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I learned something early in life. If you sell, you'll never starve. In any other profession, you can find yourself out on the street saying, 'They don't want me anymore.' But if you can sell, you will never go hungry.

Marketing puts the ball in play; sales puts the ball away.

"Our" stories are more effective (authentic) than "their" or even "my" stories.

We like to say at Schwab that the difference between sales and service is relevance. If a client perceives us as presenting a solution to a problem he doesn't have, that is selling. That feels really bad, and it's a huge waste of time. On the other hand, if the client sees us as presenting a solution to a problem he does have, that's service. That's not sales.

Email is still a great way to communicate with customers, but it is now-officially-a horrible way to prospect. So before you launch any email program make sure it's about customer retention and not about acquisition. And even then, don't assume it's working until you can verify that with metrics other than open and opt-out rates.

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The most established way to handle a price objection is to ask a question. It goes like this:
"If we were the same price as the competitor would you prefer our proposal?"
What is the client to say? If they say "Well, no actually," seemingly the worst outcome, at least you can now ask, "Why?" and deal with the other objections real or imagined. Suppose they say, "Well, yes I think we would." At that point the same question, "Why?", will elicit what the client believes to be special about your firm. Often clients are actually trying to persuade themselves that the bit extra is worth it.

In my experience very frequently the question, "Would you buy from us if we were the same price as the cheapest?", leads to a lot of thought from the prospect. Keep your mouth shut and wait for the response.

Your solution may not solve your client's problem-or your client may not even have a problem. So why should you feel you've failed when there is no sale? A salesperson should no more make a presentation to every prospect than a physician should prescribe medication for every patient.

Where traditional selling advocates that every prospect is a likely customer, and 'goes for the yes,' the diagnostic process gives salespeople permission to 'go for the no.' Most inefficiencies in sales come from spending too much time with too many prospects. The real skill in selling lies in recognizing the seven or eight out of ten who won't buy, due to realistic observable conditions, and setting them aside temporarily or permanently.

Marketers profit because consumers buy what they want, not what they need. Needs are practical and objective, wants are irrational and subjective. And no matter what you sell-and whether you sell it to businesses or consumers-the path to profitable growth is in satisfying wants, not needs. (Of course, your product must really satisfy those wants, not just pretend to!)

Truly great stories succeed because they are able to capture the imagination of large or important audiences.

A great story is true. Not true because it's factual, but true because it's consistent and authentic. Consumers are too good at sniffing out inconsistencies for a marketer to get away with a story that's just slapped on.

Great stories make a promise. They promise fun or money, safety or a shortcut. The promise is bold and audacious and not just very good-it's exceptional or it's not worth listening to.

Great stories are trusted. Trust is the scarcest resource we've got left. No one trusts anyone...As a result, no marketer succeeds in telling a story unless he has earned the credibility to tell that story.

Great stories are subtle. Surprisingly, the less a marketer spells out, the more powerful the story becomes. Talented marketers understand that the prospect is ultimately telling himself the lie, so allowing him (and the rest of the target audience) to draw his own conclusions is far more effective than just announcing the punch line.

Great stories match the voice the consumer's worldview was seeking, and they sync right up with her expectations. Either you are ready to listen to what a Prius delivers or you aren't.

Great stories are rarely aimed at everyone. Average people are good at ignoring you. Average people have too many different points of view about life, and average people are by and large satisfied. If you need to water down your story to appeal to everyone, it will appeal to no one. Runaway hits like the LiveStrong fund-raising bracelets take off because they match the worldview of a tiny audience-and then that tiny audience spreads the story.

And most of all, great stories agree with our worldview. The best stories don't teach people anything new. Instead, the best stories agree with what the audience already believes and makes the members of the audience feel smart and secure when reminded how right they were in the first place.

Dissatisfaction drives the sale; the cost of the dissatisfaction is the accelerator.

Relationship selling isn't enough anymore. If you can't prove the value, all you'll get from the person you've built a relationship with is a empathetic rejection, rather than a dispassionate one.

Sales is an easy job if you strive for mediocrity. It is a whole different job if you want to be the best.

I always imagine that there is a customer with me at all times. We always shine in front of customers, right? I think I'm at my best when I'm talking to customers. So, I have taken that mindset and I've incorporated it into all of my daily activities. I imagine there is a customer watching me. They can see everything that I'm doing. Would they buy from me if they saw what I do when I walk out of their office? Now the real question is, do you think that this customer would buy from you if they could see everything that you do or don't do?

No matter how wonderful your product is, how needed it is, how much 'pain' there is, how good a sales person you are, or how good the ad is, buyers will not buy your product until or unless they consciously understand there is something missing that they cannot fix themselves, that there will be no chaos when they bring in a fix, and that their current systems will flourish with their new choices.

When we approach negotiations by tactically reacting to customers' requests, by merely giving in because they ask us to do so, seemingly disparate transactions have the effect of "rolling upward" and defining our negotiation strategy. We teach the marketplace, our customers and our competitors, who we are based on the deals we do. By rolling over in negotiations, we run into several problems:
1. Customers believe the initial offer was a lie and don't know where the truth really begins.
2. We fan the fire of irrational marketplace competition by setting up bidding wars.
3. We prove through our actions that while we sell on value, we negotiate on price.

When a customer says, "Your price is too high," the salesperson needs to look to himself as the likely problem, not the product. There are two possibilities: 1) the customer is not experiencing a significant absence of value and the solution should never have been offered; therefore, the price is too high. Or 2) the absence of value is there and the customer does not recognize it. The burden of proof is on the salesperson, and he hasn't done his job.

Many sales and marketing managers continue to have faith that price cuts can "fix" problems such as undifferentiated products or an obscure brand image. Their faith is misplaced. Price decreases are easy to implement--especially compared to changes in product attributes or customer service, for instance--but extremely difficult to reverse. It often takes years, to bring a price back to its original level. What's most regrettable is that price often isn't the driver that instinct or history or a manager's whim might say it is.

We find that when asked directly, customers regularly overstate the importance of price. But when they are asked, using a series of choice matrices, to trade off product and service features against price, their ranking of price drops steeply.

What makes the idea of cross-selling so insidious is that it is half-right. Customers do want to conserve their energies when they shop. They like, for example, to be able to buy a pint of milk and a gallon of petrol at the same service station. It is also true that what you learn about a customer in one selling context can sometimes be profitably exploited in another. An estate agent, for example, can be ideally placed to help a house buyer with a mortgage and house insurance.

But here's the rub: cross-selling works only when what is being sold really is a collection of the best. In today's world of sophisticated, informed customers, even great products will not tug mediocre ones along with them.

And there is another rub: using customer information gained in one context to pitch products in another is likely to cause serious aggravation to customers.

...Cross-selling is a producer-driven strategy in an increasingly consumer-driven world. It is simply out of touch with the times.

Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.

All compensation systems involve a series of complex tradeoffs. How much of the compensation should be fixed and how much variable? Should it reward revenues, profit margins, or both? How will it weigh mature products against new ones? How will it encourage salespeople to stretch for incremental dollars once they have hit their quotas? The right answers to these questions will balance the salesperson's primary concern ("Is my return worth the effort I put out?") with the company's performance, its strategic and financial goals, and the value it offers its customers.

Much sounder and much more fruitful than relying on any "psychological" analysis of selling is the threefold process implied in the customer-problem approach: (1) What is the customer's need or want? (2) How does my product fit that need or want? (3) How can I best demonstrate the relationship between the two? Such a process has these distinct advantages: (1) It keeps the salesman's mind on one central purpose, yet allows adaptation to individual cases. (2) It suggests the motives that can best be appealed to in making a sale. (3) It does not arouse so much new resistance and may even lull resistance already present. (4) The completed sale leaves the customer satisfied.

Vendors often try to change what the buyer wants or which class of benefits he or she responds to most strongly. My view of motivation suggests that such an approach is almost always unsuccessful. Selling strategy needs to work with the buyer's motivations, not around them.

Most channels are constructed from the supplier out, rather than from the customer in. In other words, the product or service is designed first and it is only then that the supplier thinks about ways to get the product/service out to the customer. If the company achieves its sales goals, it lulls the company into the assumption that the channels must be right. For all you know an alternate channel might have achieved even better results.

The more common pitfall is that the chosen channel is an expedient short-term solution, often not well suited to sustain sales and profitability in the long run. But once a channel is up and running it is very hard to shut it down and construct a new one. So the channel is temporarily repaired, a "band-aid" is applied, and the selling process moves on.

Several years and band-aids later, managers may realize that their channels serve neither their customers nor their channel partners well, but it is too late.

If price weren't an issue, anyone could sell. Selling value, however, is a much different proposition. To sell value, a salesperson must ask the right questions and know when to be quiet. Your salesperson needs to be incredibly well versed in the competitive landscape and understand the customer's business.

As a rule, the more a seller expands the market by teaching and helping customers to use his or her product, the more vulnerable that seller becomes to losing them. A customer who no longer needs help gains the flexibility to shop for things he or she values more-such as price.

Sales is selling one-to-one. Marketing is selling one-to-many.

A sales pitch based on rational economic efficiency is a supplier's argument, not something that is compelling to a consumer.

Firms are typically driven by the competing objectives of the marketing and sales departments. Sales personnel are rewarded for volume increases, yet marketing frequently owns the P&L. At many companies, an "iron curtain" goes up between these units, with marketing executives centralizing authority in a vain attempt to control and improve sales promotion and local marketing; meanwhile, out in the "real world," sales pushes volume at any cost. Linkages between brand strategy and sales promotion plans are not fully considered, and account-specific profit objectives are deemed a pipe dream, too difficult to set and track. The constant bickering leads to a cultural stalemate: Marketing executives are considered the brains, while sales executives are considered the brawn (or salespeople are thought of as the pragmatists, and marketers the pointy-headed intellectuals). Wherever the truth lies, the concept of working together toward a common goal is lost among the battles for budget and primacy.

People rationalize buying decisions based on facts, but people make buying decisions based on feelings.