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.

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.

He believed that you were either selling or being sold: if you weren’t selling a customer on your product then the customer was selling you on why she wasn’t going to buy

If you're selling, your job isn't to sell, it's to build trust.

The Sales were important to us because that was how we got hold of things from outside.

I sighed. If there was a hell, it was in sales.

And the third thing is: Rather than thinking how to get love, start giving. If you give, you get. There is no other way. People are more interested in how to grab and get. Everybody is interested in getting and nobody seems to enjoy giving. People give very reluctantly — if ever they give, they give only to get, and they are almost businesslike. It is a bargain. They always go on watching to make sure they get more than they give — then it is a good bargain, good business. And the other is doing the same. Love is not a business, so stop being businesslike. Otherwise you will miss your life and love and all that is beautiful in it — because all that is beautiful is not at all businesslike. Business is the ugliest thing in the world — a necessary evil, but existence knows nothing of business. Trees bloom, it is not a business; the stars shine, it is not a business and you don’t have to pay for it and nobody demands anything from you. A bird comes and sits at your door and sings a song, and the bird will not ask you for a certificate or some sign of appreciation. He has sung the song and then happily he flies away, leaving no traces behind.

I do not mean that selling is ignored. Far from it. But selling, again, is not marketing. As already pointed out, selling concerns it with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing invariably does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse, and satisfy customer needs. The customer is somebody "out there" who, with proper cunning, can be separated from his loose change.

Selling is about a transference of emotion, not a presentation of facts.

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.

Effective sales is about finding a perceived need and helping someone fulfill it.

Most salespeople think that selling is “closing.” It isn’t. Selling is opening.

I learned the joy of giving, and

Driving back to Portland I’d puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.