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SELLING—A WAY OF LIFE

SELLING IS A PREREQUISITE FOR LIFE

Selling impacts every person on this planet. Your ability or inability to sell, persuade, negotiate, and convince others will affect every area of your life and will determine how well you survive.

No matter what your title or position is in life, or what your role is in a company or on a team, you will at some point have to convince others of something.

Selling is used every day by every person on this planet. No one is excluded. Selling is not just a job or a career; selling is essential to the survival and well-being of every living individual. Your ability to do well in life depends on your ability to sell others on the things in which you believe! You need to know how to negotiate and how to get agreement from others. The ability to get others to like you, work with you, and want to please you determines how well you will survive. Selling is not just a job—selling is a way of life!

Selling (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary): The action of persuading or influencing another to a course of action or to the acceptance of something.

Who does this not affect?

When I say “selling,” I’m talking about anything having to do with convincing, persuading, negotiating, or just getting your way. This could include debating, getting along with others, exchanging goods or services, convincing a girl to go out with you, buying or selling a home, convincing the bank to give you a loan, starting your own business, persuading others to support your ideas, or getting a customer to buy a product from you.

It is said that the number one reason a business or an individual fails is undercapitalization. Not so! The truth is, businesses fail first and foremost because their ideas weren’t sold quickly enough and in quantities great enough, and therefore they ran out of money. No business owner can build a business without understanding this critical element called selling! Think of any action in life, and I assure you that there’s someone at one end or the other trying to influence the outcome.

An example: A golfer has a six-foot putt. He putts the ball and then does everything he can to persuade that ball to go into the hole. He talks to it, he pleads with it, he makes motions with his hands, and he might even whisper a little prayer that the ball will drop. All the while, his opponent stands across from him and does the exact opposite. This example demonstrates that every one of us is always trying to influence a certain outcome.

The degree to which you can influence the outcome of events in your life is the determining factor of your success. Those individuals who don’t want to trust their fate to pleading, wishing, praying, and hoping must learn to persuade, convince, and negotiate successfully.

No matter who you are or what you do, you’re selling something. It doesn’t matter whether or not you call yourself a salesperson because you’re either selling something or someone is selling you. Either way, one of the parties is going to influence the outcome, and it will either be you getting your way or the other guy getting his way.

A sale is made in every exchange of ideas or communication—there are no exceptions. Deny it if you will, but that won’t change the facts. You’re a salesperson, and you’re one every single day of your life. From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, I assure you that you’re trying to get your way. The fact that you don’t have the title “salesperson” or that you aren’t being paid a commission is only a technical issue. You’re still a salesperson—and commissions come in many forms.

THE COMMISSION

Speaking of commissions: Every time you get your way, you’ve just been paid a commission. Not all payments are monetary. Some of the greatest achievements I’ve had in my life had nothing to do with money. Recognition for a job well done is a commission. A raise or a promotion at work is a commission. Gaining new friends is an incredible commission. Getting votes for a project you’re pushing forward is a commission.

I find it comical when people tell me, “I could never be a salesperson because I could never work on commission.” I’m like, “What do you mean? Your entire life is a commission. There’s no salary guaranteed in life. The whole world is on commission and the whole world is required to sell!” It’s been said that the best things in life are free, but I don’t agree with that. The best things in life are those that come in the form of a commission for some extra, well-done effort! Happiness, security, safety, a great home, a great family, love, confidence, friends, your church, your community, and on and on—are all commissions for someone’s hard work at selling others on a better way of life.

True love, the ultimate commission, is earned by those who find the right partner, take care of him or her, continue to create the relationship, and keep it growing. There’s no guarantee that a relationship will get you love. First, you’ve got to persuade the person to take an interest in you. Then you have to find out what they want and what makes them happy. Then you have to produce it and keep producing it. But somewhere along the line, you have to sell the other person on the idea that you’re the one that he or she can trust to create a life with. If you succeed and exceed the person’s expectations, you will get the commission of love.

Health is not guaranteed in life. Health is a commission for taking care of yourself and your mind. When a person successfully sells himself on eating right, working out, and taking care of his attitude, he gets a commission of having good health.

The great benefit of children is also a commission of sorts and is not guaranteed to every marriage. You still have to convince your partner to have sex with you, and even marriage doesn’t guarantee you sex. If you can’t close your partner on wanting to have sex with you, then you won’t get the great commission of children. Once you have the kids, you have to continue to sell. Concepts such as discipline, work ethic, education, good manners, and homework all have to be sold. If you don’t do the selling, they will sell you. Kids are the best salespeople on the planet. They’re passionate, relentless, and persistent closers, able to break down their parents’ resistance until they get what they want!

The point is, selling is about life, and every area of life involves selling. The more consistently you can win at selling, the more commissions you’ll get rewarded in life!

So get it! Everyone on this planet is involved in sales. There are no exceptions to this law. You’re involved in selling almost every minute of every day. If this is somehow distasteful to you, then you have some misunderstandings about selling. When I say “selling,” do you think of a fast-talking swindler who can sell anything to anyone? Maybe you immediately get a picture of some guy who’s a confrontational, high-pressure type? Both of these images are negative extremes of selling and in no way describe the skills of a true salesperson. Confrontation and pressure are attributes of the amateur who doesn’t understand sales and ends up resorting to unpleasant tactics.

When I discuss sales in this book, not only am I referring to the professional, paid salesperson, but I’m also covering the everyday use of basic persuasion skills and how to use them to get your way in life.

BEWARE OF FALSE DATA

The subject of selling, like any other subject, is full of false information that has been perpetuated over the years. This false data may be partly responsible for the poor impression of this profession and very needed life skill. “False data” is information that is not factual but is accepted as truth and passed along.

For instance, most of my life I wanted to own real estate and had a particular interest in buying apartment buildings. When I first got started, most of the people I talked to about apartments immediately told me that owning apartments was a nightmare and that I would have difficulties with tenants at midnight when the plumbing sprang a leak. Though tenants would obviously get upset if there was a plumbing leak, it is false data about owning apartments that actually causes people to lose interest in buying apartments. I’ve owned more than 2,500 apartments and, trust me, the renter is not the problem with owning them. Not having renters is a problem; leaky faucets are just an issue to deal with. Of course there are problems with owning apartment buildings, but so what? I assure you that the problems are minuscule compared to the rewards. People who knew very little about buying apartments used this false data as an excuse for me to not buy these buildings.

The whole subject of money is full of false data, most of which are passed on by people who give advice on money, but don’t have any themselves.

When I was starting my first business, almost everyone told me how difficult it was going to be, how much money it would take, how risky it was, and how few businesses make it. None of these people had ever actually started a business themselves, but they had plenty of advice for me. You see, this is data that disregards all the successful stories of people like me who started their own business. I later started another company that required me to take on a partner. Multiple people suggested to me that most partnerships don’t work out. Well, I can only tell you that while partnerships may be difficult, this business would have been impossible for me to operate without a partner. By the way, that particular partnership, which we closed on with a handshake, has lasted for almost fifteen years.

People tend to form opinions, give advice, and pass on myths when they don’t actually have any personal experience. Much of the data they pass along hasn’t been fully inspected for truth even though it’s been passed on as truth.

Take urban legends, for example. A guy will swear to you that it was a friend of a friend’s sister who disappeared on prom night twenty years ago and that her ghost now hitchhikes along the lonely road between town and the old cemetery. You’ll hear that same story in multiple cities across the country. If you ask the guy to give you specific names and dates, he won’t be able to provide them, yet just moments ago he was passing on this falsehood as though it were truth.

Many years ago, I was told not to move to California because “it was so expensive and the people were very strange.” People who had never lived in California told me this!

The same phenomenon occurs with sales, and it’s given the whole profession and the skill itself a bad name. It’s a shame because everyone needs the skill of selling to get along in life, and the profession itself offers so much freedom and so many financial benefits. People continue to pass on the false information that selling is hard, that it’s difficult to depend on commissions, that selling is sleazy, that you’ll have to work long hours, that it isn’t a dependable profession, that you can’t rely on the income, and that it’s not considered a “real” job! It’s a shame, because selling as a profession offers a great deal of freedom and numerous financial benefits.

Most of the perceptions people have regarding sales are very rarely based in reality. Certainly any negative images you might have had about salespeople are based on the past—which would suggest that they’re not particularly relevant to the present because they’re in the past. If I’m talking about selling, persuading, and negotiating, you might get an image of a past experience or something you were told about salespeople that would take you out of the present conversation. You would be relying on some past decision, advice, or opinion for your information. All images based on the past have very little value in the present and definitely no value in creating a future.

SELLING—CRITICAL TO SURVIVAL

Regardless of your preconceived opinions, ideas, or evaluations regarding sales and salespeople, you need to fully adopt the idea that you’re going to have to sell no matter what your position or job is in life. Whether you’re rich or poor, male or female, on salary or on commission, you’re always selling something to someone in order to advance. There is no exception to this rule and no way to escape it. But that doesn’t mean that you have to start wearing polyester slacks and white patent-leather shoes and talk fast and pressure people to do what you want them to do.

Take a moment to consider all the different roles you play in life. Let’s say you came up with wife, partner, employee, mom, teacher, church member, neighbor, friend, writer, and PTA president. I want you to look at each of these roles and observe how selling is involved in it. Maybe selling isn’t your full-time career and maybe you don’t get paid a monetary commission to sell products, but I assure you that you’ll see how selling will affect your success in each role more than any other single ability that you possess.

The receptionist who wants a raise, the actress who wants the part, the guy who wants the girl—all rely on selling themselves, whether they know it or not. A professional salesperson who depends on sales for his livelihood definitely needs to know how to do this thing called selling. When you’re driving to work and want to get off the freeway, you have to negotiate and sell the other drivers so you can access the off-ramp. When you find yourself buying a house and trying to convince the seller to sell at a lower price, you’re selling. When you go to the bank to get a loan, you’ll be selling the loan officers on why they should give you a loan. When the actor goes to an audition and hopes to get the part, no matter how well prepared he is, he’d better be able to convince the director that not only can he act, but he is the right guy for the part! Start preparing now because there’s no way to avoid the fact that you’ll need this skill to do well in life.

The skill of sales is so critical to a person’s survival that I don’t understand why it is not required study at school. The fact that it isn’t taught in school, that it isn’t required, or even offered, only further indicates the immense value of those who do learn this skill. It’s my observation that the most important skills needed in life aren’t taught in school. I spent seventeen years getting a formal education, and I can tell you that I have learned more from seminars, audio programs, books, and talking with other successful businesspeople at conferences than I learned in all my formal education. No successful businessperson would exclude basic selling, persuasion, and negotiation skills from a list of those things that helped him or her along the way.

A person’s ability to persuade another is the only thing that will ultimately ensure a position in the marketplace. Academic records, grades, and résumés won’t guarantee you a promotion or advancement in life, but the ability to sell will. All students should be required to learn basic persuasion skills, basic negotiating, and basic closing techniques, as these are fundamental to life. No other set of skills will better determine the likelihood of a person getting a job, much less being a success in life, than the ability to persuade, negotiate successfully, and convince others to act.

As an employer, I don’t always hire the smartest person or the most qualified person to fill a position. I’m much more likely to hire the person who convinces me he can do the job. I look at the person’s ability to persuade before I look at the résumé. Will I like being around this person? Is this person a winner? Does this person exude confidence and a positive attitude? Can this person convince others to take action? I’ll hire the persuasive, positive, and confident applicant hands down over the one who offers me little more than a fancy résumé.

It’s been said that almost a quarter of the population on the planet is involved in selling, but whoever came up with this estimation confined their thinking to an industry and a job type. It’s incorrect to think of sales in this way. Selling is an absolute must for getting along in life. Breathing, eating, and exercising are not careers for most of us—they are fundamental requirements for living. So it is with selling. Most books written about sales are about the career of selling and exclude how vital it is to life.

My wife constantly asks me, “How do you always get your way with people?” The answer is simple—because I want to. I want to have a great life for us! Because I try to get my way? Oh, yeah! And because I know how to sell, how to persuade, and how to close the deal and get what I want! Whether she knows it or not, my wife is one of the best salespeople I’ve ever met. She’s passionate, persistent, and always seems to get her way—and not just with me.

This book is going to teach you how to get your way in life!