Moe and Susan Ershler discuss how sales professionals can overcome their perceived limitations and achieve peak performance.
Achieving Excellence in Sales
The sales profession is both dignified and essential to our economic prosperity, still few in society acknowledge the good that it serves. None of us want to be sold — I get that — but, each of us is a consumer in our own way. Whether it’s an everyday item that we’re buying or a once-in-a-lifetime purchase, our ultimate satisfaction is when we walk away feeling that our needs have been met.
Having built a sales organization for the better part of two decades, I’ve found it a great paradox when a sales person somehow forgets that he, too is a consumer with similar expectations to the individual with whom he’s dealing with. In the same vein that Lao Tzu described a great leader, the exceptional sales person “is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say, ‘we did it ourselves.’” Mountain climber and leadership consultant, Susan Ershler writes in her latest book, Conquering the Seven Summits of Sales, that a top performer hardly sees himself as a salesperson; instead he thinks more like a guide who follows this five-step process to achieve peak performance.