Lifeboat Part III

Mel, And now the exciting conclusion to our story of the rise and fall of the biggest deal of my career.  We join our hero soon after being fired from yet another job... ...These experiences forced me to figure out what I should really be doing. And in this case the problem wasn't really all that obvious or formulaic. Let me tell you what it was. The rep firm I worked for sold off-the-shelf components, a lot of them were relatively simple things that I found rather boring.  I wanted to be a consultative sales guy. I wanted to sell sophisticated things using my knowledge and expertise, and this rep firm was not geared towards that kind of sale. The company's product mix was mostly stuff you sell to purchasing agents, and I wanted to sell to engineers. The mismatch between my natural abilities and my company's business plan was an unsolvable problem. The other problem was: If you want to do a consultative sale, you cannot chase people around with cold calls and all that. It ruins your positioning and destroys the respect that you need to get listened to in the first place. Because of my extreme state of agony I had finally discovered the world of direct marketing and was beginning to understand how I could get prospects to come to me. So I did a serious self-inventory and came up with the following criteria for my next job: 1. Sell to engineers, not purchasing agents 2. Sell products that the glad-handed, rapport-building, joke-telling, doughnut-buying, purchasing-agent-schmoozing sales guys wouldn't know how to sell in the first place. 3. Find a company that understands the power of good marketing - and hopefully even let me try a thing or two You know what? Once I had that list in place it was not hard to figure out where to go next. Thousands of possible jobs were eliminated from consideration from the very start. The next job came quickly, it met all those criteria, and my first commission check was my biggest ever. And the sales weren't hard to get. Everything was much, much easier.  It was the start of a four year success story, the best and last job I ever had. One of the misconceptions people have when the chips are down is they think everything is supposed to be hard.  You get into this self-flaggelation where you start to think, "This is hard and it's barely working. Maybe if I find something harder, that will actually work." Actually the opposite is true. When you find a groove, it really is a groove. You don't have to force things to happen. But you have to be willing to walk away from things that are barely working to make room for things that can work really well. Test fast. Fail fast. Move on. Next, next, next. Being unable or unwilling to walk away, that's the kiss of death. Perry's criteria for a good sales job is not gonna be the same as yours. But the point is, you have to know yourself. You have to know your USP in the world, your own personal Unique Selling Proposition. You're special, you have something unique to offer, you have a unique life experience, and people out there need that experience and expertise, right at this very moment. Perry Marshall **NOTE: Please do not reply directly to this email. Instead, visit http://perrymarshall.com/support with any questions or concerns.  Update subscriber options

Perry S. Marshall & Assoc
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