Book Summary Preview : How You Make The Sale

The Big Idea

Are you thinking of a career in selling? Maybe you’ve had some initial success at selling and are wondering if you could make it a full-time career. Or maybe you are completely new at selling and have no idea at all if you can do it. Or, you may have found a job as a salesperson but you are not having any luck while others seem to succeed naturally.

If you are any one of these people, then this book is for you. “How You Make The Sale” by Frank McNair shows that selling is a learnable skill, not something you are naturally born with. You don’t have to be a glib talker or a natural at selling to be a great salesperson. By providing the basic keys and insights to selling, this book can start you off on a successful selling career.

I. Selling As Service

One of the main things that put people off from a career in selling is that they think it means you have to trick, cajole and generally talk people into buying things. This is the traditional, combative selling perspective. You see the customer as the combatant that you have to beat to make the sale.

You hear salespeople talk about tactics and strategy, about outflanking or pushing the customer into a corner, attacking his/her weakness, countering resistance, and defeating objections. You’ll even hear discussions about guerilla marketing. This is the perspective that views selling as warfare, where the customer is the enemy that has to lose for you to win.

But this kind of selling does not work in the long-term. You can’t stay in business where making sales means the buyer loses. Repeat/referral sales are the most profitable of all sales and they’re not going to happen if you think of the customer as the enemy.

But there is another way to sell. This is win-win selling – where you serve the customers by helping them make the best possible choice to solve the problem that took them into the market in the first place.

This is selling as service, or service to the customer. In selling as service, the salesperson adds value by what he knows, what she can teach, and he/she structures a sale to meet the customer’s needs and problems.

Your role as a salesperson then should be to serve -- serve the customer, the demands of the sales process, and your own needs for significance and competence by being the best person you can be.

II. What Types Of Products Require A Professional Salesperson

More products are bought than sold. Chewing gum, toilet paper, detergent, toothpaste -- these are products that do not need to be sold by salespeople. They are marketed in television ads, but not by salespeople. This is because their sales price and dollar margin is too small to support the services of a professional salesperson. Also they are inexpensive and simple enough that customers don’t need a salesperson to help them make a choice.

Products that need to be sold by professional salespeople are products that:

• Have relatively high market value (cars, real estate, insurance).
• Occur relatively infrequently (you don’t buy a car every year)
• Many of the decisions are moderately complex with a lot of considerations to factor in.
• For most of these products, service and repair after the sale is a major consideration in the customer’s satisfaction with the product.
• The monetary cost and inconvenience of a bad decision is high.

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