Selling is Not Just for Sales

The 3 Most Important Habits of Highly Successful Sales People

Anyone Can Learn to Sell Well

“I wish we could close more customers”

“I’ll never be good at sales”

“I hate selling”

If you dislike (or maybe even hate) sales, think you don’t have the personality to succeed in sales, or just want to close more sales for your business, this short article could have bigger impact on your life than you might expect. Sales, after all, is not just a profession, but is a critical skill in many things we do in life — from getting admitted into a great school, dating, raising kids, advancing in a career, buying a car or home, to organizing a fundraiser, and much more.

Sales Experience

I’ve been selling for much of my 35 year career. I joined my first company, Intellution, as a programmer, but on condition with the CEO that I would move into Sales to “learn the business side.” One of the biggest surprises was the change in reaction by people to my sales title versus my previous engineering title. The overwhelming general response was a sudden distrust (of anyone in sales). At that moment, I made it my mission to show that one can succeed in sales without being a slimeball.

In the next few years, I progressed rapidly in sales, building international and mid-west sales using mixed channels of direct and indirect reps, dealers, distributors, OEMs, and VARs, to become the #2 regional sales manager at half the age of most of my peers and reports. Early in my career, I’m thankful for learning a ton from those experienced coworkers. Next, at Lotus (remember “Lotus 1–2–3” and “Lotus Notes” 😊), I closed some of my division’s largest enterprise deals in new territories. At IBM, I managed a system that tracked $100B’s (yes billions) of sales pipeline. At Microsoft, I helped enable their salesforce to unseat the largest (Fortune 50), most entrenched competitive accounts. I built a SaaS CRM…