Frank Pacetta from Xerox listed his top ten sales commandments in the Wall Street Journal. These truths were acquired during a year where he turned the worst performing sales district into the number one district in the country.
- Prepare customer proposals on weekends and evenings.
- Never say no to a customer; everything is negotiable.
- Make customers feel good about you - not just your product.
- Meet customer requirements, even if it means fighting your own bureaucracy.
- Do things for customers you don’t get paid for, like solving billing problems.
- Know your competitor’s product better than your competitor does.
- Be early for meetings.
- Dress and groom yourself sharply so you look like a superior product.
- When it’s time to go home, make one more phone call.
- If you stay in the shower a long time in the morning because you don’t look forward to work, find another job.
Pretty good, but I have to respectively disagree with number 2, perhaps it warrants a post in itself.
2 comments ↓
What immediately came to mind when I read this list is these are very basic Sales 101-type imperatives.
First, I started to think about what wasn’t included in the list such as: leverage the internal political structure within your customer’s company; know how your competitor is going to position their product against yours and have a plan to overcome their assertions, be able to quantify the value of your product in your customer’s financial terms, etc.
But then I realized that many salespeople don’t abide by the basic points Pacetta listed. I can easily envision a salesperson following that list when all her competitors don’t, and doing quite well.
Hi Dave, that is a great point. I had an engineering professor that once said, if you just show up and do the basics, you’ll be ahead of 70% of your competition.
So many salespeople today are just acting as order takers and aren’t really selling at all. The problem with that is that we all get a bad reputation from these folks. The good news is that it’s pretty easy to beat the competition by using common sense and a little hard work.
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