As much as I wanted “The Quintessential Salesman Blog” to be about sales and helping others to find their own sense of excellence and empowerment, I also wanted it to be a Blog about life. I believe that it is not enough to merely survive the trenches of business, but to thrive in them. My hope, my mission in fact, has been to inspire people to seek levels within their own lives that go beyond the accomplishments of the moment, to constantly pursue the greater wisdom of who and what they are, and to use that knowledge to set in place the foundations that are capable of sustaining true success and true fulfillment.
Just as in life, the most crucial element of any sale is not the product or service that is being sold…but the person who sells it. Perhaps finding the Quintessential Human Being that is within all of us is the first step to finding The Quintessential Salesman that is in each of us.
In the days and weeks to come I will be putting excerpts from the Quintessential Salesman on my business blog entitled, “The Quintessential Salesman Business Blog” and I invite you to visit and contribute whenever possible. Thank you and I look forward to hearing from you.
Insights from Thirty-five Years of Experience in Life and Industry. In a sense we are all Salesmen.
The one demise of great salespeople, unlike any other professional discipline, is they make what they do look easy. People will often think, if they can't do anything else they can "SELL". The same people often think the same thing about teaching. If you can't do, teach. Both are enormously wrong. I have seen amazingly qualified people, often experts in their own fields, terrified, sweating profusely, on a simple sales call. Being a true sales professional is a skill set not unlike being a lawyer, or doctor or any other highly skilled and trained indvidual. The sad part is that even the best sales professionals often believe the detractors. That is why I refer to it as the "Noble Profession".
I believe one of the single greatest sources of lost opportunity is what I refer to as “causalities of doomed history”. They are people who live in the past of their own failures; they failed and the scar of that failure continues to haunt them. As is often the case, “bad” experiences are often “emotional” experiences, which means they can be anchored heavily in how we think and react moving forward.
Einstein once said ”If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it I would use the first 55 minutes to formulate the right question because as soon as I had identified the right question, I knew I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
For a long time society at large has looked at the levels of education as a measurement of intelligence and only recently have we began to realize that for the most part it is largely a myth. First it is critical to recognize that there are many kinds of intelligence and how we learn can vary from one person to another as much as our fingerprints. In fact, it is probably safe to say that no two people learn the exact same way.