Author: Mike Whitney
Publisher: AuthorHouse. 264 pages
Book Review by Ramu Nakliba
Those who are or were in the profession of selling or owning a small business know that one of the most difficult jobs out there is selling.
For those who own businesses and are closely involved in selling their products and services, they know that upholding the quality of product or services, as well as providing an excellent overall customer experience is also part and parcel of selling, acquiring and retaining customers, the most critical part of a business.
When all these responsibilities are taken together – selling, maintaining product-service quality and ensuring customers remain with your company, the pressure can be overwhelming.
And when the business owner is doing all this in the midst of the severest recession the United States is in since the 1930s Great Depression, it is no surprise that nearly 1.6 million businesses filed for bankruptcies in 2010 (bankruptcy cases filed in federal courts for the 12-month period ending December 31, 2010, totaled 1,593,081, up 8.1 percent over the total 2009 bankruptcy filings of 1,473,675, according to the records of the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts).
Selling services is a lot more difficult than selling products. When you’re selling services, you are selling a promise to the customer. If you do not deliver on your promise, even through no fault of your own, it is likely you will lose that customer for good, unless you have established close relationship with your customer and he clearly understands that the service delivered being not up to his expectation was not any of the company’s fault. But today’s tough economy, you either get customer satisfaction or lose the customer for good.
Throughout the book Are You Ready to Sell, Mike Whitney underscores the word ready.
Readiness is a key requirement in the success of any endeavor, and especially so in the field of sales.
The chart on page 5 pretty much summarizes what Mike Whitney illustrates what the salesperson needs to do in order to be in a state of readiness to sell, and not just in one instance, but all the time.
This important chart, which shows two points – from a bottom left “You are here” to a top right “You want to be here.” The chart has 18 areas of attainment for the salesperson. Not all salespeople could score a 100 percent in each of these areas. Whitney suggests that sales professionals do a self-assessment. Find out in which areas you need improvement and work on those weak points in your personal salesperson profile.
At the lowest end of the chart, Whitney has areas of assessment such as “a willingness and desire to change and improve” and “accepting that improvement takes work.” Knowing that a person has to constantly keep doing something to bring about improvement in a given area is an important starting point.
We often read and have heard this advice: “No pain, no gain.” Unless we learn what we need to do improve our prospecting activity for example, we will keep struggling to do sales. For example, if we simply make cold telephone calls, and 99 percent of them go into voicemails and only one or two of them are returned, we will have an extremely difficult getting in-person sales appointments. If such meetings are critical to getting new business, you are going to be a very frustrated person unless you get more calls back.
There are many areas of personal assessment on this chart, such as “deeper knowledge of your competition” and “upgraded listening skills” for example, that the salesperson needs to look into to improve his order volume and gross profit margins. We suggest the reader look at each and every one of these areas of improvement to become a sales pro, when he or she will be making decisions on areas at the top of the ladder in this chart, which include “knowing when and how to close” and “the courage to maximize margin.”
Mike Whitney. In his final comments, says that his career has spanned 45 years. His areas of work have included sales support, selling, managing sales people, running sales companies, coaching sales people, and doing consulting work for sales organizations.
The wealth of experience, knowledge and wisdom he has acquired in the world of sales is amply reflected in this excellently written and valuable book. Sales people and sales managers who read this book and keep it as a useful reference work will benefit from it greatly.
