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This is a book I’ve been intending to write for quite a few years. I originally proposed it as a manuscript around the time of the dot-com bubble. My agent told me that only books on internet marketing were selling at the time. So, I put it on the back burner.

At the same time, I have come to see that God has given me a very specific set of experiences, concepts and skills related to this subject, and that, as a Christian, I have a responsibility to share those.

I’ve learned sales from a wide variety of selling experiences, from route sales, to retail, to capital equipment, to wholesale distribution. I’ve learned sales management and sales systems as the general manager of a division of the company with whom I was employed, but more importantly as a consultant to over 300 different businesses. I’ve learned, through my education, (B.Ed, and M.A. in Teaching) how to communicate in such a way as to impact behavior, and I’ve been gifted with the ability to write and speak in a manner that is comfortable, easy to understand, and makes even complex subjects seem simple and easy to implement.

I take no pride in these things, seeing them as the providential hand of a loving God working through me to bless those who come into contact with the ideas expressed in this manuscript.

Further, I don’t claim to have invented the concepts and processes discussed in this manuscript. I merely recognized what was already there, dusted them off, sharpened them up around the edges and communicated them. It’s sort of like growing sweet corn. Left on its own, corn will just naturally grow. After all, it existed long before man started to cultivate it. But, by studying it, fertilizing it and nurturing it, we can make it grow bigger and better.

That is, I think, my contribution to sales systems – taking what currently exists and cultivating it so that it returns bigger and better than ever before. Here’s my hope that you will use the concepts, processes and practices described here to grow your business bigger and better.

We are focused on helping our clients grow their businesses to such an extent that they will, cumulatively, add 1,000 new jobs and $100 million in new revenue each year for the next three years. Learn more here:

http://www.davekahle.com/initiative.html.

10 books, including Question Your Way to Sales Success, 10 Secrets of Time Management for Salespeople. and How to Sell Anything to Anyone Anytime.

He writes and publishes an Ezine for salespeople and managers called “Thinking about Sales” which is distributed

1,249 sales managers in the Kahle Way® Sales Management System, and has trained

TENS OF THOUSANDS of B2B salespeople to be more productive in the Information Age.

It refers to all the sales and marketing efforts, ideas, policies, principles, techniques, and strategies that worked well in the past, but are no longer effective. The past is everything that’s pre-2013.

I still recall a poignant moment with an attendee at one of my seminars. During the break he came up to me and said this:

I’ve been in business for seventeen years. And we’ve done well. But now, it seems like everything is changing, and I don’t know what to do.

He went on to explain that he had built his formerly thriving tool and die business on certain core principles: Quality workmanship, competitive prices, and good service. Those principles, adhered to with discipline and conviction, had brought him word-of-mouth business consistently over the years. But they were no longer working, and his business was floundering. The pain and confusion were written all over his face as he contemplated the prospect of seeing his business wither away.

Those principles are some of the most common examples of FIP: Business principles and policies that were sufficient on which to build a business, but today are not. At one time, you could distinguish your business from others on the basis of these and other FIP principles. Now, however, the bar has risen. Because there is so much churn in our marketplace and the competition is so fierce, the kinds of service and quality that were sufficient to distinguish yourself from your competition are no longer sufficient. Your customers expect previously outstanding levels of service and quality from every supplier. What was sufficient a few years ago is still necessary today, but no longer sufficient.

That reliance on quality service and word-of-mouth marketing is a FIP principle. When viewed from the perspective of effective sales and marketing approaches, these principles are passive. They rely on your customer’s coming to you, recognizing the superiority of your product or service, and then talking about you to others.

When everyone else operated in similar fashion; that was FIP. But when more and more competitors appear, and they make the same claims as you do, your reliance on passive marketing methods relegates you to second choice.

Probably one of the greatest marketing myths of all time is encapsulated in the expression,

Once you build a better mousetrap, you then have to publicize it, price it correctly, and develop a sales system to take it to market in an effective and efficient way. And if you don’t do that, your mousetrap will linger in the limbo of obscurity.

I’ve seen literally hundreds of businesses of all sizes who never reached their potential because of an inability to do sales well. They were perfectly capable of rendering outstanding service at competitive prices but struggled to survive. These FIP principles were so deeply ingrained in their mindsets that they never learned to do sales as well as they could, and their businesses never reached the level of prosperity and success that they could have reached. The economic landscape is littered with the remains of businesses who were excellent in providing their product or service, but mediocre in selling it.

It’s not that CEOs, entrepreneurs and CSOs (Chief Sales Officers) don’t want to grow their businesses. Almost everyone I’ve met is ambitious for the growth of their businesses.

It’s just that there is so much bad information, bad ideas and bad advice that it is difficult to sort it all out and come up with a constructive plan. In my tenure, I’ve seen almost every approach. Here are some of the most common, and errant, approaches to growing your business.

1. Hire good sales people and let them do it. I call this “death by wishful thinking.”

There is probably someone, somewhere, who made a great hire with his first sales person, and then grew the business on the strength of that person’s capabilities, commitment and motivation. I just have never met him.

I understand from where this idea comes. As a principal, you look at the needs of the organization, and more and more realize that sales is a problem. The knee-jerk reaction is to hire a good sales person. That, you think, will solve the problem.

Maybe in theory, but rarely in practice. One of the seminars that I present is one I call “How to Find, Interview, Select and Hire a Good Salesperson.” When I begin the seminar, I ask the group, “How many of you had a good experience with the first sales person you hired?” Less than one percent of the hands go up. And, when called on to explain, those one percent usually have some qualifiers: “Well, sort of, for a few months…..” I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an unqualified “Absolutely!”