Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Huh?

Great sellers go to Heaven because selling is all about the art of getting people to let you help them achieve their goals. Their goals. Not Yours! If you learn how to do that effectively and consistently over a lifetime of work, you will have helped many, many people live better than they would have had they not met you, and had you not been determined to get them to let you help. If there's a God, I'm guessing he values those of us who go around helping.


Having watched sales people and myself interact with prospective customers my entire adult life it became clear to me early on that success, at anything really, is directly proportional to the degree we focus on the success and fulfillment of others rather than ourselves. As related to selling, the more we worry about selling, the less we sell and the more we concern ourselves with the success of our prospect, or client, the more we sell. Selling isn't about getting someone to buy from you so that you can earn a commission (uh, that's what bundling all those high-risk mortgages recently was about), selling is about solving someone else's problem. By the way, an incidental by-product of day after day behavior of helping others is the success of the "helper."

The selfless daily, hard-working practitioner of the art of selling consistently meets and exceeds personal and company objectives, month after month and year after year. They are the first people to come to mind when one executive asks another who the stars are? Now, I am not talking about the man or woman who makes a killing on a couple of deals, buys a big house in Westchester at age twenty-eight and knows they are the smartest people in the world. I'm talking about the Heaven bound sellers who day after day sends their customers children to college and their customers to early retirement.


Here's my resume: Two VP jobs at the CBS Broadcast Group managing company owned media properties, VP/GM WNBC-AM, EVP NBC Radio Division in charge of all company owned radio stations, Co-Founder and Partner, Della Femina, Sherman Advertising Agency, Founder, operator and seller of four entrepreneurial radio station holding companies, Senior Advisor to the COO of AOL Time Warner, President Time Warner Cable Advertising Sales, President of AOL Worldwide Advertising Sales--dad to Scott, Jessica, Luke, Tate, Tess and Nell. Adoring husband to Mandy.

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