By John Ingrisano

The Freestyle Entrepreneur 

[The following is an excerpt from John Ingrisano’s

 The Back to Basics Book of Selling: A Guide to a Successful Sales Career.] 

You don’t need to be a genius or have a Ph.D. in market­ing to be a successful sales professional. All you need are four things:

1. A thorough knowledge of your products or services.
2. A firm commitment to work hard and to invest the time and effort it will take to become successful. Some people think that an eight-hour workday represents four hours of over­time, while others regularly work up to 16 hours a day.  Andrew Carnegie, one of the most successful industrialists ever born, had the philosophy that, “Anything worth having is worth working for.”  Good advice.
3. A winning attitude.  Some folks come by a positive mental attitude naturally.  Most of us, however, have to work at it.  Train yourself to think positively.  Yes, it can be a challenge, but it is possible.  The more positive your attitude, the more successful you will be.
4. A mastery of the basic, fundamental techniques of suc­cessful selling.  They are ancient, universal … and they work.  Yes, new techniques and methods come around every year like Christmas and Easter.  However, the basics NEVER change.  They have been proven over the centuries to be successful for countless numbers of sales professionals and others.

These ideas should be thoroughly learned, step by step. Most of all, they should be understood. If you understand the purpose of each step in the successful sales process, you will be able to apply it with more conviction than if you simply view it as a step to be blindly followed.

Study the basics. Master them. Perfect them. Once you have a solid understanding of all of the elements of successful selling and can see how they all fit together, you can begin fine tuning and adjusting them to fit your own sales situation and sales style. Make them yours. In turn, they will make you an effective, successful sales professional.

 So, learn your products, work hard, keep a positive attitude, learn the basics of selling … and then go out and make money!

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