Sales Doesn’t Have To Be All Red Bull And Results

Recently, I went back and reread Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective people and I came away with the below passage as being my biggest takeaway.

?“Inside-Out" means to start first with self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self -- with your paradigms, your character, and your motives”

?A sale can be made a lot of different ways but the hardest, and most effective, is what Covey references, in creating an atmosphere and personal culture/brand that people are genuinely attracted to.?I think back to the different sales/leadership books that I have read and some are very tactical and teach the ‘tricks’ to influence people to buy your product.?Some of them do actually work amazingly enough, but at the core of it, most people care about who they are buying from, which gets back to Stephen Covey, in terms of doing self work (Inside-Out Paradigm shift) versus learning tactics to build a sales career around.

I recently was interviewed for a sales podcast and I realized I talk about a lot of the concepts and books that I really like.?One of the concepts, which oddly enough comes from a very tactical book, is the Three Tens from The Way Of The Wolf.?It can be summarized in that people have three reasons for their buyer behavior (you, your product, and your company).?If you deviate from talking about those topics and building credibility in those areas, you are wasting your time, because buyers don’t make their decisions based on the other topics.?A good tactic, but at the same time, it reinforces the importance of building trust and a connection with you as one of the three most important things in buyer behavior.

There will always be some people that buy just on price, but I have been very fortunate to surround myself with people that appreciate me as a person and what I bring, not just from a product perspective.?People genuinely like working with people that they have something in common with (know, like and trust).?One of the interesting topics of the interview that I didn’t anticipate coming up was my charitable work and it is true that it absolutely helps me in my career.?I get an opportunity to network and connect with people who are also involved in those projects.?They get to see what my work ethic and process is and almost works as a test drive of what it is like to work with me.?In addition to giving back to the community, I can say it’s been more productive in my business career than I ever realized.

?In the interview, I reference 7 Habits, 800 Pound Guerrilla and Way of The Wolf as my favorite business books.?What would you include in your Mount Rushmore of Sales books?

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Jason Hornberger is a 30-something year old commercial lender at Orrstown Bank in Berks County.?He would likely be considered a dinosaur by his Millennial peers, but he tries to regularly put together engaging content to show his brand and thought process.?Social media is an online billboard and his goal is to establish himself as an ethical thought leader and someone that other people want to engage with (hopefully in business and in the community).