Preface
The author speaks to her passion for sales, as a challenging position in which you see results daily. It's also a profession where some enjoy great success and others fail miserably - and being "profoundly curious," she's sought the reason for this variance.
There is a science to selling, though it's difficult to find in the profession. The most successful salesmen are tight-lipped about their techniques; the most vocal ones are narcissistic. Hence many of the thought leaders in the sales profession tend to be self-aggrandizing storytellers who offer folksy wisdom that is ultimately of little use.
But there is a science to selling, psychological principles and mathematical analysis that is not merely an overlay or a prop to validate tall tales. This book is her "manifesto for the scientific approach to selling."
An then, ironically enough, she goes right into a "me" story: like many in the sales profession, she dropped out of college because she wanted to do rather than to study. She ended up in life insurance, a tough product to sell with a high turnover rate, where training consisted of storytelling and vague hints at how to use deceptive ticks and where support consisted of threatening to fire people who didn't make enough sales.
She recognized it as "derogatory nonsense" and likely the reason that the firm had such a low success rate with customers and a 90% annual turnover rate of salesmen. Her chances of success would be better if she did the exact opposite of what they were telling her to do. Given the task of selling starter life insurance products to college students, she instead leveraged her contact list to get past the students to their parents, who had an actual need for insurance and the financial capacity to actually buy it.
This was her "first big lesson" - that selling is about understanding needs and finding out how to satisfy them. This isn't stunning news, as it's what's taught in most colleges about sales - but is thrown away immediately when a person enters the workforce in favor of manipulative tricks to get a person to buy something they don't need because that's the way to get results. And it does get results, but it's a lot of work to eke out a small number of sales.
Her next job (another "me" story) was at an alarm company, which is a contrast to insurance because it deals with a tangible product. It was also a product that was highly commoditized, and her employer's focus was on training salesmen to be conversant about the features that made the product better. It was a three-month training period.
During her second week of training, she chanced across a restaurant that was being remodeled, and recognized that since they were tearing out the walls, it would be easy to install an alarm system, so she went inside and sold one to the manager.
Her employer was astounded; felt she couldn't possibly know the product well enough to sell it. But to her way of thinking, an alarm system wasn't about the precise features of the sensors and wires, but about peace of mind - the customer couldn't understand and didn't really want to know about the technology, just enough to sense it was a good product, and would buy. It wasn't about the product, but the benefit the customer seeks to achieve.
Shift to the mind-set of the employer. Most of them hire potential salesmen on hope: they don't generally know if a candidate has what it takes to be successful, and if asked what qualities they seek, most of them can't provide a clear and logical explanation. Some people are just good at sales, and they don't really understand the reasons why.
She then mentions a chance meeting with a company owner at a chamber of commerce, a discussion that followed in which she "gave him some pointers." He offered her a job, then asked her to work as a consultant. She didn't jump at either opportunity, but later mulled it over and recognized the potential value of consulting services, then started her own firm.
In the early days, she focused on "customer-focused selling" as a set of practices that seemed sensible, but recognized that she was simply talking theory, having so little sales experience, and having no real scientific basis for suggesting it would work: it was just a good idea, something different. Moreover, it was about soft skills - which were notoriously hard to measure.
Along the way, she stumbled across the Predictive Index (PI) system of personality assessment, and felt it was an excellent tool for assessing the character traits of job candidates, which was an excellent tool for the task but not focused specifically enough on sales. Doing a bit of research, she refined PI into a Selling Skills Assessment Tool (SSAT) which was devised to test for the specific skills required to sell effectively.
She stops abruptly to stress that this book is not a sales tool to flog her assessment system, but about the research that went into its development. To develop such a tool required identifying the qualities that make a person effective at sales and assessing them in a scientific manner, which in turn requires an understanding of the sales situation in general - and it's the science behind the tool that the present book is meant to discuss.
Specifically, she hopes to contribute to the sales profession the perspective that selling is scientific and measurable, as a contrast to the "mystical and anecdotal concept" that seems to dominate the field. It's high time to set those methods aside - they have a long history of consummate failure - and take a different approach.