Rules of Sales

If you’re in business, you’re in sales, even if indirectly. That’s not a choice. The only choice is to feel guilt and shame or freedom and desire.

• You’ll never win everybody, and you don’t have to. A salesman knows, crafts, and shapes his market. But whether he woos it like a siren or hunts it like a shark, he doesn’t expect or need everyone to respond.
• The best salesman believes in what he does and what he’s selling, not because he is gullible or naive, but because he chooses to represent and act with goodness and excellence. Such a salesman, at his best, is the ethical electricity that drives the world of business and free market economies. He expertly pairs the demands of consumers with the activity of business. He is the meet-er of needs and the satisfier of desires. The internet has only required him to adapt and be more consultative; it has only further ennobled his profession.
• If you want to be in sales, people will pull their daughters close, cover their children’s eyes, and find it incongruent if you show up in Church. Pay it no mind. What you regard as a profession, and others as a trade, can be as low and honest as sweeping streets or as high and heinous as several industries it would be imprudent to name. We just haven’t yet had our Law and Order.
• The layman thinks sales is about talking, and the expert thinks it’s about listening. What it’s really about is what the prospect thinks it’s about, and how you’re going to change that. Of course if you suck at talking or listening, it’s hopeless.