The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [75]
■ HOW I LEARNED SALES BY READING JUST ONE BOOK
I am going to now teach you how to teach yourself the skill of high-integrity, zero-sleaze selling. I’m going to teach you this by telling you the story of how I learned to sell.
For most of my life, from my adolescence throughout my twenties, I held the attitude of the journalist in Kiyosaki’s story. “I’m Above Learning How to Sell.” Around age fifteen, I became a convert to radical environmentalism, and I began piling up various worldviews and ideologies that separated me more and more stridently from mainstream capitalist society. First it was vegetarianism, then veganism, then Buddhism, then ecofeminism, then deep ecology, then primitivism. Then vegan-Buddhist-ecofeministdeep-ecologist-primitivism. I won’t even try to explain what all those terms are, but suffice it to say that throughout my teens and twenties, I didn’t really believe in the value of learning sales.
Over this period, I did slowly begin shedding some of the more rigid aspects of these belief systems. But for me, the crisis and tipping point occurred in my late twenties, when I was almost totally broke as an aspiring writer (which I wrote about in Success Skill #1), and I realized I needed to stop pretending as if money was irrelevant to my life, and start learning about the way money actually worked.
Fast-forward to age thirty-one. By that age, I had definitely started to get some financial mojo going in my life and was supporting myself decently as a freelance book proposal writer. But I still hadn’t really learned sales. I still basically subscribed to the view, which Bryan dissected for us: If I’m good at what I do, shouldn’t that be good enough to make people want to pay me for it? I’m not going to force people to buy something they don’t already want. That would be uncouth, wouldn’t it?
What I still didn’t realize—and what most people who are resistant to learning sales don’t realize—is that there’s a lot of room between just hanging out your shingle and hoping people show up, on the one hand, and forcing and manipulating people to buy things they don’t want, on the other hand. Most people, for reasons of integrity, don’t want to do the latter. (And thank goodness.) But they think the only other option is to do the former, so that’s what they do to sell themselves: diddly-squat. This is where the mistake lies. There’s a lot of room between these two poles, between pressuring people and doing diddly-squat. Between those two poles lie options that both close the sale and exhibit high class and integrity.
What first woke me up to this distinction was a half-day coaching session Jena and I paid for with Victor Cheng (http://www.victorcheng.com), a business growth expert who is often quoted by reporters from Fox News, MSNBC, Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur, Forbes, Time, and the Wall Street Journal.
After our epiphany with the sales letter for Jena’s business at the beginning of 2009 (described in Success Skill #3), we both were forever “sold” on the value of making serious investments in improving our marketing skills. (See Success Skill #5 on investing for success.) So we flew out to California and jointly hired Victor for a $4,000 half-day of coaching for Jena on her business; I got to be a fly on the wall and soak up the teachings as Victor coached her.
In this session, Victor taught Jena an approach to sales inspired by the book SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham. It turns out that a team of over one hundred researchers with a budget of $1 million, led by Rackham, analyzed thirty-five thousand real-world, in-person sales sessions made by ten thousand salespeople in twenty-three countries over twelve years. All to figure out