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Foreword
Gerhard Gschwandtner, Publisher, Selling Power Magazine
In 1835, Samuel Haliburton wrote a number of stories about an imaginary
salesman named Sam Slick who traveled through Connecticut selling
clocks. The purpose of the series of articles was to incite his readers
to become more enterprising. Haliburton minted memorable quotes that
millions of people use today without remembering their creator. He came
up with sayings like "Six of one or half a dozen of the other,"
"Barking up the wrong tree," and "Failures to heroic minds are the
stepping stones to success."
Stories contain the seeds that
fuel our ambition. When someone tells us a story, we listen to the
kernel of truth, to the flash of insight or the lightning bolt of
inspiration. Stories move us forward to grab the brass ring, and they
help us avoid the pitfalls that wipe others out.
While
stories about success may fill readers with awe or envy, they often
fail to motivate those who lack self-esteem. Stories about failures
have a dual benefit: First, failures or fumbles are entertaining to
read. Second, failures are wonderful teachers who often bring out the
best in us. Seidman has collected some of the best failure stories,
which work like strong vitamins that boost our immune system so we can
protect ourselves against adversity, rejection, or defeat.
Remember the old saying, "When the student is ready, the teacher will
appear." Dan Seidman is the teacher who allows the sales professional
to enjoy the drama of a sales situation. He then illuminates the mind
of the reader with keen insights, useful advice, and practical
suggestions. These stories are all written from the heart. In a
high-tech age filled with confusion, this collection of real-life
stories appears as a breath of fresh air.
This book is not a
cure for blunders. On the contrary, the main message of the book is to
encourage you as a salesperson to fail forward. It's a lot more
realistic than to get stuck in one place and pretend to be growing. The
moral of every story in this book is very simple: If we don't learn to
fail, we'll never learn to grow.
Introduction
Jeffrey Gitomer, author of The Sales Bible
Who done it?
A sales murder mystery!
Have you ever had a sale die? Have you ever lost a sale because you
killed it? What lesson did you learn? Or did you just grumble and blame
others.
In my thirty years of sales training and consulting
I've never had a salesperson come up to me and say, "Jeffrey, I didn't
make the sale, and it was all my fault!" Salespeople always blame the
death of their sales on things like lower prices, better relationship
with someone else, pre-existing contracts, unreturned phone calls-you
know the drill-anything and anyone but the face they see in the morning
bathroom mirror.
Salespeople are always studying sales
looking for the best (or easiest) way to make a sale. But they don't
seem to really learn unless they hit a brick wall. That pain sinks in.
When I began reading these sales horror stories through Dan's e-zine, I
laughed and learned from each one. But as I read the book, I realized
that here was a collection of sales coal turned into sales diamonds.
For the first time in sales history, someone has taken the horror of
sales and not only humanized the response, but created a mouth-to-mouth
form of "selling resuscitation."
This isn't a book about lost
sales. No, no. This is a book about how you can learn to win sales by
not making the same mistakes of others. This isn't a book about other
people's blunders. This is a book about how you can make more sales by
gaining insight (the cause of death after each story) about other
salespeople's sales mistakes, so you don't have to make them yourself.
Vicarious learning: You see the pain, but don't actually feel it.
When you read about other people's sales death, you chuckle at the
story, the circumstance, and the stupidity. It also allows you to
"Monday-morning quarterback" about how you would have never done that.
But the real value in these autopsies is the prevention of your lost
sales. Because in the end, that's what you really care about.
So let me give you some major clues about how to use this book to save
sales, save face, save customers, save dollars, and save your career.
The stories are ingeniously grouped by the "type" of failure so that
you can see how deaths take place by person and personality. Old
techniques, bad attitude, too much ego or anger, a poor system for
selling, or-my favorite-the "go figure" sales death that plagues us
all.
Each story tells of the death of a sale in the words of
the person who killed it. Classic miscues, poor judgments, and boners
that they committed and then were brave enough to fess up what really
happened. These salespeople are to be commended.
After each
story, Dan presents a postmortem to determine the cause of death. Like
an autopsy performed by a pathologist, Dan leads you to an
understanding of why this death occurred. And those "why" lessons are
designed to prevent your sales death.
Between the lessons,
Dan also takes the time to share his own sales concepts and
philosophies, a perfect blend of information about the reality between
old and new perspectives of selling.
As a rule, I don't read
current books on selling. It ruins my independent thought and
creativity as a writer and speaker. I read the sales classic literature
written fifty years ago or more. These books can only be found in used
bookstores, and even though they're much less expensive than the shiny
new ones, they contain the history and the philosophy of selling at its
purest, and sales "answers" at their finest. They tell the way sales
should be made-and in fact, the easiest way to sell. The rare title,
How to Sell Your Way Through Life, written by Napoleon Hill in the late
twenties and early thirties, remains the best book ever written on the
subject.
But when I read The Death of 20th-Century Selling I
was taken aback. This book is both a throwback and a leap forward. It
embraces the concepts of yesterday, which rely more on the relationship
and less on the hoodwinking, and it leaps forward with the progressive
thoughts and insights necessary for 21st-century sales dominance-both
individual and corporate. It is real-world examples and street-smart
insights about how to make bad situations good.
Salespeople
have been dying since Henry Miller wrote Death of a Salesman fifty
years ago, but the rebirth of the selling process is alive and in your
hands.
Dan Seidman has created the best example of a
180-degree U-turn in selling strategy I've ever read-he brings the dead
(sales) back to life.
But here's the secret to this book and
your success. The best way to read, enjoy, and benefit from this book
is to "sip" it. Read the stories one at a time, one each day. After you
read it, put the lesson into action the same day. If you read it, and
study it, and apply the principles in it, and put the lessons into your
sales actions, at the end of sixty days you'll be on the sales path to
success. Healed!
With the proper self-discipline, you can
convert the death of The Death of 20th-Century Selling into living
sales and eternal relationships.
I hope you do.
The
Death Of 20th Century Selling will give you some of the funniest
business reading you've encountered. It will also give you some of the
best selling advice and strategies available from today's experts.
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