Everything in Sales Has Not Changed: Excerpt from #SalesTruth
#SalesTruth: Debunk the Myths. Apply Powerful Principles. Win More Sales.
By world-renowned sales consultant, coach, speaker, influencer, and bestselling author Mike Weinberg
Many of today’s nouveau “experts” love to tell us that everything has changed. It’s a dangerous new world and all the rules have changed, they claim. Nothing that used to work in sales or sales management still works today. Nothing. Traditional approaches, techniques, and methodologies are no longer effective. In fact, they proffer that if you dare even try to deploy old-school, traditional methods, you’re not just an idiot bound to fail, but also a luddite from the Dark Ages who deserves to be ridiculed.
What’s so amusing and so irritating to me is that I see the exact opposite. The. Exact. Opposite.
The most effective executives, sales managers, and salespeople I observe are masters at the basics. They have perfected old school, traditional approaches. Instead of constantly entertaining themselves by shopping for the latest, greatest, and trendiest new tool, toy, or trick, they stay with the tried-and-true, proven fundamentals of sales and sales leadership. Not sexy, but incredibly effective.
Let me make that point again from a different angle, because I desperately want you to digest this truth: Despite what you hear and read from today’s trendiest, self-proclaimed thought leaders, I have never seen a salesperson or sales team fail because they lack a recently invented sales tool, or because they had not yet adopted a newly created sales process.
...I can emphatically and unequivocally state that, regardless of what the so-called experts are writing on LinkedIn or quoting in their “studies,” it’s not their beloved, newfound tool or process that’s missing—it’s a solid execution of the basics. They can wax eloquently about their theories, brag about how many people “like” their posts, speak for free at the online virtual sales conferences, and cite supposedly valid research to their hearts’ content. I know what I am seeing and hearing with my own eyes and ears: The sales world is desperate for rigor and discipline around the fundamentals, not fancy new tricks.
#SalesTruth: Releasing June 11, 2019
— Andrea Waltz, coauthor of Go for No!