SALES-FAIL: My Revised 2nd Edition Introduction. By Jon Weinstein

Even before COVID-19 totally upended our lives, I was asked to do an update of my 2017 book, SALES-FAIL: The Infinite Loop Of Sales Failure. Here is the Introduction to the ( hopefully!) 2020 edition:

If you were expecting just another sales book attempting to teach you how to Up Your Game! Win More! And get ahead in the sales world through smarter selling tactics alone---this is not the book you expected. But if you are looking for a totally unique book that will address your hesitancies and legitimate questions about entering sales in the first place---you won: this book is for you.

However, if you are looking for a unique explanation of why sales careers fail and why you lose sales jobs , seemingly over and over : this book was written just for you. There are a lot of ‘Yous’ out there who fall prey to the same patterns that prevail in salesworld. The situation has changed with the new pandemic world that we now live in. Time horizons measuring sales success are shorter. They are more inflexible, and arbitrary. The ability to foster in-person face- to- face relationships has been altered. If you have cycled into and out of sales jobs and wonder just what has caused serial failure, I think we can gain some vital answers here.

Sales-Fail? is a term that describes a syndrome, almost like a disease. It has severely sickened more careers than we can count. It has killed many job and career plans, too. Sales-Fail is a term that I coined to describe the sales employment and work practice process that more often than not, leads you to either be terminated for non-performance, or otherwise eased out.

Someone read my first edition who , ironically enough, had a Master’s in Psychology and allegedly taught it at the college level . He described my book derisively to another as a plan to guide sellers in how to purposefully fail ! Obviously, wherever this guy got his graduate degree from they did not teach basic, rudimentary reading comprehension. Nothing is further from the truth !It boggles the mind how anyone could have gotten that message---then or possibly even now. This book is designed to help the seller decide if they want to be in sales, should be in sales—and then once in sales, how to prosper, thrive, remain employed---and be successful at the craft.

As I said earlier, the ' Basics ' of prospecting, planning, setting up your presentation, how to listen, manage objections, prepare quotes and deliver them, close and follow up, etc. are handled very well by many others. The best are several who appear daily on LinkedIn, Grant Carbone, Sandler Sales, Tom Hopkins and several others whos named I can send you if you contact me—after, that is, you’ve this book.

Sales jobs and even careers fail for three key reasons: First,  You have not comfortably mastered both the basics of the craft---and basic tools and techniques are vital—as well as the ability to properly read how your specific employer operates. You have not been able to plug in whatever intuitive as well as learned tools of the trade you might have  into the unique company that you work for. You have not learned how to read your boss, your company's system and its expectations machinery properly.

The second reason is that there are basic flash-points, or indicators, like flashing  like red flashing warning lights along the way that, in fairness to you, you have not been taught about before. I have been a sales manager. I have recruited, trained , managed, and terminated scores of salespeople. A few sellers were so good that they were admittedly far better sellers than I was. Many were Average who sunk into Below Average territory. There were warnings. There were clear markings which I will tell you about so that you can use them to repair any problems you may be having, prevent others, and successfully navigate your employment.

The third reason is that the mindset itself is key: we are all ambivalent about what we do. Few of us are fully happy, invested in and totally amused by all aspects/ all the time of what we do for a living. The vast majority of us have learned to manage the smaller portion of what we Dislike about our jobs and accentuate the Likes. But, perhaps you are fundamentally not cut out through temperament, desire, education and general outlook to be in sales. And that is no crime! However, if you find yourself falling prey to the types of failure points that I describe in this book, maybe you have to ask yourself: ‘ Am I really, really cut out for this? Is what I have to do and put up with worth it? Do I naturally like and have natural abilities in salesmanship and salesworld life so that I can navigate the individual problems and challenges? ‘ If the answer is No, you are perhaps better off than most people: You at least know what you don’t want to do for a living.

This book is for Sellers---before you become one, and after you are in salesworld. It is also for sales managers: knowing the failure points can aid managers in helping to prevent them wherever possible at their end, too.

Sales gurus teach sales success from an operational perspective. I do too. The process here is more occupational and psychological. It is the active, small, daily small things in your sales work that can and do trip you up—and out.

No, this sales book has not been written before. It is about sales failure. If self-error is the greatest teacher, than I have been truly well educated—and so have many others. I have learned about sales-fail as a seller, as well as a manager. When practicing positive sales failure prevention strategies, I have grown my companies. I have succeeded and truly grown my performance.

So can you.