Selling For Dummies®
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ISBN: 978-0-470-51259-3
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Tom Hopkins is the epitome of sales success. A millionaire by the time he reached the age of 27, Hopkins now is Chairman of Tom Hopkins International, one of the largest sales-training organisations in the world.
Thirty years ago, Tom Hopkins considered himself a failure. He had dropped out of college after 90 days, and for the next 18 months he carried steel on construction sites to make a living. Believing that there had to be a better way to earn a living, he went into sales – and ran into the worst period of his life. For six months, Tom earned an average of $42 a month and slid deeper into debt and despair. Pulling together his last few dollars, he invested in a five-day sales training seminar that turned his life around. In the next six months, Tom sold more than $1 million worth of $25,000 homes. At age 21, he won the Los Angeles Sales and Marketing Institute’s coveted SAMMY Award and began setting records in sales performance that still stand today.
Because of his unique ability to share his enthusiasm for the profession of selling and the successful selling techniques he developed, Tom began giving seminars in 1974. Training as many as 10,000 salespeople a month, he quickly became known as the world’s leading sales trainer. Today, he presents approximately 75 seminars a year to over 100,000 people throughout the world.
Tom was a pioneer in producing high-quality audio and video programmes for those who could not attend the seminars or who wanted further reinforcement after the seminars. Recognised as the most effective sales-training programmes ever produced, they’re continually updated and are now being utilised by more than 1 million people.
Tom Hopkins has also written nine other books, including Sales Prospecting For Dummies and Sales Closing For Dummies, as well as the best-selling How to Master the Art of Selling, which has sold over 1.3 million copies in 8 languages and 27 countries.
Tom Hopkins is a member of the National Speakers Association and one of a select few to receive its Council of Peers Award for Excellence. He is often the keynote speaker for annual conventions and is a frequent guest on television and radio talk shows.
Ben Kench, ‘The Can Can Man’, is Britain’s leading small business growth specialist, enjoying a reputation for delivering quite incredible results.
Ben’s pedigree and character have been formed over a lifetime of adventure and achievements that culminate in a rich spectrum of knowledge that’s life-based with family values and an underpinning of integrity and honesty.
His selling career began with an early foray into double glazing sales as an impressionable 19-year-old, and while his initial success was nationally recognised he also learned hard lessons about life, success, and attitude, eventually falling out with family and loved ones as arrogance overcame the youth. A few months taught lifelong lessons.
Moving on and learning, Ben’s first major role in selling was to industry selling air compressors and related tools. Aged 20, he learned to face the ‘we’ve been doing it this way for longer than you’ve been alive, lad’ rejection.
Over the years Ben has enjoyed success in roles selling higher value equipment to corporate clients, selling to the small business market, and selling to the home owner. He’s experienced in selling in the consumer marketplace in industries as diverse as unregulated timesharing to heavily regulated financial services. Each have presented their particular challenges and each has added their own unique refinement to the art of selling.
Ben also raised his daughter from the age of 20 months as a single parent and knows well the struggle to balance work and family while also appreciating the real value and meaning of family life. Ben is first and foremost a family man, with old-fashioned values, where truth and integrity are non-negotiable and where business relationships become friendships that last. Those sentiments echo throughout the advice in this book to help you succeed in your selling career.
Ben’s programme, ‘The Business Booster’, is gaining national recognition and his company is often approached by major institutions to assist with their performance objectives. He’s approved as a member of The National Consultants Register and is often asked to speak at conventions for The Institute of Sales and Marketing Management (ISMM), and The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), as well as major business to business exhibitions nationally.
Ben has also written a book on small business growth entitled How to Grow Your Business and Enjoy More Money, Less Stress!
Today, Ben’s time is spent dedicated to helping individuals improve their performance through a variety of sales and business education programmes.
From Tom: This book is dedicated to all my teachers and my students. Some of you have been both to me. Thank you for your loyalty and for sharing your successes with me. You are the reason why my life has been so filled with love, laughter, and abundance.
From Ben: This book is dedicated to the thousands of people who have helped me along my path. Literally every step is remembered with fondness. Lessons learned from teachers mingle with lessons learned from life and the many situations I’ve been presented with. This book is dedicated to each and every person or situation along the way.
Above all, this book is dedicated to my great friend and sales leader Dave Brazier. Dave you showed me (when I wasn’t best disposed to learn!) much of the foundation basics relayed in this book. You showed me the huge value in discipline, order, and record-keeping to become a professional. You showed me the adaptation from direct to consumer sales into selling business to business and all of the variations that entailed. You showed me how to handle prejudice and overcome stacked odds as a young man in an old industry. In short you were a cornerstone and as vital on my journey as snow is to skiing. This then Dave is my way to say Thank You. You probably don’t know or dare think about how much you have influenced me but for the record I still bear the scars from those first lessons you taught me!
From Tom: I must acknowledge my wonderful wife, Debbie, who has brought so much joy into my life. I’m grateful for your patience and understanding when my life’s work takes me away. I’m also grateful for your valuable input into my teaching, and particularly in this book.
I thank Judy Slack of Tom Hopkins International for writing and managing all my material for so long. I also thank Laura Oien, my company President, and Spence Price, CFO. You all work hard to make my life easy, allowing me to do what I do best – teach.
From Ben: As with any undertaking in life, the singular effort rarely if ever returns the result. Indeed, in my case I recognise the enormous support of many ‘background’ people.
First and foremost among them must be my wife Stella. You are always there to guide, to share, and to lend a valid thought – nothing I ever do is done alone. Through times of ‘word drought’ and ‘thinking block’ you’ve been the sounding wall and brain agitator while kindly and lovingly also allowing me to work when you’d rather I didn’t! To Stella, then, my gratitude and love. Thank you for everything.
To my loyal and long-suffering secretary Alison, who at times has shown remarkable mind-reading skills and is always remembering when I forget! I might ask ‘where would I be without you?’ but I daren’t even contemplate the answer! Thank you.
To manager Marion Cohrs and the truly helpful team at Las Dunas Suites Hotel in Gran Canaria who so kindly allowed me to use their facilities while a holiday doubled as working time even though I’d left my laptop behind! To a superb resort and excellent team of people, I thank you.
To the thousands of people who inspire me when I’m blessed with an audience to share my thoughts with, and to the hundreds of students each year who share their thoughts, their struggles, and their successes with me when they allow me to help them in their business tasks. I am eternally grateful as this task is why God made me. For allowing me to do my life’s work, I thank you all.
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Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:
Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development
Project Editor: Rachael Chilvers
Development Editor: Kathleen Dobie
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Commissioning Editor: Samantha Clapp
Copy Editor: Kate O’Leary
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Executive Project Editor: Martin Tribe
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Cartoons: Ed McLachlan
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Publishing and Editorial for Consumer Dummies
Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher, Consumer Dummies
Joyce Pepple, Acquisitions Director, Consumer Dummies
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Michael Spring, Vice President and Publisher, Travel
Kelly Regan, Editorial Director, Travel
Publishing for Technology Dummies
Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher, Dummies Technology/General User
Composition Services
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Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services
Welcome to Selling For Dummies. In this book, we cover more than selling products and services to businesses and consumers. This book is really about people skills. After all, knowing how to get along well with others is a vital skill – one everyone needs to develop as early as possible in life. Indeed for many years Ben has shared a presentation with his audiences called ‘Life’s a Pitch . . . and then you Fly’, effectively highlighting that everything in life is a sales transaction between two persons. Life is in fact a sales game, and better if you can get people to see things your way. So this book really is for everyone.
However, to play this game well, to be successful in sales, you must also be co-operative, have good listening skills, and be willing to put others’ needs before your own. With refined selling skills in your arsenal, you’ll have more happiness and contentment in all areas of your life, not just in your selling career (although your selling will certainly benefit, too).
Selling For Dummies can help you get more happiness and contentment out of your life right now by helping you gain more respect, more money, more recognition for the job you do, more agreement from your friends and family, more control in negotiations, and of course, more sales. Above all, this book is a reference tool – so you don’t have to read it from beginning to end. Instead, you can turn to the part of the book that gives you the information you need when you need it. And you can keep coming back to the book over and over again throughout your selling career.
As the original dummies in sales, we’re the perfect people to write this book.
Ben’s story: I started my selling career in double glazing! For many, this product epitomised the lower end of the selling spectrum. However, it served as a brilliant baptism into the real world of selling and living by your efforts on a commission-only basis. I started out living alone in lodgings and learning fast how to help people see it my way. I remember having a massive need – I literally needed to buy myself something to wear. I owned no suit or suitable footwear for the winter. I got cold because I didn’t own a coat and I had a battered Hillman Avenger with no heater. But my need fired me up to get better at this game and fast. So I did. I learned quickly, and climbed my way up the career ladder. Amazingly I soon discovered that, in fact, selling isn’t that difficult!
Tom’s story: I started my selling career in real estate at age 19. Real estate may have been a great career choice, but at the time I owned neither a suit nor a car. All I had was a band uniform and a motorcycle. And believe me, selling real estate on a motorcycle wasn’t easy; I had to tell the prospective buyers to follow me to the properties and hope they didn’t get lost along the way. When they finally came to their senses and realised that this kid couldn’t possibly be for real, they’d keep going straight on when I’d make a turn. I only averaged $42 a month in my first six months selling real estate.
But I stuck it out, because I knew there was big money to be made in the selling business – if I could just find out what the successful people were doing that I wasn’t. I learned it all the hard way, through trial and error.
Needless to say, I’ve come a long way since then, and it thrills me no end to give you the chance to benefit from the mistakes I made, as well as from the subsequent success I’ve had. Yes, I’ve had successes. I achieved my goal of becoming a millionaire by the age of 30, beating my own deadline by nearly three years! At age 27, I was one of the most successful real estate agents in the whole country – a guy who started without a decent suit or a vehicle with four wheels! That just goes to show you that it doesn’t matter how much of a dummy you are on this subject when you start – with this book by your side, serving as a reference for all the selling situations you encounter, you’ll master the selling, persuasion, and people skills you need to really shine.
Indeed selling isn’t a skill that you cannot handle. You too can sell and you’ll soon be flying and owning whatever you want.
This book is a jargon-free zone. When we introduce a new term, we italicise it and then define it. The only other conventions in this book are that Web and email addresses are in monofont, and the action part of numbered steps and the key concept in a list are in bold. We alternate between using female and male pronouns in even- and odd-numbered chapters to be fair to both!
We wrote Selling For Dummies not only for traditional salespeople who want to discover more about their careers, but also for people who can use selling skills to change or improve their lives. This book is for you
Whether you’re beginning a selling career, or you’re just looking to brush up your skills.
Whether you’re unemployed and want a job, or you’re employed and want a promotion.
Whether you’re a teen wanting to impress adults, or you’re an adult wanting to succeed at negotiation.
Whether you’re a teacher searching for better ways to get through to your students, or you’re a parent wanting to communicate more effectively with your children.
Whether you have an idea that can help others, or you want to improve your personal relationships.
In other words, this book is for everyone. People who have listened in our presentations or have been through one of our programmes tell us about how they used a strategy or selling technique outside of business to get agreement from family members on an important decision. They’ve told us about using a questioning technique to get their spouses or children to agree to do something they previously tried to put off, and some have used the skills to sell themselves into better jobs. Other students have been able to ask for, and to receive, better service simply because their confidence has skyrocketed. As an added bonus, when our students apply the skills and strategies to personal relationships, many find that those relationships became more rewarding too.
In this book, we lay out the basics of any selling situation in a series of steps. We give an overview of those steps in Chapter 2, and devote Part III of the book to covering them in greater detail. You can go through these steps in sequence or you can skim the Table of Contents and locate a title or heading that strikes you as interesting. Read that section first. Then go on to another area that you think will benefit you the most. Keep a pen or highlighter in hand and make notes if you want. Dog-ear the pages. In fact, use this book in whichever way serves you best. As you get into the material, you’ll read about real-life examples of people in various situations where they needed people skills in order to succeed. We tell you the good stories and the bad ones – and you’ll remember them when you get into similar situations.
The methods, words, and phrases contained in this book are not put on paper in Selling For Dummies just because they sound good to the editors. They’ve been proven successful by millions of people around the world. If you’re truly going to benefit by persuading, cajoling, convincing, or selling someone else on what you have to offer, don’t try to re-invent the wheel and do it the hard way. Why not pull out all the stops and master the strategies and tactics that have been proven to work for others (the ones you’ll find in this book)?
Selling For Dummies is organised into six parts, and the parts are divided into chapters. In the following sections, we give you a quick preview of what to expect from each part, so you can turn to the part that interests you most.
In this part, you find out a little about what selling is and what it isn’t. We fill you in on what selling skills can do for you in all areas of your life, and give you a quick tour through the seven steps of the selling cycle. We also let you know how important attitude is to the art of selling – showing you how to treat selling like a hobby, and get all the satisfaction and success out of it that you get out of the things you do for fun.
Just as with virtually any pursuit in life, preparation is the key to success in the world of selling. In this part, we cover the steps to preparation – everything from knowing your clients to knowing your products – that will set you apart from average salespeople and help you hear ‘Yes’ more often in your life. We also devote a chapter to using technology to your advantage in the preparation stage of the game, steering you to some great resources on the Internet that can make your selling life more successful.
In this part, we give each of the seven steps of the selling cycle its very own chapter. We pack in lots of useful information – including ideas or scripts of the right words to say and tips on which words to avoid in each stage of the process. You’ll discover how to find the people you can sell to, how to get an appointment with those people and make a good impression, how to make sure they need what you have, how to give fantastic presentations, how to address customer concerns, how to close the sale, and how to get referrals – so you can start the process all over again.
If your goal is to build a long-term business or to take your career to great heights, this part is for you. Here, you begin to separate yourself from merely average salespeople to become one of the greats. Average salespeople make their presentations, win a few, lose a few, and move on. But the great ones view every presentation as an opportunity to build. So in this part we give you tips for staying in touch with your clients, making more sales with the help of the Internet, and managing your time wisely so that as your business grows you always have time for your clients. Great salespeople build not only businesses but also relationships, because relationships take them further and bring them a lot more satisfaction in the long run.
Rejection is a part of life. So you need to expect it, accept it, and get over it. The fact that a prospect rejects your product or service doesn’t mean that he has rejected you as a person. But when you’re in the world of selling, where rejection is just part of the territory, your self-esteem can easily suffer. So in this part we help you imitate a duck by letting things run off your back like water. We also help you understand how best to use your time and stay focused on the big-picture goals, so the little negativities of life won’t bring you down.
These short chapters are packed with quick ideas about selling and persuading that you can read anytime you have a few minutes. They’re a great way of psyching yourself up for a presentation or for making calls. They’re good for getting you excited – and no one will ever want what you have if you’re not excited about it.
Icons are those little pictures you see in the margins throughout this book, and they’re meant to draw your attention to key points that are of help to you along the way. Here’s a list of the icons we use and what they signify:
Glance through the Table of Contents and find the part, chapter, or section that flips your switch. That’s the best place to begin.
To benefit most from the material in this book, do a little self-analysis to see where you’re weakest. Admitting your faults is tough, even to yourself. But reading the material that covers your weaker areas will bring you the greatest amount of success.
For example, studies show that most traditional salespeople lack qualification skills. This means that they waste a lot of time presenting to people who can’t truly make decisions on what they’re selling or people who aren’t likely to purchase the item because it just isn’t a match for them. If you’re in traditional sales and you aren’t sure whether qualification is your weakness, Chapter 9 may be a great place to start.
The most successful people in life are those who continue to grow. The fact that you’re reading these words now puts you into that realm – because what counts is not how much you know, but how much you can discover after you ‘know it all’.
Congratulations for believing in yourself, in your ability to change for the better, in your ability to improve your lifestyle, and in your ability to improve the lives of the people you help with this book’s many tips on the art of selling. We wish you greatness!
In this part . . .
Here you find out what the seven steps of selling are and how to put them to work for you. We also fill you in on the importance of attitude in the world of selling – letting you know how you can treat selling with the same joy that you treat your hobbies and pastimes. Whether you’re just starting out in sales or you’ve been at it since the beginning of time, this part offers great information to keep you upbeat and moving forward.