One of the things that irritates me is when someone that wasn’t ever going to buy from me gives me advice on how to run my business.

As if I blew a sale. As if I’m stupid.

More to the point – as if, had I said something a little bit different, or been a little more deferential I might have won the sale, and that I screwed up.

“Gee, if you’d have done it this way, I’d be your customer instead of your something.”

Please.

I know how I come across. I always have. I know that sending a strong signal of indifference or disdain will scare people away. This is on purpose. I’m reacting to something that I’m reading.

I know that putting a bunch of hoops to jump through allows us to screen our customers. Some customers get them, some don’t. This isn’t fair at all. This is my business. (These days about everyone pays the same price).

When someone sends me a signal that they are insane, or insist on meetings….I make them jump through fairly arbitrary hoops, or I pick a fight with their legal department.

Obviously, we need business, but we really don’t need business from anyone in particular. When a client believes that they are our boss, they act poorly.

They get a worse project because our objective necessarily shifts from “doing the very best that has ever been done” to “being done with these jerks as quickly as possible so that we can do the best work on another project.”

I guess it’s OK to have false positives. To have a filter that kicks out more crazy/problems. And, as we become more skilled at our process, we’ll be able to “client proof” ourselves, and as our brand becomes stronger, people will put up with more to work with us on our terms.

There is a place for tactics that everyone teaches.  They matter, a little.

But focusing on them is wrong.

The tactics:

• Objection Handling
• Cold Calling Opens
• Scripts
• DiSC typing.

All have a purpose. To some degree they help, and they can make a difference.  But it’s frosting.  You can probably put bakery frosting on garbage and make it look like a delicious birthday cake.  The frosting will look OK, but it’s covering up stuff.

Tactics are frosting.  They help.  But before we study tactics, we want to dig a little deeper. I spent ten years studying tactics.  I read books like “Question Based Selling,” or “Selling to Vito“.  Countless others  All are fine, adequate books.  All are helpful, and have things that you can use.

But none of them inspire passion, none of them teach you to tell the truth and to be fully grounded, human and real.  None of them teach leadership.  Respect.  Kindness.  Helpfulness.  Being good.  Being concerned about someone else’s well being.

That stuff makes you good.  That stuff means you get real, long term sales.

I sold mortgages for several years.  I sold at First Ohio Home Finance when I was flailing hard to beat back Adult Failure Spiral. Mostly losing.  A story for another day.

The story for today is an observation I made there.

I was the most productive member of an unproductive office.  I was making something around $80-90k a year or so (it was a bad year, I’m sorry).  Many months–even many quarters my buddy Jeremiah would print off absurd pie charts showing that my paltry production was 2/3 of what was being made in the office.  (As another aside- there probably more DUIs than employees in that office).  Instead of wondering how the hell people were eating, I crowed like a rooster, and medicated with $2 dollar beers during the afternoons.

I wasn’t a genius.  I was delusional.  You’ve been in sales, you’ve been there.

But one of the things that I noticed was that everyone was reliving every blow by blow in real time.

A variant of yesterdays lesson, this behavior was indulgent.  People would have a sales event.  A call with a client.  A possible referral.  A check in with an underwriter.

The next action would be to repeat the story throughout the office, and contribute to the hazy and delusional cognitive dissonance that was the Bush administration.

“Another referral from Brian, mmm- buddy, things are looking up.”

First they’d tell our broken down mortgage processor, then each other.  A routine event, one of 30 or 40 things that had to happen for a loan to close would be repeated to the office 5,6 times.  Something that took 3 minutes to complete would bloat into a 45 minute ordeal.

Each time it was repeated, it seems that the event became less likely to happen, but only the skill of the loan officer stood in the gap and made it work.

I imagine their wives heard the details it as well, hoping to find reassurance that their husband may actually get paid this month.

I know that they’d even tell the other loan officers at Happy Hour.

Jeremiah caught this happening and made an itinerant snarky remark about someone getting 5-6 phone calls a day and then doing 30 minutes worth of debriefing per call to fill the time.  I observed my own behavior, and yes, I did this.  Nobody cared.  Certainly not me.

The lesson here is shut up about the routine.  It doesn’t need to be said.  None of it. Do your job, shut up, and do it again.  You don’t need congratulations because some housewife in the burbs returned your call after you stayed with it 15 times.  It’s what it takes.  It’s hard for everyone.

I’ve sold a lot. I’ve failed a lot. I’ve won sales, and I’ve always hustled my way through life on “pure commission” gigs.  I’ve liked persuasion in a 1-to-1 sense.

I’m not going to dispense “Chris’s 9 rules of sales mastery” or “The Rules of Sales Club” or anything lame like that.  I just want to talk about what I know to be true, and how to create a career in sales that can leave you with some self respect.

My hope is that these ideas will survive in the future.  Our world will become way more cluttered and fragmented.

I started writing a post, but it got to 6,000 words, so I figured I’d cut it up.  My thinking is informed by psychology, testing, and other ideas.

So here’s the first idea that I know to be true.

Sales Idea #1: Kick The Approbation Habit – Only Count a Sale Once

One of the battles that salespeople have to constantly fight is self delusion.  We walk a fine line between being an inspirational figure and turning into Willy Loman.  There are invitations to delusion.  Realtors have to content with a culture where twenty agents might combine to sell 30 houses over the course of a year.  It doesn’t take much to shine.

People are approbation junkies.  They need to be loved, approved of.  So they brag about it.

It is easy to become unhinged by sales. I’ve been there.  In my real estate career I had 3 epic months that subsidized 4 whole years of mediocrity.  Yet, I remembered the epic months and carried myself as if every month was like that.  As if I was some expert on selling because I was the “LO of the year.”  Dostoyevsky  talked about this in The Gambler

You have to be intentional about only counting a sale once. If you don’t do this, you’ll become delusional. A lot of sales have “milestones” and all of the “milestones” are good news, but they aren’t much news.  They aren’t finished yet and they aren’t a sign or time to relax.

For example, a salesperson might:

• Get a lead [then brag about how good they are at getting leads]
• Get an appointment [then brag about how they did it]
• Get to write a proposal  [and brag about it]
• Get a contract [then brag about it]
• Get a check [then brag about it]
• get their boss to pay the commission…[then brag about it]

All of this means that each time you dissipate yourself a bit. You undermine your ability to do more work in the future, because you’re spending time bragging about minutia.

We all do some of this.  Every one of us.  If you can stop and if you ignore things, you become a better poker player. You focus on one goal, not mile stones, and you hit your one goal more often.  If you stop getting seduced by things that happen on the way it becomes more likely you get the real goal.