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By Raleigh Perry
BUFORD, Ga. | In spite of all of what I learned in school and college, I spent my whole working life selling. Ninety percent of selling is personality. The other ten is product knowledge. You are born into selling, you cannot get it with book learning.
Perry
Two men taught me how to sell and sell successfully. I had been in trite sales positions for a while and then was hired by Sears to sell paint. I sold there for about a year and then thought that I could make more money somewhere else. I interviewed with the manager of a Glidden Paint store. The first question he asked me was “How much did you sell today?”
I told him that my cash register said $2,000. He then said “I did not ask you how many dollars were in your cash register drawer, I asked you how much you sold.”
Then he elaborated that if a man came in and wanted a gallon of paint and walked out only with that paint, “You have not sold anything.” He explained that the man was obviously wanting to paint a house or room.
“You needed to find out if he has a brush or roller, paint thinner, rags, a drop cloth amongst other things”. He taught me that the margin on the can of paint was small, say 20 percent, but the margins on the accessories could run 50-70 percent. “Pitch everything he might need.”
The other teacher was when I was working for Random House selling college textbooks. We were at the University of Florida in Gainesville and they had a mandatory course called Social Science. All freshmen had to take it and there were 2,900 freshmen in that course that year. Every book company was trying to get that big sale, but none had.
However, I did what I was told to at the last sales meeting, I called on all of the professors to pitch a book that “our management said,” was just right for the course. It wasn’t! I called on 20 professors and no one was interested.
The books, like many schools, were chosen by committee so if you sold one, you sold 2,900. But that was not going to happen with that book.
My manager and I rode the elevator to the bottom floor and got a cup of coffee. He told me that these professors all used paperbacks, a bunch of them, and our company had the largest list of social science paperbacks of all the book publishers. “Go in tomorrow and pitch those.” I had a little catalog about 3/4 of an inch that had all of what we called the “back list.”
The main book that I had pitched the day before cost $15. We went back to all of the offices and went through that catalog. They used 10 paperbacks the next year. Eight of them were mine, which amounted to $60 per student. So 60 times 2,900 is a lot more than 15 times 2,900. My manager simply reminded me to pitch everything in your bag, and therein lies success.
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