I’ll Write That on the Board
My new sales job in janitorial supplies was not going so very well. I heard about the Lester Goodman seminars and thought ‘what have I got to lose?’ So here I am learning how to achieve success in the great market place of life with the other hundred or so delegates. Every so often Lester writes key words on a flip chart. FEATURES AND BENEFITS of the product, the dynamics of BODY LANGUAGE, how to OVERCOME OBJECTIONS and take control of dialogue with OPEN and CLOSED questions.
After discussing how to CLOSE THAT SALE! he is quiet for a moment and walks pensively across the room before writing the word CONFIDENCE in big letters on the board. “You can’t buy confidence. It comes from within.” He says this in a real quiet voice, looking at his audience and nodding sagely as though imparting an existential truth, “It’s the distillation of all that’s good about you and you must nurture it. This means you must confront yourself and address your weaknesses. It is a humbling process. It will cause distress and pain but this is necessary for you to become a professional. Through pain you will become stronger.” He pauses and says, “I’m going to write that on the board.” He writes PAIN =STRENGTH and then turns around rapidly and exclaims “The correlation is absolute. The more you believe in yourself and in a personal philosophy of individual self -improvement based on an unyielding belief in your integrity and a desire to achieve at the highest level of performance, the more others will believe in you. I’m talking here about the single most important gift you can ever give to yourself. SELF BELIEF.”
“SELF BELIEF generates CONFIDENCE which gives you the ability to accept any amount of procrastination, prevarication, evasion, delay, excuse, abuse and say okay I understand that you might not be ready to commit just at this precise moment and I respect that totally because I am a professional person and when I swing by here in two weeks’ time I’m going to take great pleasure in seeing how things are going with you and recharge the batteries of the reciprocal trust which exists between us. You see how I slipped that in, reciprocal trust? RECIPROCAL TRUST. You are now overcoming the distance between subject and object: you inhabit a shared universe of desire; you have attained a communion of interest. Gee this is profound. Take a moment to think about it while I write it on the board. COMMUNION OF INTEREST, that’s good, I like it. While I’m writing on the board my beautiful assistants will come amongst you with copies of my latest book ‘Personal Mystique & Transcendental Sales Techniques’ available to you at a special introductory price. My assistants will gladly discuss discounts for multiple copies.”
I feel I’ve turned a corner today. I just know that there isn’t anything in the world to stop me selling. I’m going to SELL, SELL, SELL confident that I have all the answers here between the covers of this great book of which I bought four copies, one for me and three for friends who I know are going to want a piece of the action. I just wish I had more money so I could buy more copies.
James Coffey is a Civil Servant in Warwickshire