In my opinion there are only a few professions that are truly recession proof and one of those professions is sales. How can I make this claim? The answer was provided to me by an old boss many years ago. He told me every company has two problems: sales and everything else. Without sales you never get the chance to get to the “everything” end of the problem. Think about it, as we toil through what is arguably the greatest recession we have faced in living memory (it may not be another Great Depression but it will definitely turn out to be the Great Recession) companies are going bust right and left, many due to the simple fact that they cannot sell their inventory. Let’s take GM or Chrysler, for example: their unsold cars are piling up in sales lots across the nation and throughout the world. Thousands upon thousands of unsold vehicles just sit there gather dust, waiting to be sold. Will these cars sell themselves? Of course not, they must be sold by sales people. Selling must begin. Value must be established. Price needs to be negotiated. And the deals must be closed.

Now, more than ever, sales people are needed. And it obviously neither starts nor ends with cars. There are houses that need to be sold. Appliances. Stocks. Bonds. Securities of every flavor. And yes, even mortgages. Without a mortgage there is no sale of a house. Without a loan many people cannot buy household goods and appliances. And without credit small businesses cannot “do business.” It’s the circle of business life and I, would argue, it begins and ends with selling.
Quite frankly if you are currently under or un-employed and have the ability or desire sell I would highly recommend that you look at businesses that are in dire need of selling their inventory. They have no choice: either sell or die. SELL or DIE: if this isn’t a great motivator for hiring people I don’t know what is. A salesperson that can prove his or her worth to such a company will be a true sight for sore eyes.

As I have often said, selling isn’t easy, nor for the faint of heart, but it is an essential profession, now more than ever. Businesses can survive without a product marketing manager, or an accountant, or a receptionist for a period of time; but what businesses cannot survive without is salespeople. Perhaps this will be the beginning of a whole new generation of great salespeople who came in on the ground floor of the Great Recession and sold the world back into fortune. I’m betting on it.

They come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Some are long, others short. You will find them thick as well as thin. Some are old and wrinkly; others are young and taught. By now I think you know what I am talking about.

Salespeople, of course.

The stereotype of the exemplary sales man or woman seems to be that of a perfectly manicured, well dressed, attractively young, executive flying around the world closing what appears to be huge deals by day, retiring into the luxury of a five star hotel where everyone (apparently on the sidelines looking in) enviously asks, “Who is he/she sleeping with?” The implication is all the right people. Memorable commercial but far from reality.

Over the years I have had numerous prospective salespeople tell me they would like to go into sales but they don’t think they look the part.

“And how are you supposed to look?” I ask.

The usual answer is something like, “I don’t know: tall, fit, and well dressed.”

“You forgot the part about being able to walk on water,” I’ve responded on more than one occasion when this topic comes up.

What I can guarantee you is that your outward size or look means very little; what grows within means everything. I have had the pleasure of working with many successful sales people who do not look anything like the guy or gal in the notorious Westin commercials. Quite frankly, they look average, of normal height, weight, and build. Some are fat and out of shape. One winning salesperson has a noticeable lisp. One very successful Estate Agent dons a wickedly bad haircut. He always looks as if he just got out of bed—but it works for him. Success in sales is more about finding your voice than buying a pair of designer shoes. The point is: Don’t second guess the way you look. It’s not primarily about appearance. It’s about attitude, perseverance, and belief in yourself and what you are selling.

Now before you put on a pair of cut offs and flip flops on your way to the office, hear me out. You have to dress appropriately to be successful. For some of us this means suits or and designer dresses, yet for others it’s simply smartly pressed business casual. The point is, dress for “your success”—not someone else’s. Know who you are and then wear it well. As one mentor said to me years ago, “To succeed in this business you have to be comfortable in your own skin.”

Winston Churchill
Danny DeVito
Elvis Presley
Rob Reiner
Oprah Winfrey
Steve Ballmer
Bill Clinton
Jack Black
Even Donald Trump

All of these people and many more like them are or were comfortable in their skin. Each person is enormously successful in their respective disciplines, be that politics, entertainment, or business. They come in different sizes and shapes, but what they all have in common is a sense of self. Let’s face it, no one is perfect. I have yet to meet a person—man or woman—who has said to me, “I like the way I look.” Everyone has something they would like different. So be it, that’s life. The point is you need to accept who you are and use it to your benefit.

The size of a person cannot be found in one’s dimension, or height or length, or volume. The true measure of a person comes from within. To quote Emerson, “Man is that noble endogenous plant, which grows, like the palm, from within, outward.”

Size Really Does Matter. It’s measured by your spirit within.

I just lost a sale and I am really upset. I was counting on winning this deal. I really expected it; the company really needed it; and my quota required it. But I lost.

The “we are sorry to inform you” phone call was followed up with a classic “Dear John” email.

“On behalf of the entire procurement team, we thank your for participating in our recent bid. You submission was of the highest quality, unfortunately, upon careful review of your proposal we have determined that your solution is not the best fit for our company at this point in time. Should our requirements change we will be in contact with you. Thank you for your time and we wish you the very best in your future endeavors.”

C’mon say it like it is: We don’t like you or the horse you rode in on. Please leave, please don’t call. And, oh yes, don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out of our office.

Losing sucks. It brings out the very worst in a salesperson. It’s like a punch to the gut that goes far deeper into your psyche that you ever want to admit. It makes you feel inadequate, vulnerable, and very much at risk. Sales people are hired to win—not lose. And we all know what happens if you lose too often: you find yourself out of a job. Everyone knows this reality either from personal experience or from watching the littered many along this road called sales. Losing sucks!

Now at this point in my entry everyone is expecting me to turn this lost sale into a golden opportunity. Turn those lemons into lemonade. I should be saying to myself, SELF it is time to “grieve over it, but get over it.” Be kind to yourself, says the Stuart Smalley voice in my head: You’re Good Enough, You’re Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like You. B. S. Right now I don’t fee like ANYBODY likes me. I just lost a deal, a deal everyone was counting on, a deal I spent months working on, and a deal that I was forecasting. Don’t tell me I’m good enough, because today I’m not. Losing sucks!

So Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, my entry today does not have a happy ending. There is no silver lining in my message other than this is part of the reality of living the life of a salesperson: you win some; you lose some. And losing isn’t fun. This entry is all about what it feels like to lose. I will get over it. I will move beyond it. But not today. Today I will take on sack cloth, cover myself in ashes, and agonize over my loss.

Is it time for an Autology check? I do them periodically whether I think I need it or not.

Autology is the art of studying oneself. As sales men and women we need to constantly do “autology checks” to make sure all of our sales skills are in good working order.

Not too long ago I performed one such audit and found myself lacking. I had been working closely with a colleague who had a nasty habit of verbal stuttering, the “ah, and um, and well em” type of stutter. I found his speech pattern to be very annoying and a huge distraction to his overall delivery. During one of his presentations I counted no fewer than 40 verbal stutters. “Wow,” I thought to myself. “This is a real problem.” And then I had a hunch.

The next day I video taped myself delivering a presentation I would be giving before a large audience the following month. And much to my surprise I found what I secretly suspected, I stuttered my way through the entire presentation. When I brought this to my wife’s attention she told me that I had, indeed, picked up this nasty habit. And habit it was. Somehow by spending so much time with my associate, his pattern of stuttering had rubbed off on me. But no excuses. It was up to me to correct it. It was no ones fault but my own. Over the next week I taped myself no fewer than 10 times. And every time I turned on the video camera I was consciously aware of what I was trying to avoid. The first three tapings were a disaster. I couldn’t believe how bad I was. But slowly, by the six taping I finally got the verbal stuttering under control. To this day I tape myself to make sure it doesn’t creep back up.

How about you? Are there nasty habits in your repertoire of sales skills that need brushing up? The following is a checklist I put together for myself. I hope it will prove helpful.

1. Practice makes perfect. Tape yourself doing a presentation and look for verbal stuttering or patterns of speech that distract from the overall persuasiveness of your presentation.
2. Check, check, and recheck again the spelling of every letter, presentation, or proposal before it leaves your desk. You will be surprised how many typos you will find. The goal is for you to find them instead of your customer or prospect.
3. Smile then “think” before you dial. As sales people we all have a tendency to dial our customers and prospects first before we really know what we are going to say. What are you closing for? What is the purpose of the call? Know the answer to what you want before you ever pick up the phone.
4. How do you look when you go out the door? Is your suit in order but your shoes are all scuffed up? You only get one chance to make a good first impression. Look your best.
5. Who am I selling against today? Often times you will know; other times you will not. Regardless it is always a good habit to ask yourself, “Who is the competition?” The more you know about your competitors the better prepared you will be to sell against their strengths and exploit their weaknesses.
6. Think positively, as often as you can. It is truly amazing how a positive attitude can dramatically affect your success. You may consider this blindingly obvious but I dare say you will catch yourself with a negative attitude far more often than you want to admit. As the saying goes, “attitude is everything.” Make sure you never leave home with anything but a positive one.

And so the list goes on. I encourage you to do your own “autology check.” It will be time well spent.

Practice makes perfect. That’s what my mother use to always say to me as a child. It didn’t matter what the subject or situation was, practice was the answer. I distinctly remember a baseball discussion on this topic. I wanted to play on the local Little League team and it wasn’t going well.

“Really?” she queried, “you want to play better baseball?”

“Of course Mom. No one wants to be bad at baseball. You spend all your time sitting on the bench if you are.”

“And you never get to play, right?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s because you haven’t practiced enough. And until you do, you won’t get to play.”

As I young boy this is not what I wanted to hear but she was absolutely correct. If I really wanted to play on the Little League team I needed to get better, and there was only one way to do it: practice, practice some more, then practice again.

The conversation with my mother so many years ago was brought forward in my mind this past week as I read an article in the London Times on, guess what? You got it: practice.

“The search for success has spawned a motivational industry worth millions of pounds and libraries full of self-improvement books.”

“It is practice, however, that makes perfect, and according to the sociologist whose books have become required reading within the Conservative party. The best way to achieve international stardom is to spend 10,000 hours honing your skills, says the new book by Malcolm Glawell, author of the best selling The Tipping Point.”(The Sunday Times, 19.10.08, page seven),

The writer of the article goes on to note great athletes like tennis star Boris Becker, rugby icon Johnny Wilkinson, and golfing legend, Tiger Woods. All of these athletes started their “practice” when they were children. They achieved greatness in their prime through practice in their youth. And it cannot happen any other way. No one is instantly good at anything—especially a profession.

Sure. We all would like life—and especially work–to be easier. But the truth is: life is hard, and it takes hard work to achieve greatness, be that in sports, or business, or sales. You cannot walk out the door and declare that you want to be a “salesperson” and expect to be a success.

Just for fun let’s apply the 10,000 hour rule to success.

There are 40 hours in a week. Divide that into ten thousand and you get 250 weeks. Divide that into 52 weeks in a year and you come out with the magic number of 4.8 years to become great at what you do. To be safe you probably want to round it off to 5 years. So if you want to be great it will take five years of hard work, dedication, and practice to achieve your goal.

How many people do you know put in this amount of time to achieve what they want? Doctors, lawyers, perhaps certain business types? When you consider the stories about entrepreneurs like Bill Gates who started working with an ASR-33 Teletype in High School and followed through with years of 100 hour weeks you can see how he achieved greatness. He practiced what he loved and he achieved unbelievable success. You could argue that he is smarter, better educated, and was in the right moment of history at the right time, and so on, but still, without the passion and practice he would not have achieved greatness.

Let’s be honest. Very few of us will actually dedicate “five years” of practice to anything, be it business or pleasure sport. And yet it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. The more you practice the better you get. And the more consistent your routine the more even the performance.

I learned early on in my selling career that if I wanted to be successful I would have to practice—a lot. I was making too many stupid mistakes without practice. I would pick up the phone and call a prospective customer and not achieve much of anything. I would go on a sales call and not close the deal. Why? I didn’t know what I really wanted to achieve before I picked up the phone or walked in the door. Stupid, right? Yet to this day, I still go on sales calls with sales men and women who don’t have a plan as to what they are out to achieve in a call or a customer visit. Why? Because they don’t practice.

If you want to be successful in sales, practice what you are going to say to your prospect before you pick up the phone; have a sales call plan finished before you drive to the customer site, and know what you are out to achieve when you get there. If you a have a presentation to give, practice it numerous times until you can give the pitch without having to look at the slides. Great salespeople are not born—they are made, through endless weeks and years of practice. I challenge you to ask any successful sales man or women how they got to where they are. I dare say all will respond with: hard work and practice.

The moral of this story is blindingly simple. As Samuel Goldwyn once said,” the harder I work the luckier I get”. Practice may not make you perfect or famous, but it will make you successful.

The global meltdown in the financial markets has taken its toll on just about everyone from the high flying bankers to conservative Germans who invested their life savings in instruments backed by Lehman Brothers and lost it all.

“It’s just not right,” a friend recently told me. “I make bad stock decisions and lose my ass. Wall Street types make bad decisions and they get a government bail out. How does that work?”

“Not well,” was my response followed by a wandering commentary on how life is not fair, nor equal to all.

One associate I know is actually getting of the banking business. He said the crisis has helped him clear his head. He is applying to become a teacher. “I’ve decided that I want to make a difference—not make money. Selling is not for me. It’s too easy to lose your soul.”

Money and selling; the two go hand in hand; you cannot have one without the other. The fact is salespeople get into the selling profession to make money. They also get into the business for many other reasons like satisfying customer needs, designing business solutions for their clients, or taking customer satisfaction personally; but in the end, successful salespeople go into the selling profession to make money. I have never encountered a winning salesperson who says money is not a major factor in their drive and success. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Entrepreneur and businesswoman Anita Roddick said it best, “Just because you are in business does not mean you have to lose your soul.” But some people do.

Personally, I think Richard Fuld, ex-chief of the now bankrupt investment firm Lehman Brothers has lost his soul. I watched with total amazement as Fuld sat before the House Panel defending his position. One congressman asked him if he thought it was fair that while he (Fuld) went home with over 300 or 400 million dollars other lost it all? Fuld answered the congressman’s question with an argument. It wasn’t 300 or 400 hundred million; it was, he argued, only 250 or 275 million. I couldn’t believe my ears. No sorry. No I feel bad for all these people. No taking of responsibility that I could have done something differently to prevent this. No, his response was he deserved it. He displayed no sense of guilt whatsoever. He is the modern day equivalent of Gordon Gekko from the movie, Wall Street. “Greed is good.”

The truth is greed isn’t good and greed always gets you in trouble. For greed is quite different from wanting to be successful. Greed by definition is the desire to possess more than one needs or deserves. A successful person knows when to stop, give thanks, and move on. For a greed driven person it is never enough, there is always more to be made, higher returns to be had, that is, until it all comes tumbling down.

You can be a successful salesperson without losing your soul or your direction. You just have to stay focused and keep you eye on what really matters. The events of the past several weeks caused me to revisit the sayings of one of my favorite thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I keep his book of essays near my bed stand. This particular book I bought in the early 70s when I was an exchange student living in London. It cost me 40 pence. And it has given me great food for thought all these years. On this particular occasion I found myself re-reading his essay on “Self Reliance.” It is particularly good wisdom for a sales person.

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, or worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”

The soul of a successful salesperson is filled with wisdom, insight, and caution wrought through years of tilling his or her patch of ground and being satisfied with all the rewards it brings.

I’ve been off line for the past several weeks personally caught up in the downward spiral of the financial markets. I do not work in finance but I have many friends and business partners who do. One associate worked for Lehman Brothers. I found out from his wife at my son’s school. Just before the bank went bust all its cash was repatriated to New York leaving the staff at Canary Wharf in London to fend for themselves. It was a sore sight to behold. Minutes after their leader Meissner declared, “It’s over, move on” some 4000 London based employees began carrying their boxes out of the door at One Bank Street, Canary Wharf. It’s a humbling experience when your work a day world is reduced to a cardboard box of personal items.

I was carrying boxes last week too. Fortunately I didn’t lose my job. I was just moving office. But the effect was the same. I carefully packed my files and folders into a series of boxes. I decided the best way to transport them would be by cab. I’d make a couple of trips over the next few days, carrying 3 or 4 boxes at a time. The day after Lehman went bust I carried my first three boxes out onto the street. The reaction was amazing; you would think I had leprosy. As I carefully placed my boxes near the curb, young urban professionals who were taking a smoke break quickly stubbed out their cigarettes and moved on. They didn’t care to watch. Maybe they were afraid they would catch something. I wanted to say to them, “But wait, I don’t work for Lehman. I still have a job.” I just smiled instead.

I hailed a cab and I was quickly met by a sympathetic driver who literally jumped out of his car to help me with my boxes. This was a first. London cab drivers never get out of their car unless requested.

“How is your day going?” he asked.

I knew there was more to the question than he was asking. I simply replied, “O.K.”

“I just returned from Canary Wharf,” he said. “It’s a blood bath down there. I had to get away.”

“I understand,” I replied. “The City (as the financial district in London is referred to) is a very ugly place right now and probably will be for some time.”

“Tell me about it,” my cab driver said. “I just dropped off a guy who lost his job before he even started. He moved himself, lock, stock, and barrel, from France to London only to turn up at his employer’s door to be told he was already redundant. Can you imagine? He’s got a new lease on his flat, bills to pay, and no job. If it hadn’t been for the fire in the Chunnel (the Eurostar) he probably would have at least gotten one day in before they sacked him.”

This is supposed to be an inspirational blog about selling situations and overcoming difficult circumstances against all odds. But I have to tell you, honestly, I’m not feeling very inspired these days. I feel more like I did when I lived in New York City in the late 70s, where everyone, including myself, had been mugged. It was a constant topic of conversation. It was only a matter of time before it happened to you. That’s what I was feeling like, beat up, worried, and anxious about the future. No wonder the smokers fled the scene of my boxes. Nobody wants to wait around for a shoe to drop.

But now my story takes a different direction, and of all places, into my son’s High School auditorium. I was attending a guest lecture with my wife. The speakers were Lee and Bob Woodruff.

In January of 2006 Bob Woodruff had it all. He had just been named the co-anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, inheriting the mantle held by Peter Jennings for many years. He had a loving wife, four beautiful children, and an amazing future in front of him. And then, just like the title of his book, “In an Instant” it was taken away. Working on assignment in Iraq, Bob was hit by an IED in the tank he was riding in. It just about killed him. He was in a coma for months. I remember hearing the news report about the accident. “What a tragedy,” I said to my wife. “He had it all and now this. I doubt he will survive.”

But survive he did thanks to his patient and loving wife and family who literally nursed him back to health As I sat in the auditorium Bob told stories about his children teaching him how to speak again. He was humble; he was honest; he was inspiring; he brought tears to my eyes.

Near the end of the talk Lee Woodruff reminded the audience of what is important.
I don’t recall her exact words but knowing that many in the audience either worked for or had been affected by the turmoil in the financial industry she asked us to think carefully about what we hold dear. She reminded us that what we have can be taken from us in an instant. She suggested we reach out to those we love and never take life—or even a day—for granted. It is a simple lesson that is difficult to follow.

Some of the people who lost their jobs in the financial meltdown deserve what they got; many do not. Bob Woodruff did not deserve what happened to him but the way he and his family have handled their tragedy is inspiring. What I learned from Lee and Bob Woodruff sitting in that school auditorium is that often times you don’t really know what you have until you lose it. Sometimes your priorities get all mixed up in the turmoil of the day and you lose all direction. Sometimes you have to get back to basics, reset your north star and plot a course for a different future. This is true in business; and is absolutely true in life.

The Lazy Millionaire? C’mon, Gimmie a break. As the Republican Vice Presidential candidate would say, I’ve got a little news flash: Lazy Millionaire? There is no such thing. It is absolute Lipstick Hogwash.

But according to an add that wormed its way into my Inbox, I too can

BE A LAZY MILLIONAIRE. A Lazy—Google–Millionaire at that.

The add is classic P.T. Barnum:

Make Cash Every Day Working From Home

-No experience necessary!
- Just fill out the forms and collect cash!
- Work from home.
- Easy to follow System.

A buxom blonde with an enormous smile introduces the advertisement, while a Pop-Up brunette comes onto the screen talking about all the money you can make but, wait, there are now only minutes left for you to take advantage of this once in a lifetime offer.

O.K, I say. Laughable, but intriguing. So I dig a little deeper.

Learn how a stay at home mom with no experience earned $107.370.00 in just six months, just by filling out forms and doing searches on Google and Yahoo. And she has the beautiful multi-million dollar house to prove it, the Land Rover in the driveway, and pictures of her recent Maldives Island vacation.

So what’s the catch? It’s buried in the fine print.

By filling out the “form” you agree to pay $72.00 dollars a month (until you wake up to reality) for the internet service that supposedly gives you all this great stuff.

Time for a reality check:

Nobody makes $100,000.00 filling out forms.
Just because you can “fog a mirror” does mean you are destined to be a millionaire.
Besides, $100,000.00 won’t even pay the mortgage on the featured house the blonde babe claims to live in, let alone the other stuff. Idiots don’t make money for doing nothing. Sometimes con artists do.

So why would I waste time on an article about a get rich spam add circling the internet? Because it is indicative of the mentality of the get rich, give me something for nothing, mentality that pervades our society. I call it the lottery syndrome and I dedicate several chapters in my book to this very issue. (“The Prize Pony and No Such Thing as Luck”).

“C’mon Greg, chill out. It’s all harmless fun. Nobody really believes it.”

That’s the problem; too many people DO believe it. If you spend even one minutes of your day contemplating how to get rich without doing any work, you have wasted precious time. There is absolutely no substitute for HARD WORK, regardless of how much we want to believe it or let others tell us it is possible.

Warren Buffet
Bill Gates
Li-Ka-Shing
Larry Ellison
Carlos Slim Helu
Ingvar Kamprad
Amancio Ortega

Who are these men, Lazy Millionaires? No, they are hard working Billionaires, some of the richest men on the planet (see blog article “The Starting 10”). Each one of them has a history of working against all odds, for endless hours, believing in their dreams, and willing to work as hard as it takes to achieve it.

It wasn’t the Donald who first said, “The harder I work the luckier I get,” it was Samuel Goldwyn. But the point is well made: there is no easy path to success, no short cuts, no get rich quick schemes. Just hard work.

Hard work is the mother of invention; hard work is the path to success; hard work is the way to become a millionaire. It won’t happen overnight, but it definitely can happen. I have met dozens of millionaires from all walks of life. Real Estate sales men and women, shoe sales men and women, dry cleaning owners, insurance sales men and women, pharmaceutical sales men and women, computer and software sales men and women, even door to door sales men and women. You name the profession; there are millionaires in every category. And the key to their success is knowing that it doesn’t come easy. It begins with the realization that your success depends on YOU and your willingness to work as hard and as long as it takes to achieve your goals.

Many years ago when I went to work for NCR Corporation in Seattle, Washington. As a new sales person I was ushered into a room along with my associates where our District Manager, Ron Beck addressed us. To this day I will never forget his words.

“I know all of you are nervous. You wonder if you have what it takes to be a successful sales person? Well I am here to tell you that the answer is yes. I repeat, yes. You may not be a superstar but if you are willing to work hard you will be successful.”

If a lifetime in sales has taught me anything it is that the words of Ron Beck still ring true. If you are willing to work hard you WILL be successful. The sky is the limit, and it’s all up to you how far you want to go.

Carpe Diem!

Knowing how to qualify a prospect is one of the most important lessons in selling you can learn. The truth is: if you can’t qualify—you will never close. I was reminded of this last week when I attempted to join a health club.

A new gym was soon to open in my neighborhood. The window displays proudly featured young athletic people in different forms of exercise from swimming in their new Olympic size pool, to running on their new treadmills, to using one of their many cross trainers, to lifting weights, smiling all the while. The motto was catchy, “Welcome, Better living starts here. We will give you the fastest way to get the results you want.”

I had been thinking about joining a health club in London for some time. The problem was I could not find a gym that was conveniently located near my home or office. But now with a state of the art health club opening up just four blocks from my flat I had to at least check it out.

When I entered the reception area I was greeted by a young woman who asked me if she could answer any questions.

“As a matter of fact yes,” I responded. “I have been watching the progress of this facility for some months. I decided to drop by and find out about membership.”

“Great,” she said. “I can definitely help you with that.” And so we began. I asked her about what type of equipment they had; her product knowledge was great. I asked about their hours of operation, how many people they expected during peak times, what type of classes they offered, and so on. Again, she knew all the answers and responded to every question with confidence. She even took the time to find out a bit about me. She discovered that I was originally from Seattle, Washington. She was from Vancouver, Canada, about a six hour drive from Seattle. We even talked about the great skiing in Whistler. And then we moved from the product knowledge and “getting to know your customer” phase to the real issue at hand: signing me up for the club. This is where the girl from Vancouver fell apart. She couldn’t qualify.

I was very specific about my needs. Even before she tried to close me I explained to her all of my requirements from flexible hours, to variety of equipment , to a short contract of three to six months, and a discount, if possible. I even indicated that I could get my wife to sign up if it was worth my while.

The truth is, I was an easy sale—or so I thought.

“I’m sorry we don’t give discounts for multiple people.”

“Really?”

“Nope, but I can give you a discount on your membership fee if you sign up today. Instead of 70 pounds it will only cost you 10.”

“And what is the term of the membership?” I asked.

“One year,” she replied with glee. “So, are you ready to sign up?”

That would be a big NO I thought to myself but I replied with, “I don’t think so.”

“But if you don’t’ sign up now you won’t be able to get the membership discount.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” I said. And with that I walked out of the club a disappointed prospect. I resigned myself to running in Regent’s park and using free weights at home. End of story.

But three days later I received a text on my mobile phone saying: “Come and see your new club. Tours are available.”

Hmm, I thought. I really did want to tour the facility which I didn’t get a chance to do last time. But, why bother?, I asked myself, the terms aren’t right. But for some reason I decided to call them back.

This time a got a different sales person . “This is Tom. How can I help?”

“I just received a text on my phone saying that you are giving tours of the gym.”

“Yes, when would you like to come in?”

“I could come in tomorrow but there is one major problem.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I’m not willing to sign up for 12 months.”

“You don’t have to,” he immediately replied. “We have several different options. You could sign up for as little as three months and then rent month by month thereafter. It will cost you a little bit more but it will give you the short term flexibility you need.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s not what I heard when I came in last week.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he replied. “But I’m glad I could clear this up. When would you like to come in? “Way to close for the appointment, I thought. I told him I’d drop by during lunchtime the following day.

When I met Tom in the reception area the next day I also saw the sales person from Vancouver. I could tell she was surprised to see me. I smiled and then proceeded to follow Tom into the gym. I was very impressed with the facility and I signed up for a three month membership that afternoon. I left a satisfied customer.

But no sooner had I walked out the door when my phone rang. “Hello.”

“Hello, this is the girl from Vancouver you met last week, remember me?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Why didn’t you join with me last week?”

“Because you told me I had to sign up for a year and I was not willing to do that,” I quickly replied.

“Hmm, I don’t recall that being an issue she said.”

“It was,” I said, “a big issue.”

“Well, I’m glad you joined. See you around.”

The problem with the girl from Vancouver was that she failed to qualify me in.

Qualifying is an art that takes time and practice. And there are two sides to qualifying: Qualifying people “in”, and qualifying people “out.” Unfortunately, we tend to center in on qualifying people out and forget about qualifying people in.

I will never forget the qualifying lines I learned at Xerox:

Will they buy?
Will they buy in the foreseeable future?
Will they buy from me?

If the answer was no to any of the three questions then I was taught to move on to the next prospect; go knock on the next door.

But the other side of qualifying is just as important. It is the “qualifying in” side of the technique. All too often inexperienced salespeople fail to qualify “in” their potential customers. And if you don’t qualify your prospect in, they will more often than not—qualify you out.

I qualified out the salesperson from Vancouver and she didn’t even see it coming. She didn’t listen carefully enough to what I was telling her. She was so focused on her standard closing lines that she forgot to listen to what I was telling her. What she should have done was qualify me in, instead of rattling off the terms of the agreement. She should have brought me into the sale instead of push me out.

In retail sales it is especially important to carefully qualify in your clients. You only get once chance. If you let them walk out the door odds are they will never come back.

The girl from Vancouver could have easily qualified me in simply by understanding that my “hot button” was a short-term agreement.

“If I can offer you a three month agreement will you sign up today?”

If she would have asked me that question I would have said yes. But she didn’t, and so her colleague got the sale.

There is a time and a place to qualify OUT prospects that have no intention to buy your product or service. But there is also an equally important time to carefully qualify IN your potential customer. Find out what they are looking for? Asking probing questions. Determine your prospect’s “hot button” and then carefully qualify them in.

A qualified customer leads to an easy close.

I spent a week this summer cruising the San Juan Islands of Washington State and Canada in my boat. There are roughly one hundred and seventy islands that make up the San Juan archipelago which lies off the mainland of Washington State and continues into the Canadian Gulf Islands. The further up you go the more remote it becomes. Many of the islands are uninhabited, but several are quite large and well known to tourists worldwide, in particular, San Juan, Lopez, and Orcas Islands. The topic for discussion today occurs daily at Roche Harbor on San Juan Island.

Roche Harbor has long been a favorite destination for boaters seeking rest, relaxation, great sunsets, and a sense of a by-gone era where children fish, parents read papers and books, and everyone tries their hand at catching crab. The harbor is located on the northern tip of San Juan Island in a historical setting with breath taking views of the harbor filled with beautiful—and often extremely expensive—boats. The “on the water” boat show, as everyone refers to it, is half the fun of the harbor. During dinner hour you take your beverage of choice and walk up and down the docks admiring the boats with a bit of fascination and envy. Multi-million dollar boats are the norm; small boats are increasingly the exception. John Wayne use to bring his boat here. Now people like Paul Allen of Microsoft fame, and CEOs from Northwest and California companies are the summer residents who moor their boats at Roche Harbor for several weeks, if not the entire summer. With this, of course comes a problem, and a smelly one at that. The problem is: what to do with all the waste from the heads (code word for bathrooms)? Someone has to deal with it. Enter in the “Phecal Freak.”

The billboard mounted on his boat says it all: Our Motto: WE TAKE CRAP FROM ANYONE. “M.V. Phecal Phreak kinda says it all. . .This entrepreneurial captain of the sea takes his little pumper boat out to moored yachts and pumps out their crapola. Gotta like someone who proudly proclaims their mission in life for all to see and smell.” Talk about taking “you know what from people” and loving it, which brings me to the point of this story.

If you want to be a successful sales person you are going to have to learn to take more than your fair share of crap from people. Whether you like it or not, some of your clients are going to dish is out, both consciously and unconsciously. One of my associates told me there are only two types of people in life: People who dish it out and those who take it. “The goal is to be on the giving—not the receiving—end of this reality.” One of my best customers would also joke with me about salespeople being the only “non-protected class.” We can give you ***t all day long.” Moral of the story: salespeople are primarily on the receiving end.

So what’s the point you ask? Stay away from a life of selling? Anything but. The point is that throughout your live you will receive crap from prospects, customers, friends, associates, and even family. It’s just a fact of life. Now, how you receive it will determine the outcome. M.V. Phecal views the smelly issue as an opportunity. He does a job that no one else really wants to do, and in so doing, gets paid handsomely for it. He is an entrepreneur who truly turns lemons into lemonade and takes it all the way to the bank.

Many years ago when I first started working for Xerox I would spend my days knocking on doors in downtown Seattle. My job was to sell copiers to companies. My daily quota was to knock on no less than 20 doors a day. I got my fair share of sales but I also encountered people were often rude, short tempered, and sometimes down right mean. One experience remains vivid in my memory to this day. I had sold an entry level copier over the phone to a company in the industrial district of Seattle known as SoDo (South of the Dome). The owner said if I would bring the copier to his office he would purchase it from me. So I said yes. Now the copier was actually quite heavy, around 80 plus pounds. But what I remember most was having to lug that copier up a flight of a hundred or so steps to the back office entry of the company. By the time I arrived at the platform I was out of breath and sweating. I remember wiping the sweat off my face before I dared enter the door; after all I was a professional salesperson. Once inside I asked for the owner who quickly came out from the back office.

“So this is the copier?” he asked examining it.

“Yes, it is sir,” I replied. “Pre-programmed as you asked and ready to go. All you have to do is plug it in and start using it.”

“Great. Did you bring the contract with you.”

“Absolutely, here it is,” I said extending my arm to give him the contract, “all you have to do is sign it and I will bill you for the product.” And then it happened.
He grabbed the contract and tore it up in front of me. “Sorry, but I found this copier for $50.00 less from one of your competitors. Please pick up your copier and leave my office as soon as you can.”

His words literally knocked the wind out of me. I was absolutely speechless. I picked up the torn contract, put it in my pocket, and then proceeded to lug the copier back down the stairs. I didn’t know what to think. I returned to the office with my tail tucked between my legs.

“Get over it Greg. The guy was a jerk,” my boss said when I told him the story. “He gets his jollies out of giving sales people crap. What you have to do is shake it off, learn from it, and move on.”

“What am I suppose to learn from this?” I asked my boss, “that people are jerks? That getting screwed is what sales is about?”

“No,” he replied calmly. “What you need to learn is that sales is about rejection and sometimes it comes in the form of someone giving you crap. What you need to do is learn how to take it and learn from it.”

“Oh,” I said in frustration. “So the life of a saleman is about taking crap from people? If that’s true then I think my days are numbered.”

“No,” he said. “A life of sales is about learning how to deal with people giving you crap, because it will happen all the time. That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he smiled. “How you receive it is the name of the game. People will always dish it out, some more than others. I assure you this will never stop. But you don’t have to take it. You can hear it. You can even feel it. But you have to learn to let it slide off you. In this case, chock it up to having experienced what it feels like to get duped by an unqualified prospect.”

“Wait a minute. He was qualified. He told me he was going to buy the copier.”

“Did you find out why? Did he ask lots of probing questions before he decided to buy? Did you have to handle many objections before he said yes? If the answer is ‘no’ then you didn’t discover that he was price driven—completely. He would have sold his grandmother for a dollar less. You need to watch out for these types of customers. You need to learn how to handle them more effectively. The next time you will know it going into the sale, right?”

“Absolutely,” I yelled back. “Count on it.”

My boss was right. The sale that seemed too easy was; and equally as true, the crap he dealt me was unfounded but the reality of this type of customer. The guy was an unqualified jerk. But the truth is salespeople do not get to choose their customers. We cannot say, “I’ll take a handful of these nice, easy customers, and leave the nasty ones to someone else.” Sales doesn’t work that way. You and I have a product to sell to the public at large. Part of successful selling is learning how to sell to “every type” not just the “nice types.”

Am I saying that to be a salesman means that you have to take crap from people? Absolutely not. But I am saying that you will have to learn to deal with this smelly stuff that people verbally throw around. If I had qualified my prospect better I probably would never have lugged that copier up all those stairs. I would have established that all he was interested in was price—not service, reputation, or quality. I should have qualified him out. He had no intention of buying from me. He just used me to get a lower price from someone else. It was a hard lesson to learn but one that I never forgot. Ever since then my “crap detector” has been fine tuned to deal with whatever may come my way.

The true is, some thirty years on, I still get crap from customers and prospects; some of it is warranted (I am not a perfect person), some of it not, and some of it is in jest. What I have learned is how to decipher the difference and work through it. As I reveal in one of the chapters in my book, somewhere amidst all that crap is a prize pony; sometimes you have to dig through it to find it.