Book Review: The Joy of Selling

Hello and welcome to episode number 50 of the Strategy Corner, where our goal is to get you to take action. I’m your host, Michel Zink, the owner of Intentional Solutions Corp. And on today’s episode, we are doing a book review. That’s right. It’s number 50. And so every 10th episode, I do a book review. Today’s book is by Steve Chandler. And you might remember him. I’ve done a book review on his Reinventing Yourself, which is one of my favorite All-Time books.

And this book is called The Joy of Selling. So, Steve Chandler, The Joy of Selling. And the way that I love to do these book reviews is to read from the book the things that I underlined, notated, and really enjoyed because I know that you, my listener, will also enjoy at least one of the little nuggets that I share. Because if you know anything about Steve, he’s really good with just sharing like one sentence that just totally blows your mind and gets you thinking in a different way. So let’s just jump right in. Here we go.

There are no unimportant people. Everyone is a piece in the puzzle of life. Everyone plays a very important part. Everyone has power. I love this – very simplistic but important. Everyone plays a very important part. That’s right. Everyone is important. The answer is not in trying to do more work. The real quantum leaps come from doing braver work. Wow. To me, especially from someone who could just work all the time and has been known to be, what do you say? A workaholic? I love this because I’ve been trying to do less and be more. And so this really speaks to me about the real quantum leap comes from doing braver work. So thinking about how you really want to make an impact in life and doing it. Not so much as working 50 hours a week, but really even taking one hour and how can you be braver? You need stagefright for joy. You can’t live a hidden life and experience joy. That’s a great one. Cause I think people feel like if they had more joy in their life, they would just always be happy. And that’s not the case.

Now he has this question to ask yourself to produce something every day it says, “What would I like to produce today? What would I like this meeting to produce?” And what I love about this is that it sets the intention for the day. It helps you to focus in on what you really do want to produce. It could be one thing, two things. But what’s most important to you and how could you produce something that day keeps you very focused. It says people who fail in sales fail for one reason only. They stay outside of the conversation. It says here the best way to produce awareness and therefore heighten your sales performance is to track yourself. Spend two experimental days logging every minute of your business day. Open up a little notebook, whatever you go. Whenever you go into a sales conversation, log in. When you stop the conversation, log out. Write down the time of day to the minute. At the end of the day, add up the minutes. You might be surprised at first unless you’re currently leading the nation in sales, you might be surprised at how little time you spend inside the conversation that leads to sales. Because if you really track this, the news is going to get good. Soon your heightened awareness will take you up into your spirit. You’ll feel different when you’ve logged in. The more logged in you are, the more effective your day will feel. There will even be times when you feel like you’ve lived three days in one day.

I love that. I think we should all be challenged when we say sales. This is anything. This is even being a manager and an organization. And your sales is to ensure that your employees are taken care of and that your employees are heard. So even tracking your conversations with them would be a great place to start and to see how much time you really are spending with them. They believed in a powerful sales secret. The more you give, the more you get, which I know a lot of people feel like where you have to be scared, you can’t give too much. He’s saying the more you give, the more you get. It says, by giving it away, the band became a group of millionaires and one of the best known and best-reported rock bands in history. So I should read the paragraph here. It says Grateful Dead fans became all more passionate because of this. They made the recordings and played them for people who had never heard Jerry Garcia play the guitar. They went to more and more concerts. And when the Dead released their new album, they turned out in droves.

So what I’m saying here is that the Grateful Dead actually encourages you to record their shows. And because of that, you know, they gave that away. And because of that, they gained a greater following. And this reminds me, too, of my friend Brooke Castillo, who on her podcast always talks about her model and always gives a lot of information away. And she’s building like a I think she started off like with a small business and now she’s in like the 30 million dollar business range. It says here, think in terms of giving not getting. The more ways you can already begin serving people who are considering buying from you, the better the chance you have of winning their business. If you have prospects, you would really like to sell to, figure out ways to communicate with them more and figure out ways to serve them before the sale. When you start serving and giving before the sale, the buyer already has a trusted experience to base his or her decision on.

Learn to enter your selling conversation as you would a large warm bathtub of rainbow soapy water. Once you’re in there, stay until you’re relaxed and comfortable. That just makes me laugh and smile. I’m gonna read that one more time. Learn to enter your selling conversations as you would a large, warm bathtub of rainbows, soapy water. And once you’re in there, stay until you are relaxed and comfortable. If you realize that you’re not making enough cold calls each day, find a spotter. Choose someone else on the sales team to partner up with it. Make it fun. Don’t wait for management to talk to you. I just love that last part. Don’t wait for management to talk to you. So again, take control. Be an owner. It says partner up with a spotter and seize the day. Take complete control of your own activities. Don’t wait for a rescue to take place. Jump out ahead of this statistical curve and let the universe take care of the rest. People aren’t trying to deceive you in self-help books when they sell you a system that worked for them. But what they don’t tell you is that it wasn’t the system that got the result. It was their desire for the result. When the desire for a result is strong enough, almost any system will work.

Isn’t that true? Right. Because if you ever started something and you just don’t you’re not that excited about it and it just fizzles out. But those activities that you’re really excited about, you move forward and you make them happen. That’s really interesting. I love that desire. In sales, you also master yourself – all the wonderful new phases to your personality grow and added to with each encounter. Most people freeze their personalities at a high school level and keep that way for life. Not you, if you’re selling for a living. You just can’t. You have to be like the plant that keeps blooming new flowers. You’re never the same. You keep learning who you can be and it changes for the better as you go along. And this also goes with reinventing yourself. You always have an opportunity to do that.

I can’t stress how much more valuable it is to do this out loud, to truly talk it out. Most people in their cars either have faces full of worry and self-doubt or they are listening to something annoying and appalling on the radio. Look around and notice these people while you drive. Look at their faces. Do you feel like they do? You don’t have to. You could be engaged in a wonderful and witty conversation that’s winning over your toughest customer. When you keep fear or worry locked inside your head, it brings migraines and more fear. It affects your stomach. Your whole nervous system gets edgy. When you speak out, really speak out and speak out. You’re back in command of your own voice, your own soul. It’s a bold and proactive thing to do. And then he has a quote here. “It’s not really the will to win that’s most important,” Bobby Knight used to say, “It’s the will to prepare to win.” Why is it when kids are really clear about what they want, they don’t hear objections? They don’t take objection seriously. They just stay in the conversation. Anyone out there who has children knows that kids when they want something, they just keep on going after it. If you tell them no, they’ll ask again. And that’s the attitude to have when you’re going out and building a client base. You can build your fortune in sales as fast as you could build your skills. What other profession gives you the fast track guarantee? When you connect to that spirit, the game of life slows down and you find your own greatness. You will find from personal experience that when you’re selling from the spirit, you’re not selling at all. You’re flying and serving and connecting, like a tennis player who has defied gravity and just left the ground. You’re soaring above the ground, just as you always dreamed you could. So whatever you do, don’t quit. Keep selling. Keep talking. Keep communicating. Your communications will connect. Your work will all be worth it. You will be rewarded in ways you can’t imagine if you simply don’t quit.

If you want to increase your confidence and sense of mastery, you might consider doing more study. Lawrence of Arabia said that everyone dreams at night, but the truly powerful people in life are the dreamers of the day because they create the circumstance of good fortune for themselves. Says here, pump enough love into your sales pitch and you will succeed. It’s so much better when we do this consciously. Just as it helps me when I remember that Try is a weak word that does not issue a command at all. In fact, the word try will suggest to my brain that this action might not get done. When I hear myself saying I’ll try to finish that proposal by tomorrow, it helps to stop and take a deep breath and ask myself whether I really am committed to finishing that proposal by tomorrow. If I am, I changed my wording in parentheses, says brain coding two will do it by tomorrow. My mind encodes my brain. It goes on to say, But if you communicate with your brain and trying terms, your results will be terrible. Or if you say, see if you can get some calls in this morning. That message, too, is loaded with heavy double meaning and pessimism. It is not a clear command at all. The brain knows that it can try without actually accomplishing anything. In fact, for people who are struggling with professional success, that’s usually what’s happening all day long. I’m going to ask you to make ten sales calls every morning this week. My sales manager once told me when I was selling in other speakers’ seminars, why 10? I would ask myself, why not just leave me alone and let me make as many as I can? Finally, I got the courage to ask him out loud, why 10? I said to him, Why don’t you trust me to do as many as I can? He said, when we leave it to chance, it drops out of existence. When we track it, it finds reality. Sales go up. It’s not babysitting. It’s managing. See it any way you want, but I recommend seeing it as a contribution to your success.

I love that paragraph. But in the important unsolved problem areas of my life, I’m still trying. And that’s the goal, right? If we don’t hit what we’re looking for, we got to still try. It says I believe in walking as a great way to focus our thoughts. If we are not out walking, we are always open to being distracted. Try this yourself when you find your motivation going away. If you give yourself enough walking time with yourself, you will return home highly motivated. When you are too distracted by too many things, your mind is scattered all around. You need a single focus of attention to succeed at anything. You can’t be attending a hundred different concerns. They will all grow worse. You are practicing being a great salesperson every time you treat someone well. You’re also changing the inner nature of the entire world. You have your own world, your own network of clients, customers, vendors, professional colleagues, sales products, prospects, friends of the family. Sales happen inside that world. Every time you treat someone, anyone in that world, especially, well, it alters the nature of the whole world.

Always put yourself in your prospect’s mind, see yourself through your customer’s eyes, pretend you are your customer looking back at you. Do this often and as much as you can. It will show you the way to sell. It says the worst salespeople do the same thing. They assume that the customer knows all about their product and service and thinks about it all the time. Not true. The customer needs help remembering because the customer only knows one thing. Through and through. And that’s his or her own business. I love this because it’s just telling you to keep on remembering or reminding people. So a lot of times we might see individuals and have to repeat ourselves and tell them what we do. And it’s only because that person is more focused on what they’re doing, which is totally natural. And so we just need to keep reminding them. In sales, the fasces road to success is through thinking. Learn to think about all your processes from top to bottom. If it isn’t about forcing some happy attitude on yourself, it’s about learning to outsmart yourself. Stories sell. That simple. Yet many of the salespeople I work with have missed this point. Rather than telling a story, they make claims. They describe features and benefits. They talk price. They try to sell rather than enchant.

Whoever you are, you must convey only one convincing promise. I will take good care of you. Successful selling is always about using the brain. When you have an understanding of how your brain is designed to serve you, you sell more. One of the most fascinating aspects of human brainpower is its rector activating system. That’s the turning capacity of your brain. It tunes out what you don’t need from the external world and tunes in what you need. It will find anything you want to find for you. If you spend time thinking about opportunities, you will start to notice more and more opportunities. If you think about problems, you will see more and more evidence of problems. This is so true in life. You know, if you’re out wanting to buy a new car, you start seeing the actual brand of car that you’re looking to buy. Before that, you never notice it. So just remember, if you think about problems, you will see more and more evidence of the problems. So don’t do that. Look at the opportunities. Greatness comes from a network of relationships built on giving and sharing. Great salespeople make friends. They are not afraid to live life in a friendly and interactive way. There is no chilly or stinging hiding out. There is no playing life close to the best.

To reach huge success, we need to risk ourselves every day. We need to offer ourselves up in person to other people. And if they are too cold and professional to create a friendship with us, well, that’s not our problem. That’s their problem because they have not outgrown their old fears. But with continued acts of kindness and friendship, we can help them take their fears away. The important thing to remember in this case is to brighten up your messages before you send them. Because you can’t be there in person to give your sentences, those warm and quirky nuances your voice tones can give them. You must have a policy of first do no harm. Before you send your email off, remember to check it for tone. Is it happy? Is it a contribution to someone’s day? Is it a pick me up? That is so great to remember that this says to make someone happy. Most people believe that the opposite of this is true. They believe that success makes you happy. It does not. It’s the other way around. Happiness makes you successful. It makes you more creative and energetic. It builds relationships faster. And it’s a very efficient operating mode. Our lives seem to keep giving us one lesson to learn. When you find the voice of your spirit, you can sell anything. The salesperson who does not sell a lot almost always has less of a connection to his or her deep down desire to succeed. The deficit in desire shows up in a lack of participation. Lack of courage in the face of challenge. And a simple lack of energy for the tedious parts of the job.

It says here they focus on what they want, not what they don’t want. In our society, we have everything backward. We’re all sitting around passively waiting until we feel like doing what we know needs to be done. We have now elevated feelings, the highest possible level. We’ve put them above everything else. And in doing so, we have paralyzed our lives. We have frozen perfectly good lives that could have been constructive and full of joyful accomplishments. Try to learn how to relax into who you really are comfortable with being instead of who you think you should be. Put your best qualities into your job. Don’t wait for some future perfect job because there is no such thing. Actually, there is, but is not in the future. It’s in this fresh moment. Your job will be perfect for you as you make it. Shape your job to find your job with your own loves and desires. Pour yourself in as you would water into a potted plant. Fear of talking to strangers can make driving around prospecting our territory more frightening than we realize. Subconsciously and suddenly, we put it off or we only do a little of it. Or we have to rush back to the office to fax the contract. OK. This is an older book. We don’t really fax things out much. It says here, but the fastest way to expand your base of friends and contacts is become absolutely fearless about calling strangers. To actually set a certain time aside every day for calling people you don’t know. So this is very interesting. He decides ahead of time who he’s going to call and he calls them and just puts it on the calendar. To speed up your success in sales, use every opportunity you can find to participate talking to strangers. When you have decided to feel the joy of becoming great at what you do, everything is practice. Some people spend their whole lives not talking to strangers. It does not give them a safer life. It only keeps their number and their happiness down way low.

Change how you sell completely just for the thrill, just to see how fun and crazy you can make your sales life. I want a protrution to realize that most people, in fact, base their sales decisions on trust, not whether you have a pleasing personality or are high school type popular, but rather it’s trust based on what they see as your commitment. The clients who have the most dramatic success are fanatical about the numbers. We all have numbers. People who work directly with their numbers succeed. People who hide their numbers, disown their numbers, or simply avoid their numbers fail. When you stay focused on what needs to be done, you will almost always achieve your goal. And for the human mind to clearly focus, numbers need to be at the forefront. If you want something, focus on it. Focus on it until you get it. Yes. The more you talk to people who have succeeded in sales, the faster you succeed. You yourself will succeed. Don’t operate in a vacuum of ignorance. Open yourself up to all kinds of help. Says here, once you really commit, a burden will be lifted. You’ll be free to enjoy yourself.

And to end the book review it says here. To me, the beauty of humor is that it signals for sure that there is no linear time. Just as one does not accumulate a linear tapeworm life. I know in my soul that linear time is human invention. We use it to measure activities. We use it so that we can show up with the right people at the first tee on the golf course. But in reality, there is no linear time. One is presented with a series of fresh moments. Each one containing all the time. This is a fresh moment right now.

So I hope you enjoyed this book review. The big thing here is that every day you can reinvent yourself. You could try something new. And then the big thing that I got out of it was that you need to keep yourself in communication. You need to start the conversations to go out there and talk to people who you’re afraid to talk to. That is your call to action. One thing that I love for you to do with this book review is to take one big learning that you have here and bring it into your week and see how you just see the results you get. For me, it’s going to be more to conversations and making sure that I connect with people that even I’m afraid to call and reach out to.

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