ALL ABOUT BUSINESS RELATED FIELDS

There are two key points to knowing your customer’s company. First, it can tell you something about the best overall approach. Second, though the person you are selling to may have total authority and autonomy, you are ultimately selling through him as the company’s representative to the company itself. Companies can, and should, be ‘read’ just as people can. The methodology, in fact-forming gut impressions based on raw perceptions-is almost the same. Watch the way a company does business, how fast it has grown, and the way it has chosen to position itself in the marketplace. Size and longevity alone can be indicators. The approach, ranging from a mature, conservative one to a more aggressive, let-it-all0hang-out technique, should parallel the image of the company itself.

These are the fundamental selling truths. If you don’t know your product, people will resent your efforts to sell it; if you don’t believe in it, no amount of personality and technique will cover that fact; if you can’t sell with enthusiasm, the lack of it will be infectious. Nothing turns off a potential customer quicker than a salesman’s lack of familiarity with his product. Knowing your product also means understanding the idea behind it-its purpose, how it is perceived-the relationship between it and what someone wants to buy. How will it help the customer? What problem is it solving? What is its promise? An understanding of these intangible features is at least as important as knowing a product’s mechanical features. Yet precisely because they are intangible, and may vary from customer to customer, they are more prone to misinterpretation, misunderstanding. Knowing your product also means understanding the image it is projecting.

Many ideas fail not because they are bad ideas, nor because they are poorly executed, but because the timing is not correct. Our timing couldn’t have been worse, and it cost us a lot of money to find this out. A lot of salespeople are far too quick to write off a good idea simply because their timing was bad. If someone says ‘no’ to a project or an idea, it is not always because he doesn’t like the idea or project. It may be simply that for economic reasons or for other internal reasons you don’t know about, it simply doesn’t work for that particular person at that particular moment.

Fear is the single biggest problem people have with selling: fear of rejection, fear of failure. So much of selling a product, a service, anything, is selling yourself, putting your own ego on the line. And what are the odds? If you’re pretty good, you’re probably going to fail half the time. Rejection, as they say, comes with the territory. Rejection in selling is rarely personal, but simply knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to take. I have always found that it helps not to be too ‘adult’ about it. Learning to accept rejection doesn’t mean having to like it. Acknowledge your real feelings and if those real feelings are irritation, frustration or anger, admit to them instead of pretending they don’t exist.

Unconsciously, we are already employing many of the aspects of selling: powers of persuasion; the art of negotiation; and the ultimate teenager’s tactic-‘Never take “no” for an answer’. By the time we get to the outside world we have learned how to position ourselves to get what we want, how to market our abilities and how to sell ourselves on job interviews. Then something happens. We forget how to sell. We question our own sales aptitude. Suddenly the techniques we’ve used all our lives become foreign and mysterious, as though we now had to go out and learn them for the first time. And yet the art of selling is the conscious practice of lot things we already know unconsciously-and have probably spent the better part of our lives doing. The problem is that once we enter the real world of business a new factor emerges. For the first time our powers of persuasion, our sales abilities, are being judged. This can be intimidating, and so we respond by convincing ourselves that we can’t sell, we don’t know how to sell, or we don’t want to sell. We then use these mental roadblocks to justify our lack of sales aptitude.

You won’t learn humility. You won’t learn respect. You won’t learn the company inside out or from the bottom up. What you will learn is something very important, and perhaps a bit frightening, about yourself. The people who get ahead have a need, are driven to perform a task well, no matter what the task is or how mundane it may actually be. They bring to any job an attitude which actually transforms the job into something greater. Carpenters who become contractors at one time had a need to drive a nail straighter and truer than anyone else. Waiters who end up owning restaurants were at one time very good waiters. Some executives, had they started in the mail room, would still be sorting mail-and misrouting most of it.

The people who buy new companies are rarely the people who have to go in and run them. But if you’re the one they turn to for help, make sure you’re not entering a no-win situation. You can’t stop your company from making stupid acquisitions or getting involved in business they shouldn’t be in. But you can try to avoid becoming part for a team that’s going to ‘continue its success’ or turn it around. For, more often than not, you will find yourself in a no-win situation. A company is usually bought for one of two reasons: either because it is successful-which means the best you can do is make it slightly better-or because it is successful and the buyer feels he can turn it around. There are always hidden reasons, as well as the obvious ones, as to why a company is unsuccessful.

The projects people take on which are not part of their day-to-day job description which have not been assigned to them, are those projects for which people get the most credit and recognition. The jobs most people have existed before they got there and will continue to exist after they’ve left. The job is the constant. What you do by going beyond it is what gets noticed. Most positions in a company are three-quarters functional, meaning the set responsibilities and duties that came with it, and one-quarter personal style. The degree to which you can stretch this 25% is the degree by which you will stand out in your company.

Companies never function according to their organizational charts. They are made up of people & personalities and politics & plays, none of which can be connected by solid or dotted lines. It is important to know the system so that you can work through it. Too many people spend too much time fighting against the system. The best and brightest spend their time learning how to use it. Every company has its secret organizational chart, and the system itself is the best clue to figuring out what it is. Understand how it’s supposed to work, and you will begin to understand how it really works.

Loyalty is another form of trust. Employees often do not realize the importance almost any company places on it. They will trade off loyalty for a gain that is too small or a goal that is too short-sighted. Obviously, if you believe another company is about to make an offer you can’t refuse; you would be crazy not to pursue it. But if you do not intend to leave you have to be very careful about how to use other opportunities. If people don’t like to be conned, they don’t like to be threatened either. Your threat of looking for another job only hurts you. You have, in effect, told your employer that you don’t place much value on loyalty and, worse that you don’t even have anything to show for your attitude. You lose something important while gaining nothing.