No. Sales — effective sales — is not “finding a need and filling it.” Effective sales is about finding a perceived need and helping someone fulfill it. If the customer doesn’t perceive the need, there is no need.

Successful salesman: someone who has found a cure for the common cold shoulder.

PRO TIP: Selling is helping. If you believe your product or service improves the lives of your customers, sales is just education. You’re helping people out. Reframing selling/asking as helping makes it exciting to offer your consulting or window-washing services or provide someone with delicious cookies. Once you accept that truth, asking becomes loads easier and feels much more like a communal gift than a selfish desire.

At the core, all successful businesses sell some combination of money, status, power, love, knowledge, protection, pleasure, and excitement. The more clearly you articulate how your product satisfies one or more of these drives, the more attractive your offer will become.

The ability to sell — to communicate to another human being, be it a customer, employee, boss, spouse, or child — is the base skill of personal success.

At the core, all successful businesses sell the promise of some combination of money, status, power, love, knowledge, protection, pleasure, and excitement. The better you articulate how your offer satisfies one or more of these drives, the more attractive your offer will become.

What's at the heart of all sales and marketing: creating demand even in the absence of logic.

all successful selling is by nature and necessity manipulative, and must apply pressure to get decision and action.

If you can bring someone belonging, connection, peace of mind, status, or one of the other most desired emotions, you’ve done something worthwhile. The thing you sell is simply a road to achieve those emotions, and we let everyone down when we focus on the tactics, not the outcomes. Who’s it for and what’s it for are the two questions that guide all of our decisions.

In business, you’re the chief salesman. Create a sense of demand, rather than waiting to have demand.

A relationship is a sales process, and sometimes you must buy to sell, and when you sell it is to the benefit of both of you.

He instilled in our eight-person sales team the crucial four C’s. To sell, you had have 1) the competence — expert knowledge of the product you were selling and the process to demonstrate it (qualifying the buyer by validating their need and budget; helping define what their buying criteria are while setting traps for the competition; getting sign-off from the technical and the economic buyer at the customer, and so forth) so that you could have 2) the confidence to state your point of view, which would give you 3) the courage to have 4) the conviction not to be sold by the customer on why she wasn’t going to buy your product. Cranney was obsessed with training every salesperson, testing them, and holding them accountable on the four C’s.

As yet the efficiency of selling goods has not been worked out. Most salesmen believe it cannot be done. They claim that there are too many variables in the problem. Perhaps there are, but nobody knows until the experiment has been thoroughly tried. In every case the victories of Efficiency have been won in spite of the most stubborn opposition from the men who were being helped. And one fact is sure - that the first Advertisers and Sales Managers who try out Efficiency and succeed will find themselves in a gold mine. They will have found a better way to enter a market that handles, in an average year, thirty thousand million dollars worth of goods.

how successfully you can satisfy the emotional or perceived needs lurking there (your customers’ psychographics).