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.] 

Does selling make a difference? Without a doubt. But what is selling? If you asked 100 sales professionals to write down their definitions of selling, you would probably get 103 dif­ferent answers. Selling is a science. It is an art. It is a system. It is an active, step-by-step process of guidance and motiva­tion, involving a logical sequence of planned events. And it is more. But in its simplest form, just about everyone could agree with the following definition:

 SELLING IS THE ACTIVE PROCESS OF PRESENT­ING INFORMATION IN SUCH A MANNER THAT IT MOTIVATES AND GUIDES THE OTHER PARTY TO TAKE A SPECIFIC ACTION.

Making a sale is very much like opening a combination lock or dialing the correct sequence of numbers to place a telephone call. Most of all, selling is what you do. It is not just a con­siderate service or a luxury. It is a vital link in the business chain. Without exception, selling makes the difference be­tween a good year and a bad one, between a compa­ny’s success and its failure, and, in many ways, between pros­perity and sluggishness in our economy. If you doubt this, keep in mind that there was money during the Great Depres­sion; it didn’t suddenly disappear. But it didn’t move or circu­late. It didn’t go anywhere. The people who had money were not spending it. Instead, they were literally stuffing it into their mattresses.

The Great Depression was caused by a number of complex factors, and I am not suggesting that platoons of super-motivated, super-qualified professionals could have single-­handedly stimulated the economy. What I am saying is that if every salesperson in the country stayed home for a month and did not attempt to sell, sales would plummet and our whole economy would stagger. People would continue to buy their daily necessities and might even seek out other items. But across the nation, sales would shrivel by as much as l0% — even 20% or 30%. And we would be on the road to another depression.

Selling counts. Selling keeps the wheels of the economy turning.  That is because, with rare exception, products do not sell themselves. They have to be sold. And they need to be sold by motivated, interested sales professionals. 

Work hard, make money, have fun, and keep on selling!