Eighteen years ago, I embarked on my career as a salesman. I was working as a cashier for the Royal Bank of Scotland in Manchester, England. I was nineteen at the time, and my only previous work experience had been as a checkout assistant at Tesco supermarket.
Working as a cashier at a bank might not strike you as being a sales job, but it was. I had to meet targets around the number of new accounts and meetings I made over the counter each week. It wasn't exactly very challenging or difficult, but it was still selling.
Every Thursday evening, we would all stay late at the bank to do telephone sales. We would call customers who were overdrawn or those who had large amounts of money in low-interest accounts to sell them loans or savings accounts.
All of my colleagues hated Thursday evenings with a passion. I absolutely loved it.
There was just something about the buzz of picking up that phone and making a sale that got me going. I was hooked.
The branch manager was so impressed with my Thursday evening performances that she promoted me to a full-time sales advisor role. I was moved upstairs and even given my own office. Life was good, and my parents were proud as punch.
Yet, a little over three years later, I declared myself personally bankrupt and quit the sales profession altogether. It was by far the lowest point of my career, if not my life.
I'd taken on my first business-to-business sales role just six months earlier. My inexperience, together with the false expectation that selling to businesses would be as easy as selling to consumers, brought me down to earth with a bump.
Today, I am a well-respected international sales trainer, personal success coach, and entrepreneur. I've trained and coached thousands of people in over 120 countries and spend my days coaching leaders and helping ambitious organizations build top performing sales teams.
During my sales career, I've closed thousands of sales and had the pleasure of doing business with global giants such as Boeing(TM), BP(TM), Siemens(TM), Kraft Foods(TM), Aon(TM), Fujitsu(TM), McGraw-Hill(TM), The Co-operative Group(TM), to name just a few.
I've also helped some of Europe's fastest growing start-ups generate millions of dollars in sales revenue, and expand into over 60 new countries, whilst successfully building and selling my first business on the side.
So, you could say, I've walked the walk.
In this book, I'm going to share with you some of the experiences, tips, tricks, and techniques that have served me well during my successful career in sales.
I'd like to save you the blood, sweat, and tears I had to go through in order to become a top sales professional.
I highly recommend you apply common sense before using anything I suggest. You, your company, prospects, and solutions all have one thing in common. They are unique.
Rigid methodologies are not my style because despite what you might hear, in sales there are no magic formulas that guarantee success in every company.
Some of the things I recommend will work the first time, others will not. I challenge you to thoroughly test the things that don't work first time to give them a fair chance. It's all too easy to dismiss something new and out of your comfort zone, and it will pain you, even more, several years down the line when you realize you made a mistake by doing so.
Finally, I will also recommend that you constantly challenge what you think you know. A flexible open-mind is more valuable than a decade of experience and rarer than a good cup of tea.
Yours Sincerely