Note: The popular website, LinkedIn, invited me to post some articles which I could later post in my blog if I wanted. So, here is the first one. Let’s see if you like it:
Birth of a Salesman
When I transitioned out of the U.S. Air Force in 1963, I took the first job I could find while I got my bearings. It was with the Salt Lake City branch of the Dictaphone Corporation, and my job was that of a technician who repaired customer-owned Dictaphones. In this role I worked mostly at the customer’s location and sometimes in the service center at the office when the problem was too difficult to deal with out of the office. Most of my customers were attorneys, and C-Suite executives. I was expected to dress smartly in a suit and engage in clever conversation to sooth the customer who was always distressed at the lost productivity due to the machine’s malfunction. Learning to handle their feelings was an important aspect of my work.
When I returned to the office, I could hear the salesmen in their frequent meetings bragging about exceeding quotas or capturing that new and lucrative account. I also admired their new cars, big paychecks and the flashy women they hung out with. I decided that the life of a salesman was for me, but I didn’t know how to get there. My formal training was in electronics and I knew little about sales. I was determined to make my customer clients very happy with me and the company, in the hope that I would get noticed by Dictaphone management. Well, it worked and soon I was promoted to the position of Branch Manager for the state of Montana. I had little in the way of sales training from the home office and no time to get any as I was immediately embroiled in a turf war with the IBM sales force. This is a war that I won. I was one against many, and I attribute my rising success to two things:
(a) I learned to trade value for value. I always give clients more than they expected, and I always took the time to uncover the “burrs under the saddle” of my customer base. Quite often, they wouldn’t really tell me how they felt, and what they wanted. So, I
(b) Looked around for a guide book that I could read in my off hours, that would better help me serve the customer, reach my personal goals, and beat the competition.
What I found really opened my eyes and with it, I far exceeded the goals that Dictaphone set out for me every quarter. Here it is:
You can read this book online at Scribd
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7323296/Brian-Tracy-Psychology-of-Selling-Manual
I like the beginning! Is this a book you wrote?
Hi, tatsuki, thanks for the visit. No, I did not write the book. Mr. Tracy (the author) published it in 1988 and I believe it is a more current version than the one I first read in 1964, that consisted of 12 small volumes, each about the size of a thin paperback novel. The first version may have been written by someone else; I just don’t remember, but they are nearly identical in content.:)