These guys get it. These ideas are great and they are stitched together with a lot of formulas that aren’t necessarily new but are known to work. They repurpose some problem-solving assessments and some great planning exercises in a way that is easy to understand.  I love the philosophy about genuinely attempting to help the customer and by doing so create a win-win scenario.

52 Weeks of Book Reviews. Week #32 – Never Be Closing: How to Sell Better Without Screwing Your Clients, Your Colleagues, or Yourself by Tim Hurson @timhurson and Tim Dunne @dunne_tim

This is Sales as a Problem Solving exercise. It’s a great book for anyone that can follow direction and basically paint by numbers. The steps are literally all laid out for the successful sales career, it is up to you to execute. There is a ton about successful planning and deconstructing the results of sales meetings and there is also a lot of great info about rapport building and gathering information. This isn’t a “sales” book that talks about the techniques of closing, persuasion or the nuances of NLP and sales hypnosis. I think this book would apply to a lot of B2B types that aren’t really ready to call themselves salespeople but probably are. There are entrepreneurs and anyone in a small business forced to wear multiple hats that can find themselves in a situation where selling is a necessity.

The book also does a great job of breaking down some personality types based on what motivates them. I’m always particularly interested in the human mind and personality types. I believe I’m probably energized by ideas, but I really want to get the results so I am working hard on habits and accomplishing small goals to train my mind to recognize and crave accomplishment. I would like to see the personality discussion actually expanded and applied to the rest of the book. The rapport building could be greatly impacting by the client’s motivation and energized basis.

The problem I run into with salespeople who WANT to be salespeople is that they are often motivated by people and connections. They are less focused on the details by nature and tend to have shorter attention spans. They love sales because they get to meet a lot of people and are presented by a lot of small challenges that are easily solved or moved on from in search of something shinier. Never be closing can be implemented by those salespeople, but only in small increments. The professional salespeople that I know ALL have a process and are ALL obsessed with their system, so I know it can be done. Every system works a certain percentage of the time, but there are just too few top producers. By definition half of all salespeople are below average and it’s those people that need this book, but I fear wont have the grit to follow through on what it suggest. It’s all about installing the right system that works for you. This book doesn’t touch much on prospecting, a little about referrals and research ahead of time, but that applies primarily to B2B salesmen. I don’t think this would apply as much to Retail Sales or any kind of Consumer Direct sales. If you are on a showroom floor or in a call center this may not apply as much to you. You can always learn something but you aren’t having sales meetings or presentations in the board room to apply some of these systems. You could still deconstruct your phone call or introduction but you aren’t going to research your client with anything other than your eyes and ears. If you are in a B2B this book requires very little translation and is packaged and ready for you. Force yourself to take the steps involved, do it for a week, then a month and then 60 days. I think you’ll be amazed.