Hopkins How to Master the Art of Selling

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61339-800-5
Verlag: Made For Success Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 100 Seiten

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hopkins, Tom

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION
BY J. DOUGLAS EDWARDS James Buchanan Brady could borrow millions on the strength of his name. Before he was thirty, he was creating a legend. Brady hobnobbed with the leading industrialists and financiers of the day. Lillian Russell, the most glamorous actress of the Gay Nineties, was his great friend and frequent companion. You know this man by his trademark. Diamond Jim walked around wearing more wealth than most banks held in their vaults. His cufflinks, watch, cane, and every finger glittered with diamonds. Why am I telling you about this man? Because Diamond Jim Brady was a salesman. He made more money selling railroad equipment than he could get rid of as Broadway's biggest spender. Brady was a superpro. Selling itself goes far back beyond that. We know that Stone Age men traveled great distances to trade for goods they couldn’t get where they hunted and gathered food. There’s reason to believe that barter is older than war, that we’re all descended from peaceful traders—salespeople, because barter requires salesmanship—rather than from violent marauders who lived on plunder. The next development in selling was the open-air marketplace. But before history dawned, the exposed marketplace was pretty much obsolete. Merchants were moving inside and selling from permanent stores. Wandering traders were now carrying less merchandise on their backs and more on animals and ships. Then development stopped except for details, and this ancient system for distributing goods came over to the New World. In the early 1800s, a revolutionary development took place and selling, as we now know it, was born. It happened very quietly. The owners of a small woolen mill in Massachusetts decided they wanted more business than the traders were giving them. With New England directness, they went straight to the heart of the matter. They hired a man to take their samples to shops in distant places and get orders for future delivery. This seems painfully obvious now, but it was a startling innovation in those days. It took intelligence to conceive that idea, courage to try it, and persistence to make it work. And work it did. Within a few years, the new system had spread to other mills and other industries, and the distribution of goods has never been the same. During this period, the first railroads were being built. The new way of getting around suited the new way of selling perfectly. Traveling salesmen with their bulky sample cases became a familiar sight wherever the rails ran. But they weren’t called salesmen yet. Everyone called them drummers, after the old-time peddlers who beat drums to attract an audience as they drove their wagons into small country towns. The man who was to become the first superpro of sales was born in 1844. John H. Patterson was still a young man when the railroads connected our two coasts, but by that time his career had already been meteoric. Patterson created the first national sales force. He was the first man to organize sales training, the first man to have a fully organized sales staff with regional and district managers throughout the nation. He set the first sales quotas. And he was the first to guarantee exclusive territory to his salesmen. Before Patterson, many companies pitted two salesmen against each other in the same territory and let them fight it out selling the same products to the same customers. This practice died out after Patterson revealed its folly. In 1895, a young man joined Patterson’s company. This man, Thomas J. Watson, was destined to become another superpro of sales. After he worked his way up to become one of Patterson's top assistants, they parted ways. Watson went on to become the driving force behind one of the most dynamic companies the world has ever seen—IBM. Watson’s finest contribution to the profession of selling was his concept that no one should ever be out of training. This is a very profound idea. You don’t have to go to school today to continue your training, to keep on learning. There are books, audio programs, lectures, seminars, magazines, videos, and more—the list of training and learning sources goes on and on. If you stop training and learning, you start sinking. Nobody can float: You're either rising or sinking. It's been this way for a thousand years. The only difference is that you can rise, or you'll sink, a whole lot faster now. The next superpro was H. W. Dubiski. When he arrived in this country right after the turn of the twentieth century, Dubiski had just turned fourteen and couldn’t speak English. Four years later, he was a chalk boy posting prices in the New York Stock Exchange. Only three years after that modest beginning, he opened his own securities firm. More than any other man except Watson, Dubiski understood the opportunities that Patterson had discovered. Feeding off Patterson's concepts of selling, Dubiski perfected mass training. He perfected the prepared sales talk. He perfected the inspirational sales meeting in an age when it worked. And he developed the original philosophy that securities could be sold during one call. Dubiski was the master of staging what we used to call—well, never mind what we used to call it—the Shot in the Enthusiasm meeting. Every morning his salesmen (they were all men in those days) got together for a session of chanting, cheering, and singing that, in a commercial way, had almost the fervor of a religious revival meeting. Nobody got a sales management job in that firm unless he could give the men a motivational shot every morning and lead them through the company songs and cheers. After Dubiski's salesmen were pumped up to the bursting point with enthusiasm and determination, the managers would turn them loose on an innocent world. Barely a dozen years after he reached this country, Dubiski sold out and retired with five million dollars in government bonds. In 1914, that was an awful lot of money to have earned by the ripe old age of twenty-six. Twenty years later, I started looking for work. I went into sales because, in the bottom of the Great Depression, sales work was the only kind available. My first job was with a traveling sales crew. The system was easy to understand. If you didn't sell that day, you didn't eat that day. I mean that literally. We sold personal stationery to schoolteachers and secretaries. They were making about $4.00 a week and our stationery was $3.75. That was a tough sell. We closed because it was the only way we could survive. We were gypsies then. When we found something better, we changed. You name it, I've sold it. After the Second World War, I became the sales manager of an aircraft distributor. We sold three thousand planes in one year, a record that's never been approached by anyone else. Then the bottom fell out of the aircraft business. Demand for airplanes vanished. The industry augered itself into the bottom of the earth. I went into the information business with a very bright outfit that was advising businesses on taxes and regulations. I almost walked away from it when they wanted me to learn their canned sales talk. Fortunately, the man hit the right note with me. He asked if I knew everything I needed to know about sales, and I had sense enough to admit that I didn’t. So I got involved for the first time with a formal sales presentation in a situation that forced me to learn how to sell. In three months, I was a marketing executive with that firm, and then I met the man who was to become my mentor. Bob Barber was a sales genius, a superpro, and I owe my foundation in the profession of selling to him. Later, Barber, myself, and some other people formed a company to market the first magnetic wire dictation machine. That venture was very successful, and we soon sold out for a nice figure. Suddenly, I had nothing to do. For years, I had been aware that there was a hole in the rapidly developing field of selling. Researchers and business consultants we had, but no sales consultants. I decided to create a new profession out of whole cloth. That's what I did, though it turned out to be a lot tougher job than I’d bargained for. The biggest problem was that, despite my sales skills, I couldn't go out and sell my services, for the same reason that doctors and lawyers struggle to peddle theirs. So I started speaking to any group that would hear me. Slowly, from my audiences, I started building my professional sales consulting career. My first client paid me twenty-five dollars a day, which was the smallest amount of money I'd made in many years. My first real break came after I recruited and trained a sales force for the local agent of a major insurance company. When corporate headquarters saw the results, I acquired my first national account. At last, I was on my way. In 1959, I released an LP recording titled Closing the Sale. That recording broke new ground. For the first time, the art of selling was broken down into specific tactics and techniques and made available to anyone who wanted to learn them. That recording became the best-selling business recording ever produced, and at my speaking engagements people started introducing me as “the father of modern selling.” Around this time, I met Tom Hopkins. I remember the occasion well. At a training seminar in California, I noticed a young man sitting in the front row. I couldn’t help noticing him because he was wearing a high school band uniform. Never in my life have I seen anyone take notes as fast and thoroughly as he did. He seemed to be trying to snatch the words before they got out of my mouth. I marked him as a man to watch. The next time I saw him, he met...