This week, I was having a conversation with one of my employees about a guy who was exposed as a total con artist on national television, yet somehow he still manages to get people to send him millions of dollars in donations each year for his supposed “good cause”–which is, in reality, a complete joke. My employee said, “I just don’t get it! Why in the world are people still sending this guy money when they’ve been told about the thousands of other people who made the mistake of believing him and got ripped off?”
This brings up a good point. Why do we sometimes ignore the lessons we can learn from others’ mistakes and doom ourselves to making the same bad decisions? People in business and sales do this all the time. There are “tried-and-true” sales techniques that are so simplistic it doesn’t seem as though they can be really effective. Many times, we try to re-evaluate, improve upon and complicate them. Oftentimes we end up making things harder than they really are.One of the biggest mistakes that people in business (and especially in sales) make is not listening to the people who have experience. For some reason, they assume that they have to know better . . . and the truth is, they don’t.There is nothing like experience. It beats education every day of the week. The only thing better is a combination of education and experience . . . or a willingness to learn from other people’s experience. There are many basic sales techniques that any good salesperson knows to be effective. They don’t look for something more complicated or involved because they know from their own experience, as well as the experience of others, what works in sales and what doesn’t work in sales.
If you’ve read my book, Masters of Sales, you may have read things that seemed too simple to be effective or you may have seen ideas that you’ve heard before. Instead of being dismissed, these tactics and ideas should be embraced. Masters of Sales learn from other people’s success. Learn from other “Masters” that sometimes the simplest ideas can have the biggest impact.
For more info on Masters of Sales, please visit: www.MastersBooks.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 1:00 am and is filed under Marketing/Sales, Book, Self Development, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Leave a Reply
