Selling Successfully

Selling Successfully
By Cliff Jenkins

The secret behind every successful salesman is having:

- the right product
- with the right marketing collateral
- in the right market
- at the right price
- at the right time
- whilst needing to earn lots of money
- and then working very hard

I’ve managed it once, such that everyone in the team all made lots of money.

So if you want to earn lots of money (preferably you have no choice, you really need lots of money, and as soon as possible) then:

- analyse your best skill set
- find the companies who want to sell to people who have that skill set
- check out their products / services and their prices
- review their marketing collateral to see if it is telling the story you want to tell, and
- get yourself a sales job with them

Now let’s turn this round and look at it from your company’s point of view.

You’re about to recruit a person to get you sales, lots of sales at good prices, what have you got available to offer these people?

Do you have a straight-forward case for them to put forward?
Is the product stable and useful, does it work?
Is there a clearly defined market need?
Have you got the pricing right?
Are the benefits and costs reasonably easy to explain, and what are the outcomes for your customers?
Do you have good client user stories and testimonials?
Is there a smooth flow throughout the progress of the sales opportunity?
Is it all presented smartly?

How are you getting your message across? How do you expect them to get the message across? Is it via web sites, exhibitions, mailshots, door to door delivery, telemarketing, cold calling?

Do you have a short clear message to get attention and to get your sales person the first crucial meeting? Have you defined who you are selling to, because you will need people who can speak their ‘language’?

You will need a salary, commission and bonus structure. You will also need Sales Opportunity Management software.

Now all you need to do is to define the criteria of performance, and find people with the knowledge of your market, who need to earn lots of money.

In my experience you will never find a ‘good salesman’ as the best sales people are already earning so much money you could never tempt them to join you, except possibly with the offer of equity participation in your company. For the rest, well you don’t really want to recruit second-best, do you?

All that’s left is to:
- find them and train them, just how easy it is to do
- drive them forward and help them, bring in professionals to help you,
- help them at every stage of the way (what do you have to do to make them each successful)
- provide more training
- celebrate success frequently, we did it formally every month
- present prizes (Champagne and Waterford Glassware from Harrods)
- train them some more

We went from a team of six people doing sales in total for about £500k (pdv) per year to £2million (pdv) per year in the next year to £6million (pdv) in the following year.

The ‘rookie’ salesman had recognised that the benefits were enormous for our clients and we just needed to show how easy they were to achieve. The outcome was to be ‘top salesman’ within three months and to be appointed Sales Manager within nine months.

BY THE WAY I noticed that if you are lumbered with admin stuff which takes you twenty hours per week (as it did) then your selling time is only twenty hours per week.

I also noticed that if you start work two hours earlier every day and finish work two hours later every day you can double your selling time.

If you would have been a poor salesperson you’ll be an average salesperson just by doing twice as much work. Similarly if you would have been average then you’ll be one of the top players. Easy isn’t it!

If you then prepared your proposals at home then you saved another three hours every time.


How did it all stop? That’s easy as it’s standard with an awful lot of silly companies. The boss couldn’t see just how much the company (and he) was making, he only saw how much the sales team were making, so he changed the remuneration structure (the one which hepersonally had created and which he’d been using for several years) and surprise surprise he lost his whole sales team. The following year the sales were significantly less than even £1million (pdv) although the sales pipelines had already been built.


The best results were in seeing these sales people blossom, seeing them recover from the situations they had seen themselves in, seeing them believe in themselves again and seeing them wearing new suits, new shirts and new shoes. Successful people.


They all went on to succeed even more.