The people who come to this website for some guidance in using technology in sales may feel this question is almost too cryptic or fundamental. But those who have read sales automation done right will know that my pet peeve is that, most often, salespeople are not (but should be) fully aware of the language of sales, in the same way that lawyers should understand the language of law. If laws are written in an ambiguous way, how can the courts decide if someone is right or wrong? In some cases where the lawmakers have not been careful, decisions can take an awful long time to make.

In my last entry, I talked about the oldest sales book on my shelves dating from the fifties. It has a small section that is titled “What is Selling?” The answer goes on for three pages, but here is essentially what it says:

“The successful sale consists of the following elements:
1. It induces others to buy a commodity or service
2. Which confers some needed benefit on them, and
3. At a price which yields a profit to the company”

Here is my paraphrase:
Selling is the ability of the salesperson to persuade a customer to purchase their company’s commodity or service, yielding a benefit to the customer and a profit for the company.

I’ve used the word persuade in place of the original word induce. Both words imply that the customer has an alternate choice to yours. I’ve always thought that the act of selling must imply competition. Selling has the end point of achieving the customer’s choice of your product over the competition. If the customer proactively goes to your company’s web store, sees something they want and places an order—this is order taking and not selling. It can be argued that the marketing department, or the product design department, through their efforts to promote the product, did the selling. But no salesperson was involved.

So an important aspect of selling is a conversation between the salesperson and the customer in which the salesperson attempts to convince the customer that they have a better solution to suit the customer’s needs than other possible alternatives. That conversation happens over time, and the time period is called the sales cycle. There are two overriding styles of selling that can occur during the sales transaction (the conversation in the sales cycle). The ability to handle both styles is critical to good selling, and there will be more on that in future entries.

I’ve always liked the idea of having a notebook; the kind made of paper (I like the electronic versions that you tap into too, but more about those later). I like the look and the feel of notebooks, and the idea of having get acres and acres of blank pages, just urging me to spill my thoughts.

Then there’s the feeling when you look back on your work (provided you don’t have trouble deciphering your own chicken scratch). Of course, not everything you scrawl will see the light of day, but there is always that gem of an idea waiting to be shared. And it will be locked safely on organic two-dimensional space.

I picked up the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago and found a fascinating article on the Moleskine Notebook. Even though I must have purchased every exotic book of blank paper under the sun over the past thirty years, I had never got a Moleskine; until now.

The Moleskine story seems to be a wonderful example of good marketing (with the likes of Van Gogh and Hemingway rumored to have been Moleskine users), and has even spawned a blog dedicated to the ways people use their Moleskines (The moleskinerie). Well now I’ve got a Moleskine and I’m giving a try; I’ll let you know how it works out.