Three times as many Fortune 1000 CEO’s come up through sales and marketing than through management and finance, yet the overwhelming majority of business school grads ignore sales and stack up sheepskins with management and finance degrees. If you check the Forbes 400 List of the richest men and women and carefully analyzed what they did to get there and even what they do now, you’ll clearly see that most of the ones on that list sold their way onto the list.
In high school, I wasn’t tall enough to play basketball and I was too small to play football. I was an average student, wasn’t part of the in crowd or any of the popular cliques. I wasn’t popular enough to be a member of student government nor was I voted most popular or most likely to succeed during my senior year.
What I did possess was an ability far greater than all of the above combined. That ability was one of being able to sell things to people. As an elementary student, I sold flower seeds and greeting cards door-to-door. As a junior high student, I sold newspapers door-to-door. And in my junior year of high school, out of a class of 249 students, I was the number one fund raising sales person for the senior prom.
Turning Point
It wasn’t until I was 30 years old that sales became a profession for me. When I first started I sucked. I was even fired once from a sales job for poor performance. It wasn’t until I got serious and began to take professional sales training that I became competent and started to make money.
Napoleon Hill is most famously known for writing “Think and Grow Rich”. One of his most obscure and forgotten books was “Why and How To Sell Your Way Through Life”. In this book he pointed out that despite all the evidence of the value, power and necessity of mastering selling, it is something the vast majority of business people refuse to make a serious study of, try to avoid, and harbor unproductive attitudes about…… so making a serious study of it, embracing it and liking it gives one a superior advantage. One of the main reasons to master selling skills is that most of your competitors never will. Most will never take a sales training class or a sales management class. Most will major in incompetency which should make them easy pickens for someone who takes the profession seriously.
To embrace the profession of selling and live as a salesman will give you a profound competitive advantage against those who refuse to do so.
If you have kids teach them to master the art of selling. They’ll never go hungry and the world will be their oyster. And they need not pile up huge student loans for education. If they do not master selling, they will forever be dependent upon whatever those who HAVE mastered selling are willing to let them have.
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