Everything You Learned About Sales Is Backwards

[Guest Post by: Bob Burg and John David Mann, coauthors of Go-Givers Sell More*]

“I’m no good at selling!” Have you ever heard someone say that? Or maybe said it yourself? (Now, tell the truth.)

We hear it all the time. Everyone who is not in sales thinks, “I could never sell” — and most people who are in sales secretly think the same thing.

There is a reason people feel this way: most of us look at sales backwards. Backwards how? In the most fundamental ways.

For example.

They see sales as convincing people to do something they don’t want to do. It’s not: it is about learning what people do want to do and then helping them do that.

They think sales is about taking advantage of others. Not so: in fact, it’s about giving others more advantage.

Most people think of sales as a talking business. Nope: it’s really a listening business.

Classic sales training focuses on the “close.” The true sales greats hardly notice the close — they are too busy focusing on the open.

But the biggest inversion of all, the great upside-down misconception about sales, is that it is an effort to get other people to do something. Ask most anyone to define sales and you will hear some variation of this: “Sales is getting people to buy something.”

The truth about sales is that it isn’t about getting at all. Sales at its best, at its most effective, is precisely the opposite: it is about [Read more…]