Why do so few sales people get rich?
(Shanghai Daily)Updated: 2006-12-13 10:31
Sales is a frustrating profession.
There is a dominant rule in sales industry that the top 20 percent of sales people make 80 percent of the money - which means the bottom 80 percent only earn the remaining 20 percent.
According to industrial statistics, sales people often earn more than many other professionals including doctors, lawyers and architects.
Jeff Han, a salesman with IBM China, derives huge pleasure from the job and reviews his two-year experience with a few tips for his counterparts.
"It is key to win the trust of your clients. You have to do two things: The first is not to let down your clients - always live up to what you have promised," says Han.
"The second is to think from their point of view. It is better if you can figure out something ahead of your clients and provide corresponding solutions."
Sound reasonable?
Here's more from Brian Tracy, a sales trainer who has worked with more than 500 corporations. He has written a book titled "The Psychology of Selling," which aims to help people become part of the top 20 percent.
"You only have to be a little better and different in each of the key result areas of selling for it to accumulate into an extraordinary difference in income," says Tracy.
"Success is not an accident. Failure is not an accident either. In fact, success is predictable. It leaves tracks."
If you can follow these tracks, maybe you can become a good salesperson and enjoy a high income.
The first thing the book emphasizes is that sales rejection has nothing to do with the salesperson. Instead, it is like rain or sunshine, it just happens from day to day.
Thus, Tracy recommends that in the first place people should recognize and understand their self-concept and its relationship to their sales performance.
People who focus on failures of selling or take them too personally have a
slim chance to make it to the top.
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