History of American Sales Culture - part one

No American can afford to treat salesmanship as a small matter. Why? Because the United States started out on a salesmanship basis for this reason: because only thirteen states were gained by war and all the others were gained by purchase and bargaining.



On five great historic occasions Uncle Sam went out with his money in his hand and bought more real estate. In 1803 he bought Louisiana from Napoleon for $15,000,000. Thomas Jefferson drove the bargain and actually picked up fourteen new States at a price of two and a half cents an acre. That was the greatest real estate transaction known to history. It doubled the size of the United States and gave us a huge territory.

In 1822 James Monroe bought Florida from Spain at a marked-down price of $5,000,000 less than the value of a handful of Google shares of today. Then, just after the Civil War and for no particular purpose, Uncle Sam bought Alaska. He paid $7,200,000 and got plenty of blame for throwing away good money for snow- drifts. For thirty years Alaska was generally regarded as a bad bargain, and then some half frozen trapper found the Klondike. In the best time of the gold-rush Alaska paid for itself, in gold, about once in every four months.

Our fourth real estate purchase was the buying of the Philippines. As to just why we did it no one has ventured to tell, for we first thrashed Spain and then to salve her injured feelings, we gave her $20,000,000 for an archipelago off the coast of China.
This archipelago had not been advertised. It was not up-to-date or serviceable. There was no demand for it. But, as almost all other nations own a few antiques, we thought that we could afford a private collection.

The Panama Canal site cost us $40,000,000; very nearly as much as all the others combined. We paid a million dollars a mile for a non-existent canal, which proves that Roosevelt was at least not as clever a bargainer as Thomas Jefferson. But we had to have it, and it is a source of national pride and marine shipping accomplishment.

So, it was buying and selling that gave us half our territory; and it is also a fact, not usually recognized, that salesmanship played an important part in preserving the Union. While it was Lincoln and Grant who put down the Rebellion, it was Jay Cooke, the famous banker, who sold the bonds and brought in the money.

Jay Cooke was unquestionably the first to launch a national sales campaign. In 1864 he was appointed by Lincoln as Sales Manager of bonds, at a time when the Federal Government was at its wits' end for money. At once Cooke sent out more than four thousand agents. He established a press bureau the first in the world, maybe. And he advertised the bonds in every worthwhile paper in the Northern States.

His fellow-bankers were shocked and astounded at his methods. They said he was no financier, nothing but a peddler of patent medicine. But Cooke only laughed at them and sent out another flood of hand-bills. He had a flaring advertisement hung in every Northern post-office. Such was his energy that in a few months the North went into a fit of bond-madness. After the noise and the shouting were over it was found that Cooke had sold bonds to the face value of $1,240,000,000.
TWELVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS!

Such was the result of the first national sales campaign in the United States.

End of part I

This is an excerpt from my new book "How to Sell to Americans".
Click here to get the book today!

If you live by price - you will die by price

If your prospect does not see the value in your product or service, and if the only difference between you and the competitors is in pricing, you didn’t do a good job as a sales person. The main description of your position inside the company is to create the value, not just to show your price list.

Teaching and educating customers is no longer enough, giving them information about your products or services is no longer necessary. They can get them by themselves, without ever talking to you or your company, and know more about your product and positioning on the market then you.

If they know so much about you, how can you try to sell them the same product without knowing their business situation or their needs?

Remember that customers are sophisticated; they either have or believe they can get product information more reliably on their own. Information is readily available through many different sources, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Internet is full of different forums, blogs, and review or research websites where they can get information about your product easily.

Customers don’t just want a specific product; most of the times they want to solve their pain point or business issues. A customer in today's competitive sales environment does not expect to educate the sales professional about their business. Therefore, you must already possess a solid understanding of the customer's industry, competitors, and business direction.

Developing such a comprehensive view of the customer is a task that requires extensive researching and education to get an overall picture of the customer's business industry. The modern sales person needs to focus on understanding the customer's business initiatives, strategic plans, IT environment, and key customer preferences.

If you are still seeing yourself as someone who is there to educate customers, you are living in the past. The time of product-centric sales is gone. Welcome to customer-centric approach in sales.

You need to move away from the focus on presenting your products. Instead a customer-centric approach shows that you recognize and understand your customers’ needs, which is necessary if you want to survive in a 21st Century sales environment.

Your customers are tired of salespeople who come in and are unable to address real business needs, but talk about their company and the hottest feature, or unique one that nobody else has. There are many dimensions that you are selling, and price is only one of them.

How to win the deal and not even touch the topic of discounting of your product or service?

If you base your offer on your price only, there is a good chance that someone will have lower price than you, or you can end up in the bidding war that distracts from solutions. To avoid that, base your proposal in achieving more goals for your prospects, not just to save money, because every other salesperson will say exactly the same.

Customer wants to see the value not in your product; he wants to get the value from your solution to their business problem. They must perceive unique value from you. If they cannot differentiate you from the competition, there is no reason to buy from you.

Probably you can’t differentiate much with your product, I am sure you have some unique features, but your competition has them too. Customers today can easily substitute your product with the one from your competition and still be satisfied.

So how can you differentiate?
That’s where trigger events are coming to the game.

Trigger events can help you with recognizing needs and opening the door to have a meaningful conversation with customers who have events happening. Just to be different from the competition is not really important to your customers. What they would like to see is added value.

What creates customer value?
- Skilled sales force
- Sales process itself
- Understanding their business situation today and adapting to their particular wants and needs

If you recognize customers’ needs and create the value for them, customers will move from initial meeting to a decision much easier. Communicating the value is a traditional view of selling, but in today’s world you can’t survive if you are not creating the value for the customer. And make customer realize that they are on the market.

Sales person needs to play a leading role to create the value for his customers. In each step of sales process sales person can create the value, but the most value can be created early in the process by helping customers to define their needs.

This is true especially in consultative sales where sales person can create the value recognizing customer needs with trigger events and helping them to define them better and deeper. Sales professional needs to create the specialized situation and put them on the market even they didn’t felt like that before he entered the picture.

If you are just selling your product – you are missing the point and you will die by price, as you lived by price. Customers are looking beyond the product; they are looking for the solution to their needs and your understanding of their business situation. Many times that should include help and advice too.

Different customers must be treated differently, what works for one customer may not work at all for another. Knowing about trigger events happening to your targeted prospect (and more different events is always better) you will have a very powerful tool to adjust your sales presentation to their needs, recovered with trigger events.

Concentrate on understanding your customers' business issues, and show them how to solve more than one goal with your product, create a value for them and you will go home with the contract in your pocket, whatever the price is.

Let me repeat it here once more - if you don't show the value you will definitely not win whatever your price is. Even if you have a lowest price on the market, it does not mean much to the prospect, because they don't see the difference between your product and ones from the competition. And many buyers are buying from someone who had crafted a compelling solution to their needs, then comes understanding of their needs, and after that the financial part of the deal.

Your goal as sales professional is to create value through how you’re selling, not just through what you’re selling. To be a real sales professional ready for 21st century customers, here is no question you need to change your approach, but when and how?

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Read more about Seliing in 21st Century and about trigger events (where to find them and how to use them) in my book "Trigger Events - How to Find Your Next Customer".

Click here to get the book today!

Sales 2.0 - how to sell in 21st Century

Everyone is talking about the Web 2.0 as a second generation of web-based communities and services, such as social networking sites that facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.

I firmly believe that is time to start talking about Sales 2.0.

Certainly there are many areas that sales people are affected with the new technology, pushing them to be more pro-active and having more control over the tools they are using.

To give a few examples I would say that communications with the customer is affected with Sales 2.0 because many sales reps are having their own blogs; emails are taking over the communication to a different level, many sales reps are always available due to a technology and Blackberry phones of the world, and especially internet makes it possible to do something that even decade ago was impossible – research companies before you contact them with the help of RSS feeds, Hoovers, etc.

This is an excerpt from my book "Trigger Events - how to find your next customer" . To find more about the book and how to order it visit my website www.alenmajer.com

Business Expert Webinars

Business Expert Webinars (BEW) is an international community of business experts, comprising best-selling authors, award-winning speakers, and business gurus, announced its launch today with more than 100 speakers and 700 live business education webinars. The Science and Art of Selling is a part of this big community!

A Cutting Edge Way to Increase Your Business Knowledge, Easily and Affordably!

Key points:

1. Business Expert Webinars is an international community of business experts that comprises best-selling authors, award-winning speakers, and business gurus
2. BEW is using webinar technology to deliver business eLearning
3. BEW has over 100 speakers and over 700 webinars on their schedule
4. New speakers and webinars are being added every day
5. Each webinar is sixty minutes long and taught by a live presenter on the phone and is supported by a presentation delivered over the Internet
6. The experts pick very specific topics and go deep into the subject matter
7. This is strictly business education, not an infomercial
8. Participants come away from BEW webinars with actionable information they can implement immediately
9. It is a great way for adults to learn valuable information inexpensively, without leaving the office

“We are using webinar technology to deliver business eLearning,” said Lee B. Salz, President and CEO of Business Expert Webinars. Topics include all genres of business –sales, networking, public relations, marketing, real estate, human resources, entrepreneurship, management and many others. Visitors interested in participating can view the extensive schedule and sign up for webinars at BusinessExpertWebinars.com.

Each webinar is taught by a live presenter on the phone and is supported by a presentation delivered over the Internet.

For more information, visit BusinessExpertWebinars.com.

Sales amateur vs. sales professional

In my 15+ years in different roles in sales, I have met many sales people who never bought a book about the sales in their life. They never attended a seminar about sales, which was not part of their company at the time. However, they were always complaining about how companies are not investing enough in their sales force, yet expect them to be perfect and up to date. That is the reason why they don’t want to invest in seminars on their own.

They believe that if their company does not see the value in it, why would they pay for it by themselves? Also they feel they know everything about the sales, so there is no need for spending money on books and seminars, or finding time for reading magazines or specialized websites. Many of those people who don’t learn continuously wonder why they don’t advance in their career or are skipped over again for a promotion.

I am giving you perfect examples of how the amateurs are thinking while blaming everyone around them for being unsuccessful in sales. You are the one who is making the decision. Every morning, when you look in the mirror, are you seeing the reflection of an amateur or professional?

Sales professional is someone who invests in his knowledge, who reads magazines and web portals dedicated to sales people and attends seminars and conferences. A sales person who follows the trends understands how essential it is to improve him personally.Professionals are ones they know how necessary this is to start selling more. And of course – they are the ones who are earning more.

Be different from the 95% of salespeople out there who are not investing in their knowledge, and you will start seeing the change. It will start first inside of you where you will be hungrier for the new knowledge. You will have a better conversation and better approach to your prospects and people around you will see that difference.

Your self-respect that you’ve gained with that new knowledge will make the world your oyster. Don’t wait for your employer to send you to a seminar. Be proactive, for yourself and your career. It will benefit you in the long term - with your career and most importantly you will see the difference in your wallet!

You are asking your clients to make a change, but if you are unwilling to change yourself, how can you ask your prospects to?

Your sales process will also depend on your efforts invested in research and understanding your customer base, your energy and enthusiasm about your product. If you cannot transfer enthusiasm to your prospects, you are in deep problems. When you talking about something people can feel if you are insincere, or you really know what you are talking about.

It is not what are you saying but how are you saying it.

What does it mean to be sales professional? I am not saying that you have to live, eat and breathe sales 24/7 every day for the rest of your life, but to start seeing your sales position as something more, something bigger than 9-5 job.

Whether you love your sales job or not, you have a choice to do it well or not, to be fully involved or back away, and if you have this attitude of choosing to do your work well, you will enjoy your job itself!

You can be very productive once you consciously choose to be in sales, and if you change your approach from “get things done” to actually enjoy what you do, you can get the job well done and be rewarded for your efforts.

Fulfillment in your life comes with doing a great job, whatever you do. And your occupation, in this case sales profession, is just as important to your personal health as the right food for your body.

Invest in your knowledge; put the seeds in the small steps and watering your skills and constant caring about your sales knowledge. And when the time of harvesting comes, you will have the fruits of your efforts in front of you.

To differentiate from majority of people who don’t like what they do, you have to actually enjoy what you do.

Start your day by doing your job the best you can, and try to do it for a week. Then come back next week and do it all over again. The best you can, not waiting for rewards, not asking for rewards. Don’t wait for results to come, just do the job the best you could. When first results came back, when you get positive feedback from your customers, when you close a new deal – ask yourself: What has changed?

You will start loving your job because success will come, first in small steps, but more and more day by day it will grow. Your customers will start seeing you as a knowledgeable person, your colleagues will see you with different eyes, and you will realize that all of that is important, but most important are feelings inside of you that start building – good feelings about yourself.

You will feel worthy, valuable to your customers, colleagues, and you will build that feeling inside of you that you are valuable part of your environment.

And you will start feeling that you are helping others – your colleagues to be better, your customers to find the best solution, and by helping them you are actually helping yourself to become a more valuable member of the community.

Does it make sense?

Natural order of things is in doing your best at what you do best, and the rewards will follow inevitable.

Remember this - you can't fail how hard you try it.

Big vs. Little Jobs

One morning Elizabeth Potter wakes up to find she is out of work. Her firm has been purchased and will be moving to another region of the country. Elizabeth is not in a position to move, so she begins to look for another job.

Along with hundreds of other letters, Elizabeth's application slowly hits a company that is interested and grants her an interview. This position was carved to fit the person who is satisfied with what life chooses to give out to him or her – food, clothes, place to lay his or her head, and the right to exist.

But as she progresses, she is not satisfied with just a livable wage, and presents a well prepared portfolio of what she can do. She is hired for a gain in income.

Who did she beat out for this job? Hundreds of applicants both inside the company and out, who did not fight for what they were worth. Elizabeth showed what she could do. It was not just words. The amazing thing in this case is how the internal employees failed to demonstrate that they had the performance ability for the position.

By hiring someone who could demonstrate their abilities it may mean the company can save hundreds of thousands of dollars. No inside employee could match her ability to sell her competencies. It doesn’t mean they might not have those competencies; it does mean they didn’t sell them.

In another case a company is searching for a new auditor. Outsourcing costs are running too high and the international business work seems too much for the current auditor. In the New Z-Laser Company in Pittsburgh, a thirty-five-year-old dynamo, Bill Marin, is making a name for himself in the auditor’s position, and as a leading member of the professional auditing association. On top of it he has sought international finance and marketing expertise.

His ability has been noted by outsiders as well as by those above him. So, winding slowly through the grapevine, word reached the searching company that a right person for their open position exists. They send an invitation to Bill Martin for lunch.
One month later, entrenched behind a mahogany desk in a private office, Bill Martin is on that success road to a six figure salary.

In this case the job found the person. The directors are congratulating themselves on having secured Bill’s services and are doing everything in their power to help him get a fair, square start.

Think it over.

Both Bill Martin and Elizabeth successfully sold themselves, purveyed their strong personalities, while hundreds of others, many that should have had an advantage by being current employees failed to make the effort. It did not happen overnight: both Bill and Elizabeth trained, expanded their talents, developed, and as their personal worth grew their incomes as well expanded. One of their trademarks was their dedication to a constant repetition of intended and steady tasks.
But an in-house employee should have been in line for that job. A person out of their own organization who had delivered every step of the way would have been far preferable at the time in the eyes of the employer. This person had overlooked the necessity of selling themselves and their possibilities to his employers.

There are three classes of workers:
1. The person who doesn't try;
2. The person who builds their ability but fails to demonstrate it.
3. The person of success: a combination of ever-increasing ability and constant personality selling, who wins in spite of person barriers.

And, after all, you can be what you make yourself. Often just a little longer pull and a little stronger one and the sky is your earnings limit.

On the other hand, the person, who lies down and rests; who is satisfied at any point is lost. They become one of the vast wayside army which acts as background and scenery for the ones who really follow through. Bear this in mind: the person above you today, yesterday found less in their paycheck than you do now.

For Bill and Elizabeth the future wore a cloak of question marks, too. But they pulled back that curtain and traveled the identical road that you are following. Therefore, there is no reason under a blue sky above why you can't do as much.

Now I'm going to repeat: Step by step-constantly adding to your store of knowledge-constantly fitting yourself for the step ahead, that is a step above you: study and work; use every capability within you; develop your talents and create new ones; then build yourself, your ability, and your possibilities day by day; and sell yourself all the way.

When you stop to analyze it, a salesperson selling goods has just exactly three things to do: first find a customer, then make the sales to happen, and last, but not least, that sales person has to cultivate customers to buy more.

It all comes down to selling yourself - selling personality.

You are your own wares. The person who employs you is your customer. You've got to find your customer by locating a business that offers opportunity for you and needs what you have to offer. You have to make your first sale: actually land the position.
And then, where the salesperson’s work is to make his customers buy more of his goods, your task is to build the value of your services and get a cash return - promotion - if you follow these steps.

What a person of success needs is a good margin of pay above a living wage. In that case, the job goes hunting for the person. That high-salaried person, who is worth that high price, is harder to find than proverbial needles in a haystack. Big positions find few applicants; little jobs have a waiting list.

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This is an excerpt from my new book "Crucial Points to Succeed in Sales (and Life)". Click here to read more.