I just finished studying The Psychology of Selling by Brian Tracy.
I’ve seen Brian Tracy live in person twice through through the Peak Performers network. I had not heard of him before joining Peak Performers but then again I hadn’t really heard of any of the other major speakers who I’ve seen since then as I’d never really paid any attention to motivational speakers like this before.
If you’ve not heard of Brian Tracy, he’s a high school dropout who began working laboring jobs and essentially backed into a sales career and learned the business initially by being told that sales was a numbers game and he just had to make lots of calls to be successful. Eventually he started asking successful sales reps how it was that they’d become successful as he noticed that many of the successful reps didn’t seem to view sales as a numbers game and that their strategy seemed to be more organized and sophisticated. He started talking less and asking more questions and found that that’s when his sales started to increase.
Over time, he perfected his strategies by using what he’d learned from other successful sales people, used common sense and listened to what his customers wanted. He kept repeating what worked and concentrated on selling benefits to his customers and not features as many sales people often do.
Granted, when you see speakers like this in person, the hardest task is usually keeping track of how many of their CDs and books they plug during their speech and avoiding buying every products of theirs that they hawk. In the case of Brian Tracy though, I do like his style and I found this book to be very useful.
As the title would suggest, the book and CD set concentrates on the psychology of selling and learning (as the book says) about how people think and why they buy. As a person who sells myself, it’s interesting to be reminded that sitting with a sales prospect and listing every benefit that your product or service offers doesn’t necessarily mean that your prospect will be interested or “sold” on what you offer.
One of the parts of the book and CD set that I’ll remember is when Tracy reminds the reader that suggesting that a product or service is high quality and priced right aren’t benefits, they’re givens. We assume these days that products are good quality and reasonably priced otherwise the company probably won’t be in business very long.
True benefits relate to what the product does for the customer and how it makes their life easier.
In a career sense, this book is useful even to people who aren’t in sales-based roles since we all sell ourselves during our career and in job interviews specifically. To follow up with the comment I referred to above, mentioning many of the things you’ve done in your career won’t necessarily cause a hiring manager to want you interview you or hire you. As mentioned above, they have hot buttons too (something Tracy also discusses in the book) and they’ll perk up when you mention things that are relevant to them and to their business.
Even if you aren’t in a sales role and have no intention of ever being in one, this book can help you learn selling strategies that can positively contribute to your long term career success.
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