I’m excited that you are about to embark on journey of going through The Secrets of Successful Selling, by my father, Zig Ziglar.
We’ve brought this classic information back to you because we believe that the foundation stones of selling have not changed at all. Yes, our culture’s changed, and the technology’s changed, and way we do business has changed, but when you talk about a value proposition, when you talk about how people trust each other and what they expect, and when salespeople have a higher level of responsibility for integrity and morality than ever before, you’re going to discover that this course is perfectly suited for what you do today.
I love The Secrets of Successful Selling because salespeople have an enormous responsibility, and opportunity, to help their customers and their prospects forgo future pain. What do I mean by forgoing future pain? I learned from one of my mentors, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, that in sales what we really want to do is we want to look into the future of our customer’s life, and we want to picture that life.
We can picture that life with our product or service or without our product or service. When we understand that our product or service can help them overcome a problem before they even have it, then, I believe, we have a moral responsibility to offer them that product or service.
Yes, this is a far cry from what we see all the time on the Internet, which gives huge promises and doesn’t really deliver anything of value. We have a huge moral responsibility to do what’s right for our customer and our prospect. The Secrets of Successful Selling is based on that foundational belief.
In order to live out this moral responsibility to its fullest, we have to be professional. We have to have the technical skills. We have to know the right questions to ask. We have to take our own career seriously because until we do that, we’re not servicing our customers the way we should. We’re not helping our prospects understand the benefits of what we have to offer. A lot more is at stake than just a sale. It’s dreams, really.
Here’s the reality. When we do what we are equipped to do, when we have the gifts that we have been given and we use them to our fullest ability and in the right moral framework, then we solve more problems that are out there. When we solve more problems, we are rewarded.
Yes, that’s a huge blessing to us, but it goes even one step further: our customers have dreams as well. Isn’t it funny that the more we help others achieve their dreams, the more likely it is that we’re going to achieve ours? It really does go back to my father’s greatest quote of all: “You can have everything in life you want if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.”
When we sell the right way with the right intention, and we bring a product or service that offers value, we’re helping whomever we serve them to get closer to their dream, because that equips them to do what they do better. They solve problems in a better way, and they are rewarded for that.
We all know that dreams take time and money, so when people are solving problems and helping others achieve their dreams, that’s when we solve our own. That’s when we achieve our own dreams.
Tom Ziglar is the president of Ziglar Training Corporation, the author of Live to Win, and a successful platform speaker in his own right.