Book of the month: SELLING IS EVERYONE’S BUSINESS: What It Takes To Create A Great Salesperson

Do you have one or more downline members? Then the two most important things you can do for them are: relieve them of much of their prospecting duties via direct marketing and “attraction marketing”, and, embrace the role of coach, and accept the responsibility of continuous coaching.

In this book, sales training consultants Steve Johnson and Adam Shaivitz lay out a simple, sensible regimen for managing and coaching salespeople (or yourself) to top performance, including a “coaching model”, goal setting and accountability forms, and examples. While the premise of “creating a great salesperson” or “downline member” is flawed – because, ultimately, all effective motivation is self-motivation and a successful salesperson creates himself – the strategies in the book for assisting salespeople/downline distributors in their efforts to excel are practical and important.

Available in bookstores or get information at wiley.com/business or nextlevelsalesconsulting.com

Dick Benson was one of the great direct marketing pioneers, starting in 1947 at Time-Life. In 1954, he encouraged and consulted with a group of publishers and celebrated authors in creating American Heritage Magazine, which, just 6 years later, had an eye-popping 365,000 paid subscribers. As a result, the magazine’s editor, Bruce Catton was able to sell over 250,000 copies of his book on the Civil War entirely by direct-mail. (Which is one of the reasons I teach postcard techniques in OnlineProspectingSecrets.com – it’s THAT powerful!)
In 1969, Benson took a tiny kitchen table publication, The Contest Newsletter (about entering and winning contests and sweepstakes) and built it to 750,000 subscribers. And, at his death in 1996, he was doing it again with a health newsletter, quickly built to 800,000 subscribers. His strategies of selling newsletter subscriptions by mail have broad application to selling anything by mail, and can be found in his book ‘Secrets Of Successful Direct-Mail’, published by Boardroom Books (BottomLineSecrets.com).

Some quick Benson tips: A 2-time buyer is twice as likely to buy again as is a 1-time buyer. (So let your customers know what else they can be buying from you and your company!) Memberships sell and renew better than subscriptions, by 10% or more. Long copy is better than short copy. Two premiums/bonus gifts are usually better than one….so what bonuses are you including when people join you? How do you stand out?

In September, 1963, golfer Floyd Root started hitting golf balls at the edge of the Pacific Ocean and kept hitting them non-stop, across country, for 13 months until reaching the Atlantic Ocean. He lost 3,511 golf balls along the way. To my knowledge, his “achievement” still stands as a record today.

The late sports super-agent Mark McCormack, who I appeared on a number of programs with as a speaker, told me he thought most avid golfers approach their weekend game with far more determination, drive, persistence, patience and sustained interest than they do their careers or businesses – and if they flipped their passions, they’d all wind up millionaires many times over. Obviously, Mr. Root was particularly driven, persistent and patient!

The public, outside someone’s life looking, all too often sees the illusion of overnight success. It rarely occurs in reality. Most successes are the natural harvest of a lot of years, a lot of long hours, a lot of patient and persistent seed planting and fertilizing and care. Because people believe too much in the pleasing but mythical possibility of overnight success, they are too quick to give up on their ideas and themselves, too quick to give into disappointment, too easily lured and seduced by the promise of one magic pill after another.

It is quite common to find people willing to devote 3 or 4 consecutive hours at a time to playing a game of golf, playing a video game, or some other recreational pursuit, but quite uncommon to find those same people devoting 3 or 4 hours at a time to reading or studying self-improvement, career improvement or business improvement materials, studying at the library, or even working diligently on a business project.

Similarly, it’s common to see people start entrepreneurial enterprises; comparatively rare to see them sticking to them long enough to achieve success. The much cited statistics about the high rate of business failure are as big an illusion as is overnight success. They don’t accurately measure “failure”; they mostly represent “quitting.”

— Dan Kennedy

Dan Kennedy is an author, consultant and business coach. Additional information at www.FreeDanKennedyNewsletter.com