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In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work

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Re: In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work

#161

Post by gitaarik »

junto wrote: post #135

In a past life I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners. You began your lead generation process by making cold calls, starting with your family and friends before expanding outward. Securing an appointment with a potential customer allowed you to demonstrate the product directly in their home or office. A key part of the sales presentation in people’s homes involved vacuuming the customer’s mattress using a black cloth, secured…

Hmm funny, I wouldn't buy a $800 vaccuum cleaner that a salesperson just blew up in my house.

Re: In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work

#162

Post by Cthulhu_ »

llm_trw wrote: post #101
lazystar wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds like hes setting the stage for a movie script - "wolf of wall street 2"

The wolf of wallstreet 2 should be about the making of the wolf of wallstreet: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52661779 the whole thing is crazier than the original.

This reminds me of how the film Catch Me If You Can about a credit card / pilot con man was in itself a con and the whole story was made up. It's great, the author did not actually commit any of the crimes he "confessed" to, and at best there's a civil case of the claim of the story being true events not in fact being true. But I hope the filmmakers had a good laugh about the irony.

Re: In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work

#164

Post by grecy »

bee_rider wrote: post #62

> I know a good salesman when I see one. I was, briefly, the No. 1 telemarketer in the United States. Oh neat, how? > Unlike many of my less successful colleagues, I quickly learned to take yes for an answer; though we were legally required to read a long list of mandatory disclosures to all our sales, I noticed that this often broke the spell and gave people an opening to back out or “wait and ask the wife about it.…

Lying and breaking the law are ok as long as everyone keeps making money.

Re: In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work

#165

Post by gitaarik »

dotancohen wrote: post #159

> it doesn’t matter what you’re selling—it matters how you make people feel. If you make them feel good, they’ll say yes. If you don’t, you could be selling a pill that reverses male-pattern baldness and makes you lose weight without exercise, and they’ll still turn you down flat. The old adage is as true as ever. People do not remember what you did or what you said. People remember how you made them feel.

Later on in the article the author also says that it's luck.

Of course you need to be better than your colleagues to be the best, but also the environment you're working in should help.

If there is demand for the product you're selling, and you can actually offer them an interesting deal, then you have a lot more chance of succeeding in your elite sales person life.

If there's little demand, and the industry has changed and people are more aware, the same old tactics and products are not gonna work anymore. Because these customers also get called by other new sales people with new exciting products and new ways of persuasion.

It's not just about how you make people feel, it's also about the product, company, and market situation, obviously.

The company the author worked for went bankrupt eventually. So I imagine no sales people were doing great at the end.

So there is no golden rule.

Re: In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work

#166

Post by imhoguy »

nextworddev wrote: post #45

The real secret to having a successful sales career is to work at a company that sells a market leading product. This trumps 99% of anything you can do as an individual. I have seen complete noobs have good sales careers at AWS

Then you don't need salespeople as it sells itself. You need on-boarding support people.

Re: In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work

#167

Post by gadders »

In the early 90s, I had a job door to door selling in America. This was a 3 month holiday job post-uni, part of the BUNAC scheme.

We were selling aerial photos of people's neighbourhoods/streets. (This was pre-Google Earth and pre-web).

I was a crap salesperson, but was luckily enough to bump into the best one, another student called Owen. I got chatting to him at one of the periodic parties the company threw and he had this knack for acting (maybe it was genuine?) like he was hanging on your every word, and how you were the most interesting person he'd ever spoken to. This is 30 years ago and I still remember it.

Re: In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work

#168

Post by imhoguy »

myself248 wrote: post #68
alganet wrote: post #48

There is an absolute flood of internet articles that tell basically the same anecdote "the best salesman I ever met is not a salesman", or simple variations. Most of them have this talkative, knowledgeable salesman character. Can someone from the industry tell me if this is some kind of ritual of passage? Maybe a prank on new authors? It doesn't make any sense to me. All these articles are the same trick repeated ove…

Quite some years back, I did some door-to-door political canvassing. (Agitate the base, get people to tell a stranger they were absolutely going to vote, maybe recruit some more canvassers if we were super lucky.) This is utterly shocking to anyone who knew me back then, as it was a complete 180° from my socially-petrified personality. I believed in the cause, but when I showed up at the local campaign office, they d…

This is great story, thanks! Happy 2025!

Re: In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work

#169

Post by StanislavPetrov »

grecy wrote: post #164
bee_rider wrote: post #62

> I know a good salesman when I see one. I was, briefly, the No. 1 telemarketer in the United States. Oh neat, how? > Unlike many of my less successful colleagues, I quickly learned to take yes for an answer; though we were legally required to read a long list of mandatory disclosures to all our sales, I noticed that this often broke the spell and gave people an opening to back out or “wait and ask the wife about it.…

Lying and breaking the law are ok as long as everyone keeps making money.

Unfortunately that is pretty much how society works. As long as the right people are making money, or getting paid off by the people who are making money.

Re: In my life, I've witnessed three elite salespeople at work

#170

Post by forinti »

mooreds wrote: post #6
Ozarkian wrote: post #4

This piece obviously puts sales in a bad light. If you had asked me what a salesman is like in my early 20s, I would have described them much as this article expresses. But in my career in Silicon Valley I really came to respect good salespeople. I often had roles where I was debugging customer-reported issues, and good salespeople make everything smoother. I came to a conclusion that there are two types of sales tra…

> I came to a conclusion that there are two types of sales transactions: one that is a one-time transaction and one that is an ongoing transaction. Incidentally, this is the difference between a good real estate agent and a "door opener".

I have not yet met a "good real estate agent". I dread having to deal with these people.

Case 1: a puddle in the centre of a room; agent comments that the window had been left open.

Case 2: "this view will never change" as a building was going up right in front of us.

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