Book Summary Preview : DISCOVER YOUR SALES STRENGTHS

The Big Idea
A huge number of books have been written about sales and finding one’s road to success in achieving exceptional sales performance. Like fresh-off-the-press diet book bestsellers, they promise spectacular results, but lasting improvement in the end is still hard to find. This book identifies the many myths associated with exceptional sales and explains how believing them may negatively affect one’s performance. It will also show how important it is to fit one’s talents into the right job, whether it be as sales representative or sales manager.

THE GREAT SALES MYTHS
Doctors tell us that kidney stones are one of the most painful medical conditions human beings may suffer from. These small calcium fragments form in the kidney and eventually get stuck in the ureter, between the kidney and the bladder, causing tremendous pain. Fortunately, a treatment is available: ultrasonic-waves. However, people who have had one stone are very likely to have another. So for years, physicians placed such patients on low-calcium diets, thinking that since these stones are made of calcium, cutting down on calcium intake will do the trick. But soon, researchers studied the problem more and found that patients with low-calcium diets had 47% more stones than patients with normal calcium intake. The solution to the problem, appearing too simple and sensible, was in fact, totally wrong.

This illustrates – rather painfully – the problem with assuming that if something makes sense intuitively, it must be true. For years Gallup has conducted research to verify what salespeople think of as fingertip knowledge. Here are the “myths” produced by the research:

The Education Myth
Do you know what Bill Gates, Harry Truman and Dave Thomas all have in common? Other than being highly successful in their fields, few know that they did not finish college. At present, many professions have stringent educational prerequisites. You have every reason to expect your doctor to have a medical degree and your accountant to have been schooled in tax laws and regulations. The trend toward higher education has appeared in the selling profession as well. But then, even though more and more companies are demanding certain education levels before they hire, does that education have any bearing on sales success?

Curious to see if this is the right way to go about hiring, research has been conducted on existing sales force and outstanding performance. The results were interesting. It showed that most of the individuals in the top quartile of the top-performing rank did not have advanced degrees. In fact, most of the best performers had not achieved high grade point averages in college.

 

The Experience Myth
In some professions experience matters a great deal and has a huge relationship with success. It has been discovered, however, that sales is not an experience-sensitive profession in the same manner as for example, medicine. Many companies place great weight on experience and herein lies the trap. If you are performing at an average level, . . . . . . . .

Want to read the rest of this summary? click here >>