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I have been selling for all my business life. It is interesting to note that anyone who has been in business could make the same claim. It is not possible to survive in any commercial activity unless you sell your products or services. What is a career-minded person doing as they take on projects outside their normal job in order to impress their superiors and gain better access to senior people in their organisation? They are selling their services as suitable for promotion. What is a jobbing carpenter doing when they produce heart-shaped wooden boxes for Valentine's Day and offer them to clients they have worked for in the past? They are selling the boxes and also just reminding their customers of their existence and their ability to provide further services. What is a bank manager doing when they agree to make a speech at their old school? And I could go on. ‘Everybody lives by selling something’ is a phrase coined not by a red-necked republican in the oil industry but by the aesthete Robert Louis Stevenson, the novelist and poet.

So why is my statement that I have been selling for all my business life different from any person enjoying success in their jobs, whether working for big corporations or, at the other end of the spectrum, for themselves? The answer is that my selling has been of products and services that I understood only vaguely. I knew what they would do for my customers but I was not entirely sure how or why they produced those beneficial effects. For example, for many years I sold computer systems. Now, years ago I had a passing knowledge of how computers work and of the products that I sold, but it was no more than a passing knowledge. Then they got more complicated and I had to understand the telecommunications industry as well. The list of products was so vast that I could not, with the best will in the world, maintain even this superficial knowledge. I was completely dependent on technical support people to turn my interpretation of a customer's problem into a technical solution and, if I made the sale, to implement what I had promised. And I did not have the best will in the world. By this time I was becoming a reasonable general manager with a growing knowledge of how to run a business and absolutely no interest in computers themselves.

‘So what,’ I hear you cry. Well, I think that this lack of real knowledge of the products and services I sell is a huge advantage in selling. It gives the professional salesperson who does nothing except sell, an edge over people who have selling as an extra skill they need to add to their real expertise. Professional salesmen have nothing else to concentrate on than improving their technique and their selling performance. Their minds are not cluttered up with expertise and technical knowledge. I have talked, for example, to chartered surveyors, people who have to have a detailed knowledge of the property market and of landlord/tenant laws, to give just two issues that they have to keep their knowledge of up-to-date. When customers ask them questions, they think through the answers right down to the level of detail they need to consider to satisfy themselves that what they are saying is accurate as well as attractive in sales terms. Professional salespeople, on the other hand, answer client questions only with the next sale in mind. That is not to say that they will be cavalier or dishonest, I am talking about professional salespeople, but it is to say that their response is aimed at moving the sale forward. If that means admitting ignorance, they will do that happily. If it means ducking the question to another day they will do that too.

The first section in the book describes the ideas that came out top for producing sustained and successful selling in my straw poll. They are not, of course, rocket science but they are the pillars on which other more refined selling techniques hinge.

My claim to have discovered the top two ideas comes from their popularity with the people who sent in contributions to this book. They are very interesting—the first is ‘Listening’, which may surprise some people who express the view that a born salesperson is one with the gift of the gab, the ability to talk Eskimos into buying fridges or rabbis into buying pork chops. But the strongly expressed view of many people is the opposite of this.

The second idea concerns being very focused on achieving quantifiable objectives at every stage of a sales campaign. You must know exactly where you want to be at the end of a sales call or at a particular date in a long tender exercise. It is that focus that distinguishes the competent businessperson from the competent businessperson with the added touch of sales awareness.

By  Ken Langdon