This video, and all the materials in this course are designed to be watched many times. Each time through you will pick up many new ideas that you can translate into direct action immediately.

Welcome

Hi, I’m Alan Gordon, author of the Big Book of Sales. I want to welcome you to this video series about basic sales skills for new salespeople. I’m going to pretend that you’ve been assigned to sit next to me on your new sales job. I will talk to you throughout the videos as if you and I are working together. I will tell you everything about my philosophy of sales, the different steps in the process, teach you basic techniques, and show you a few advanced techniques. Most importantly, I’m going to make sure that at the end of this series, you’ve really had a thorough grounding in every basic sales skill and technique I can share with you.

Once you’re enrolled in this course, these videos are yours to watch forever. You can take notes and there are also notes underneath the videos.

Sales as a Skill

Sales is a cumulative skill. It’s not just something that you pick up in one day so that one day you’re a new sales person and tomorrow you’re an expert. Sales is an iterative process of continual learning, learning new skills and techniques, having the courage or personality to be able to execute some of those techniques, try the techniques, work the techniques out, see what works and what doesn’t work, and then try another technique the next time.

Slowly but surely as you become better and better at the entire sales process, you will start to see improvement and own some of the techniques we will talk about.

My Definition of Sales

Regardless of the product or service you sell, sales is the art and science of understanding customer psychology, anticipating customer reactions, applying the right skill at exactly the right time to control the sale to a close with an acceptable outcome for each party - the client, your company, and you personally.

Sales is a science because it’s repeatable. I can teach you very specific things to say in different circumstances. Sales is an art because you have to have a feel for the customer’s mood at the time and how the chemistry of the call is going.

If every time you sell you’re giving away your commission to make the sale, that’s not good. You have every right to earn a commission on the sales that you make and your company has every right to earn a profit on the sale, and the client has every right to be put into a better situation.

Sales Models

The key element in the sales definition is customer psychology. The old concept of selling that was taught from the 1950s to the early 1990s was A, B, C, Always Be Closing. Sales was seen as a pressure activity to push pressure on people to force them to close. There are so many problems with that model. You will still see a lot of this model out there.

The new model of selling from the early 1990s until today is to understand customer psychology, to understand what your client actually needs, what their desires are, what their problems are, what pain, what problem are they trying to solve and then understand how to get them to understand that pain and need and desire. Then show them how your solution can solve their problem, their pain, their desire. Then to move them toward a close, to be able to pull out the right technique at the right time, to apply the right words at the right time to control the sales process to a successful close and successful conclusion, as we said, successful for the client, successful for your company and successful for you.

Advice on How to Use the Course

This is your profession. This is your career. This is your craft. I need you to take this seriously. I need you to take notes, to write things, get index cards, and use flash cards. It’s like a skill. It’s like you’re training an athlete. You’re an athlete in training and you’ve got to develop certain skills and muscles and movements that you might not have right now and that’s okay, but I need you to work through this series of videos and then come back to them again and go through them again, and again, and again.

Through this series of videos, we will be touching all the basics of sales, and it's going to be tremendously profitable. I don't believe that salespeople should fail. When you are sitting next to me, or on my sales team you will succeed because I'm going to teach you how to sell. I want you to keep that in mind as you go through these materials. I have your back. I have your best interests in mind, and it's very important to me when I hear your feedback and hear about your successes.

When you see a salesperson who "makes it look easy" you can be sure
they have put in years of hard work to make it look that way.

Now it's time for you to get to work. You can do this!