As a specialist in complex sales, I rarely read anything that relates to one-call-close sales. I read Selling Fearlessly: A Master Salesman’s Secrets For the One-Call-Close Salesperson
Terson did not sell complex systems to large businesses—he sold advertising on telephone book covers to small businesses, not what you would consider sophisticated sales. Yet, anyone who went on 12,000 sales calls during a 43-year career is bound to have learned a lot about selling, about consistent success, and about the psychology of persuasion. He also has a special gift for teaching, explaining and telling stories, which wraps the valuable lessons of a lifetime into a compelling and entertaining package.
In fact, Selling Fearlessly was a “one-call-close” for me, in that I read most of it through in one sitting while on a flight. But I have already started going through it again, because there are pearls of wisdom disguised as “common sense”, the kinds of things we all think we know but definitely don’t do enough of.
The book is in four sections, with about a dozen short chapters in each that tell a story or make a valuable point. Each chapter is opened by an apposite quote. My favorite is “Personality can open doors, but only character can keep them open,” quoted in chapter 4. Another quote dovetails beautifully with my own Bottom-Line Selling approach: “Treat your role strictly as a fiduciary responsibility and you’re on the right path to selling glory.” (I planned to steal that one, but when I tried it out on my class full of salespeople today, I had to explain what “fiduciary” meant.)
Part I is about the selling life, and the Mound Road story that opens the book (and Terson’s career) introduces us to the man who is our mentor and guide for the rest of the book. Everyone will draw their own lessons from Part I, but for me the key is the importance and dignity of the sales profession, especially since we’re all salespeople in some way.
The next three sections cover one leg of “The Triangle”, made up of mental attitude, work habits and salesmanship. Part II, on mental attitude, is mostly full of ideas that we already “know”, but constantly need reminding of, such as motivation, belief, and persistence. The key takeaway from this is that you don’t have to be born with a natural aptitude for selling; as long as you’re willing to work hard, take responsibility for your own and your customers’ results, and develop a tenacious belief in yourself despite disappointment and rejection, you can create a successful and rewarding career for yourself.
Part III is full of practical advice about work habits. Terson was way ahead of some of the current thinking on applying lean methods to selling—codifying and standardizing his work processes and following them consistently week by week, year over year. Although it would not be possible in today’s rapidly changing world, I found it fascinating that he only made three changes to his selling process in 43 years!
Part IV is about salesmanship. If you have any experience and success in complex sales, you’ve heard of his techniques before and won’t agree with all of them, but occasionally we need reminders that planning, developing relationships and challenging your buyers sometimes needs to be supplemented by the ability to communicate convincingly, deal with objections, and close a wavering decision maker.
Selling Fearlessly will enthrall, teach, and inspire you.
I’ve been following Cal Newport’s ideas for a while now, so when I learned that he was coming out with a book, I pre-ordered it from Amazon. I was not disappointed. If you have a child or know someone in college who is trying to figure out what to do with their life, or even if you’re north of fifty and still wonder what you’ll be when you grow up, then this book is for you. So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
The central premise that sets this book apart from so much life advice that is out on the market is that following your passion is terrible advice. There are two main reasons for this: first, very few people at a young age know enough about life to choose something to be really passionate about, and even if they do, they are bound to be wrong. If Steve Jobs had followed his early passion, maybe he would have made a dent in the universe as a Buddhist monk.
Second, while most people would love to have a job that allows them to be creative, make an impact on the world, and have control over how they choose to spend their time, jobs like that are rare and valuable, and the only way to get something valuable is to offer something in return. And the only way to be in a position to do that is to master a difficult skill. Passion doesn’t waive the laws of economics, and if it’s not difficult it won’t be rare. The book cites the example of Julia, who quit a secure job in advertising to pursue her passion of teaching yoga. Armed with a 4-week course, she quit her job, began teaching, and one year later was on food stamps. Here’s a hint: if a four-week course is enough to allow you to set up shop, do you think you might have a little competition?
Taking the economic model a step further, the book argues that you must develop career capital, which comprises skills, relationships and a body of work. The long and arduous process of building your capital also opens up your options and refines your own understanding of what you really like to do and what you can be good at.
Newport offers the craftsman mindset in place of the passion mindset. The passion mindset asks what the world can offer you in terms of fulfillment and fun; the craftsman mindset forces you to look inside and ask what you can offer the world. You have to create value to get value, and that takes time and deliberate practice. It’s the only way to get so good that they can’t ignore you. The nice benefit is that rather than being good at something because you love it, you love doing something because you’ve gotten good at it. (Note the similarity to Carol Dweck’s growth mindset.)
What’s the little idea? Another idea that Newport challenges is the common advice that you should have a big idea—set a big hairy audacious goal for your life and then work backward from it. The master plan approach certainly works for some people, but how many people do you know who have actually lived their lives that way? Instead, you should work forward from where you are, taking small steps that expand your capabilities and build up your career capital. In this way, more options and possibilities open up. Newport compares career discoveries to scientific discoveries, most of which occur in what’s called the “adjacent possible”, or just on the other side of the cutting edge of current knowledge. Although I never thought of it that way, that’s exactly how my training and consulting career has progressed. Any time I’ve developed new material it’s because a client has asked me to develop something for them that is just outside my current knowledge or skill set.[1] It’s close enough that they and I have the confidence that it can be done, but different enough that it leads to new material. In this way, I keep learning more and more and develop more career capital that in turn makes me even more valuable to the market.
The book is well-written. Newport emulates Malcolm Gladwell’s technique of telling individual stories to illustrate the main point in each chapter. In addition, the arc of the stories follows a master story thread through the book, so that you feel like you are brought along on his quest to figure it all out.
Here comes the part I did not like about the book, and I would not devote so much space to it if the author were not an MIT PhD, just beginning his career as an assistant professor of computer science.
The methodology in the book is suspect in two ways. While its stories are the book’s great strength, the plural of anecdote is not data, and it’s surprising how little hard data we’re given. I certainly buy in because it makes sense and it matches my own life experience, but someone with a more skeptical point of view may be a tougher sell.
Here’s an example. Between the ages of ten and twenty, I had an absolute passion to be a fighter pilot that I followed with a laser focus, so much so that I only filled out two college applications, to the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy. When my straight shot to my goals was sidelined by a vision problem in my sophomore year at the Academy, my passion was up in smoke and I haven’t found anything since to quite match it. So, my own experience supports Newport’s hypothesis. But then I think of my friend Dirk, who followed the same path—except that he stayed on it and recently retired after a long and distinguished career doing exactly what he wanted to do.
In at least one case, where he does use a peer-reviewed study for support, he overstates the case. Citing a paper by Amy Wrzesniewski, he states that the happiest, most passionate employees are not those who followed their passion into a position, but those who stayed around long enough to be good at what they do. If you read the actual paper, you won’t find that conclusion, and in fact the author stresses that the sample size of 24 is too small to draw any firm conclusions.
That said, I strongly recommend this book to just about anyone, regardless of where you are in your career.
Related articles:
Bad Advice from the Passionistas
So, you think your company is customer-focused? If you’re not involving the top executives of your top accounts in your planning, you’re not as customer-focused as you could be. While every B2B company pays lip service to customer focus, few go as far as the prescriptions in The B2B Executive Playbook: The Ultimate Weapon for Achieving Sustainable, Predictable and Profitable Growth
In B2B sales, there is a surprisingly small group of individuals who hold the most control over your fate—your revenue, profitability and market share. They are the executive decision makers of your best customers.
- How often do you talk to them?
- How well do you really know what they think about your company and your offerings?
- Do you know exactly why they buy from you?
- Does your perception of your strengths and weaknesses jibe with theirs?
- If you picked up the phone to call each one, what would happen?
This last question is taken from page 95, which in itself is worth the price of the book. Geehan provides a simple assessment you can use to figure out where you stand on the B2B relationship continuum, which has five descriptions ranging from Commodity Supplier to Business Partner. The phone call test for each one is simple and powerful—and if you answer it honestly, you probably will be disturbed by the result.
The theme of the book is about how to achieve sustainable, predictable and profitable growth (SPPG) through close and active engagement with your top executive customers. While this may not seem like a huge revelation, very few companies do it well, and the value in this book consists of its specific four-step plan for how to accomplish this.
Engage: “Engagement means executive customers are talking to your leadership team directly and without filters.” In this section, Geehan explains how to establish and use an Executive Customer Advisory Council (ECAC) to get your top customers engaged in the process, and whom to include. Because they are the ones who write the really big checks, you can’t leave it entirely in the hands of your account managers; your own executive leadership must be continuously and deeply engaged with them.
Plan: Every company has a strategic planning process, in which they make decisions about strategy, products, markets, resource allocation, etc., but very few involve the stakeholders who vote with their dollars to approve or disapprove of their plans. Geehan advocates Market-Aligned Planning, which uses customer input to help identify which strategies to eliminate, evolve, or acquire.
Collaborate: Most companies equate relationship-building with entertainment. Geehan recommends a much deeper process called Account-Based Innovation, which uses customer inputs to inform choices about R&D and make innovation relevant (and worthwhile). Companies have long learned to minimize internal silos that slow down innovation—this process eliminates the last remaining silo, that between companies and their customers. 60-70% of new products in the B2B space fail; why not give the customer a voice before the cost, trouble and time go into the launch?
Grow: When customers have an early and active role in your planning processes, they often become your best salespeople within their industries. The book cites the example of Henny Penny Corporation, which used the process to design a low oil volume fryer for McDonald’s. That breakthrough led to their being named Worldwide Equipment Partner[1] of the Year in 2010, and that kind of publicity was priceless for other customers.
This book is not for everyone: it’s clearly aimed at those within the company who have primary responsibility for revenue growth. It offers offers clear, direct prescriptions, backed by numerous examples that provide credibility and illumination to the author’s thesis. If you want to listen to the Voice of the Customers that really matter, this book will show you how.
Daniel Willingham wrote When Can You Trust the Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education
The ability to discern good science from bad is important if you are making important corporate decisions. If you’re a buyer, you like to complete as much research as possible before talking to salespeople. We’ve been told that buyers are much better informed than in the past, but are you better informed, or simply more informed?
If you’re reading this, you’re one of the elite who likes to keep up with the latest ideas, but how do you know which ones are likely to be true? When top experts offer conflicting advice, how do you evaluate their respective claims? It’s even critical in our personal lives. What diet should we follow? How do we know?
My own field of sales and communications training is full of “experts” peddling myths, sometimes unknowingly, such as learning styles and the often-quoted statistic that 93% of communication is non-verbal. (Full disclosure: I once had both of those ideas in my training material.)
Willingham tells us that we can learn to think more like scientists. He does not claim that we can be as good as a trained scientist with a background in the particular field, because their practices and habits of mind take years to develop, and background knowledge is essential in evaluating many claims. But, we can do much better at it than we are now.
Four steps for more informed decisions:
Step 1: Strip it and Flip It
Strip it means taking out all the hyped-up, vague or emotional language that expert persuaders wrap around it to make it go down smoothly. Simply try to write the following sentence:
If I do X, there is a Y percent chance that Z will happen.
By boiling it down to those stark terms you gain clarity on what the person is trying to say, so that you can test it. If the claim can’t be expressed clearly, then that’s a red flag right there.
Flipping it means expressing its reverse corollary. For example, when hamburger is advertised as 85% lean, it also means it’s 15% fat, which doesn’t sound near as appetizing. You can also flip the action: what happens if you don’t do what they recommend?
Step 2: Trace It
If they have the credentials, many experts will simply say, “Trust me, I’m an expert.” If they don’t, they will say, “Trust me, because I have expert sources.” There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, because life would be impossible if we had to research everything ourselves. But for important decisions, a little digging under the surface can make a big difference, and it’s so easy to do on the internet. One of the problems is that the claim may be based on a kernel of truth from a valid study, but the expert may overstate the claim (as in the 93% myth mentioned above). Go to the original source when you can.
Step 3: Analyze It
Willingham takes the reader on a tour of some basic analysis and critical thinking skills, including sample size and statistical significance. Moderately sophisticated readers won’t learn much here. I do like one important point he makes, though: “If a claim sounds like a breakthrough, it’s probably a sham, because unheralded breakthroughs in science are exceedingly rare.”
Step 4: Should I Do it?
Finally, you have to decide whether to implement the change, buy the product, etc. This chapter takes you through two comprehensive checklists. If you follow these, you may not be guaranteed a good decision, but you’ll certainly have a defensible one if it doesn’t pan out!
Will this book help you?
Before I make my closing observation, let me first say that I think When Can You Trust the Experts? is a good book, and explains a useful (albeit basic) approach that can help make you a better consumer of information and improve your decision making. BUT…there is a lot of sound advice that is worth taking that does not meet the stringent standards outlined in the book. The irony is that the book itself offers a prime example. Let’s just apply Step 1 to the book. What is Willingham’s claim?
The cover flap states:
“When Can You Trust the Experts? offers parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers the tools they need to ask tougher questions, think more logically about why an intervention might or might not work, and ultimately make more informed decisions.”
If we strip this claim (including evidence cited in the book itself), we get,
“If you follow the prescriptions in this book…
…there is a ____% chance…
…that you will make more informed decisions.”
This brings up a few questions:
- Do I have to follow all the prescriptions? (Let’s use the 16 questions on pages 208-209 as a template?)
- How will I know if I have followed them? (Some of the questions are hard to answer in a binary fashion.)
- What is the % chance? (I did not see any specific quantified claims in the book.)
- How will you know your decisions are more informed?
- How much more?
- Will more informed mean better outcomes from the decisions?
So, as you can see, it’s pretty tough to get good decision-making down to a specific methodology, but I do believe this book makes a strong case that some methodology is better than none at all.
