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    The 25 Sales Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople
    The 25 Sales Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople
    The 25 Sales Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople
    Ebook139 pages1 hour

    The 25 Sales Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople

    By Stephan Schiffman

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    About this ebook

    Now you can join the hundreds of thousands of salespeople who have followed Stephen Schiffman's advice and watch your performance soar. Schiffman lets you in on the industry's best-kept secrets.

    Learn how to convert leads to sales, motivate yourself and motivate others, give killer presentations, and keep your sense of humor.

    This new edition includes:
    • New examples using the latest advances in sales presentation technology
    • Up-to-date cases of these successful habits in action
    • Five bonus habits showing readers how to overcome mistakes, set sales timetables, and reexamine processes to shore up weaknesses
    If you're a salesperson looking to succeed, this is the book for you!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster
    Release dateMay 1, 2008
    ISBN9781440501128
    Author

    Stephan Schiffman

    Stephan Schiffman(New York, NY) has trained more than half a million salespeople at wide range of corporations including IBM, AT&T, Motorola, Sprint, and Cigna. A popular speaker, he is the author of numerous bestselling books with eight million in print, including Cold Calling Techniques (That Really Work!) and The 25 Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople.

    Read more from Stephan Schiffman

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    Reviews for The 25 Sales Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople

    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      he is not selling you stereotypes, but sharing his true experiences as a salesman. you will even find conversations about the techniques he suggested which will literally be crossed your mind. strongly recommended.
    • 3/5
      Good book for starters in sales. There is not much new information for those who have been working with sales for many years, though.

    Book preview

    The 25 Sales Habits of Highly Successful Salespeople - Stephan Schiffman

    Acknowledgments

    I would like to thank the following people for their help with this book: my editor, Curt Schleier; my agent, Stephanie Kip Rosten; Laura Daly and Peter Archer at Adams Media; Monika Verma; and of course, Anne, Daniele, and Jennifer for their unceasing support.

    Introduction to the Third Edition

    For better or worse, we're all creatures of habit. We usually go to sleep and get up at the same time every day. Some people lay out their clothing the night before, some brush their hair the same number of times before they go to sleep.

    I'm not a psychologist, but I suspect this kind of ritualistic behavior is a good thing. We have enough to worry about in our lives. So the chance to perform simple, day-to-day tasks without really thinking about them is a big plus. My guess is that if we had to reflect on every simple task we now do automatically — when we put out our clothes, how many times we brush our hair — we'd become paralyzed.

    It's long been my contention that the best salespeople are also creatures of habit. You ask, How can that be, Steve? You keep telling us we have to be flexible in our approach, be able to adjust to change. And that's certainly true.

    The great salespeople are flexible enough to adopt new sales tools as they become available — from PowerPoint to text messaging. They know that they can't be locked into a single sales pitch, and they have to adjust what they say to each customer. They know the importance of the sales process — and their goals are always to get to the next step.

    But that doesn't mean routine isn't important. The most important sales skill is prospecting. Those of you who've taken my courses or read my other books know that when I talk about prospecting, I mean finding someone new to speak to every single day.

    Some people tell me they're able to rely exclusively on business from existing accounts. I'm never certain whether they mean they don't need to prospect because they have a rich vein they can continue to mine in companies with which they already do business … or that they're just order takers.

    If they can really do that and are happy with the results, more power to them. But good salespeople — by my definition — can't afford not to prospect. They're never satisfied. They're hungry. They know they'll need good paydays four, five, six, seven months down the road, and that can only come from (depending on your sales cycle) clients they pick up today. (More on that in Habit #8.)

    From the time I first got into sales, I made it my business to call fifteen leads every day; I've been in business for myself now almost three decades — and I still do that. It became a habit with me.

    While many colleagues went straight to the coffee machine when they came into the office in the morning or to the watercooler to talk about last night's big game, I went directly to the phone.

    At first, it took conscious effort to get on the phone. But that's not so true anymore. It's ingrained in me. And it can become ingrained in you. All you have to do is practice. Every morning when you get out of the car in the parking lot, step off the bus or ferry, or come up from the subway, set your priorities. And make making fifteen prospect calls every day priority number one.

    Sure, it's difficult, but if I may borrow a marketing slogan from Nike, my advice to you is to just do it! Don't make twelve or ten calls. Don't call five people you've already spoken to and count them in your daily total. The process of ingraining good habits in your workday requires good and regular practice. It doesn't happen overnight. But what it boils down to is that (for me) building good habits is like building a stairway to success — and not just in sales.

    Hall of Famer Cal Ripken, Jr., says his father used to tell him, practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. Cal Jr. said, I used to think that was ridiculous. How are you gonna have fun if you're not going to fool around a little bit? But he felt if you want to build good habits, it's a lot better to take twenty-five to fifty ground balls the right way than to take 500 ground balls and screw around. My dad's message was all about building good habits, so when the game starts you can fall back on those habits and they seem natural.

    And it wasn't just a matter of practicing fielding grounders. He got into the habit of watching the catcher and would move his position on the field based on the pitch, the count, the tendencies of the hitter, and even the tendencies of a manager. So if he knew a skipper liked to play hit and run in certain situations, he might shade over closer to second base.

    For this new edition, I've added five new habits to help build your career. But no matter how many habits I suggest, they're all meaningless unless you ingrain them as part of your process, repeat them over and over again.

    Cal Sr. is right: Perfect practice makes perfect.

    Introduction

    How has the sales landscape changed over the past ten or fifteen years?

    That question occurred to me while I was working with a sales manager at a Fortune 500 firm who complained that his salespeople still thought it was the early nineties.

    The more I thought about his (accurate) observation, the more I was reminded that these habits, first outlined in book form years ago, really do highlight the strategies used nowadays by successful salespeople — the ones who have adapted to all the changes in today's competitive selling environment. And since then, my work with salespeople has convinced me of the point. This new edition reflects an opportunity for you to benefit from these habits for success by incorporating them into your sales routine. (And, yes, you can add a good habit to your routine — just as you can add a bad one!)

    For my money, selling is the most exciting job in the world. With the right organization, it gives you unlimited income potential, freedom, and a clear means to take control of your career and your life. I believe it beats any other occupation hands down. But there's a problem.

    In the seminars that my company conducts, the first question we ask of salespeople is, What's the one thing you would like to change about your job? The answer we get is

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