The Importance of Professional Selling Rules | Professional Selling Skills

If you should decide to take up football, the first stage would be to learn the rules. And in learning those rules, you would obviously want to be taught from the current rules of the game, not from the out-dated rules. Regrettably, too many salespeople are being taught out-of-date sales practices. As I have already said, the buying public are more sophisticated than they used to be. People are better educated; they have more choices, and the competition is more intense and proficient. It is therefore absolutely essential that any salesperson attempting to perform and achieve in the vibrant market-place of the current climate, must be equipped and knowledgeable on the accepted practices of modern selling.

In listing these rules, I must again stick firmly to the principles, and those principles have to be adapted to the selling environment or industry. In so many cases these rules are common sense and appear to be stating the obvious. But it is exactly these rules that are being broken by salespeople who fall into the 80 per cent category. Over the years, in working with client companies and training thousands of salespeople, I have continually heard our 80 per cent category salespeople telling me and showing me by their body language that they have heard it all before.

The star performers calls them, the champions – are hungry and willing to be reminded of those rules and principles because they know that there are few truly new sales techniques that really work. It is the sound principles of people-to-people communication that are the most effective, and it is these principles that get forgotten and neglected.