Sellenthal: Selling Isn't a Win-Lose Proposition

A young salesman returned to the office from one of his first solo sales calls with a smile so broad it seemed like it stretched from ear to ear. It was obvious that he wanted to tell me that he had made a sale.

I played along and asked, “So, how did it go?”

“Great,” he said, “the schmuck bought it!”

I blanched and explained that he made it sounds like he had duped the prospect into buying, that a sales call wasn’t a win-win struggle, and that he was supposed to come away with the feeling that both of them had won.

One of the best sellers I ever knew, the late Charlie Mandel, was good with words, good with metaphors. Once asked to sum up the essence of a good sales call, he did so by stating that it was his job as a seller to provide the seeds and the prospect’s job to provide the fertilizer. “Together,” he added, “we can make something grow.”

All of a sudden, I remembered a sales guy I had interviewed in the early 1980s for my first book, Selling Smart. I had asked some 30 sales executives and publishers to describe one of their most memorable sales calls and the response I received from the late Robert Nylen differed from all the others.

At the time, Nylen was the associate publisher of Texas Monthly, and what he told me struck close to the heart of what effective selling is and is not.

“If I were a good baseball player and you asked me to name a crucial hit I’d gotten that turned a game around,” he said, “I’d be able to select from 50 such stories. But salesmanship isn’t as riveting, nor is it as clear-cut as sports.

“In my experience,” he added, “a single brief meeting – even a confrontational, arrestingly persuasive, eloquent business pitch – is a lot less important than the melange of impressions that the salesman creates in the buyer over time. We make friends, not conquests, and it takes a long time.”

Nylen went on to explain that many sales philosophers view sales calls as an altercation between adversaries, a war in which there is a winner and a loser. “The salesman who views the buyer as the enemy is in trouble,” he said.

In answer to my question, he said that he has never made an outstanding, memorable sales call, noting facetiously, “I have, however, made 4,326 somewhat good calls and each day our staff makes about 74 more.”

While it has nothing to do with the thrust of this column, I strongly suggest that you google Robert Nylen, a fascinating individual. I did and it made me wish I had known him better.