Four Fundamental Ideas

by Graham Denton

In summing up his experience as a champion salesperson, Zig Ziglar offers four ideas that he considers fundamental to mental success. All four go against the conventional wisdom of what it is to be a salesperson and a success.

The first idea is that salespeople, far from being normal, realistic, hardworking business professionals, are actually a little "warped" in their beliefs and expectations. Top salespeople are infected with the delusion of their own inevitable success. "It is beyond their wildest imagination to be able to begin to understand how anybody could possibly even remotely entertain the idea of thinking about saying no." The Ziglar style here, so richly overbaked, is actually an appropriate representation of what he is saying: Great salespeople are convincing because they're fully, even "unrealistically," convinced themselves.

The second idea is that good salespeople are able to distinguish between refusal and rejection. They understand that selling involves refusal-often multiple refusals-but they don't equate that inevitability with personal rejection. They assume instead that when someone refuses their proposal, that potential customer has simply made a mistake. The great salesperson gives every prospect who says no "a chance to correct that mistake by saying yes."

The third idea is that there's no such thing as a born salesman-or saleswoman. Too many potentially good sellers buy into the opposite idea, the old myth that a salesperson is born, not made. And when they fail to find quick success, they blame that failure on their "stars." Ziglar emphasizes the value of good sales training, and he notes, comically, that although he's known women who have given birth to girls and to boys, he's never known one who has given birth to a fully trained sales professional. Whatever your "natural" makeup, you can learn to sell.

The fourth idea is that the salesperson has to remember who the real winner is in any well-managed sale. That winner is the prospect or customer, because months or years after you've spent a given commission, the customer is still enjoying the product that earned you that commission. "When you fully understand and believe the prospect is the big winner, you can close more enthusiastically and forcefully."

These four ideas are certainly not all you need to sell effectively-Ziglar's own comment about training is evidence of that. But if you take them seriously, they're a very good start. They're the basis of a mental preparation that all winners share, the four corners of a philosophy that generates success.