’t it?
Now, how about some sales training?