10 Steps to Successful Sales

Sales is among the oldest and most conflicted professions on earth — at once reviled and revered, valued for its promise of heavy paychecks and prestigious career paths, maligned for its loose ethics, and made hopelessly unpredictable by buying booms and busts. According to author Brian Lambert, however, most people out there selling are merely “salespersons” and not true “sales professionals”: trusted advisors who not only close deals but make connections and change paradigms along the way. In his book 10 Steps to Successful Sales, Lambert attempts to give the sales profession a conscientious 21st century facelift, one briefcase-carrying denizen of the mighty road at a time. There are inarguably many books on how to sell, but according to Lambert, only a very few effectively explain what potential salespeople can expect from their profession or what selling really “is.” The reasons are myriad: schools of sales have done little to advance technique and ideology; the sales process itself has stagnated (aside from technological advances); and consistent guidelines simply do not exist. Unfortunately, while the sales process has remained practically unchanged for decades, the game of sales has been changing for years. It is up to the sales professional alone to get a handle on this shift and rise to meet its new expectations. Part of the ASTD Press “10-Step Series,” 10 Steps to Successful Sales serves as a primer for those entering the sales profession and those currently struggling to carve out the career they dreamed. In his book, Lambert presents the basic “whats” and “whys” of the job — how to be effective, to achieve efficiency, to clear paths, and to realize the pinnacle of sales professional prowess: the status of “trusted advisor.”