My Journey in Sales 

My first sales job involved selling cardboard ads that were placed on trash containers in the U.S. Capital of Washington, D.C. The company name was Media Kiosk. It was part of Pride Inc., a job-training initiative co-founded by Mary Treadwell Barry for inner-city youth. Treadwell was the ex-wife of the city's controversial mayor, Marion Barry, and had a lot of local influence in Washington. It was 1976 and I was paid $150 a month. As I had no idea what I was doing I provided about the same in value. Despite this, I was starving.

About six months into my job the manager who had hired me left. A few days later, he called me and told me about a sales position in radio advertising. Compared to trash containers, radio was exciting.. The company was named Discount Radio Ads. I was paid on commissions. There was no salary and I wasn‘t compensated for any expenses until I made my first sale. That said, what I learned there changed my life.

It was at Discount Radio Ads that I first learned what sales was really about. In their pitch book of about a dozen pages, I discovered Dale Carnegie's model: Attention, Interest, Conviction, Desire, and Close. Since, I have seen this model hold in all sales scenarios. I consider it the bedrock of good sales practices.

In 1978, I had my first formal sales training. It was provided by David Sandler. David is gone, but his program is still used today. An avid fisherman with a creative imagination, David said that getting customers to buy was about holding back and not pitching prematurely. To snag the tasty bonefish, he explained, one had to be patient. If you pulled your line as soon as the bait was taken, you would lose the fish. It wasn't until after the bonefish swallowed the bait that it could be safely reeled in.

Selling to customers was no different. It was better to hold off on closing a sale until the prospect had developed an understanding and genuine desire for one‘s product. Only then should a salesperson go for the close. In some instances, this process would last minutes, but in others, it could go on for months or even years.

While at Oracle, I was introduced to SPIN Selling. SPIN was developed by U.K. psychologist Neil Rackham and based on a decade of research that observed and documented 35,000 sales calls. When I first read SPIN Selling, I was returned to my college behavioral psychology class. Finally, I saw a connection between what I studied in college and my career in sales. I also learned a critical fact at Oracle that has stuck with me ever since: with each attempt to close, the probability of a sale drops. Oracle reinforced what David Sandler had observed.

I realized then that closing a sale was a bit like being in a glider: there was only one chance at landing it. Applying this principle was central to all of the big sales I made. Of course, nothing is 100%, but thinking like this enabled me to move a step ahead of my competitors and colleagues.

Like a shark smelling blood in water, one can develop an intuition about business. Sometimes, we hold back; at other times, we speed forward. My favorite sales were the ones that closed relatively fast. Getting to this point consistently was a matter of narrowing a pipeline, not expanding it.

I took a backward iterative approach to sales by imagining the result and working my way to it. For me, the blood-in-the-water moment arrived when I connected with individuals who had an interest in the product I was selling. That interest could be factual, political, financial, or all the above, but it was a hook to making the sale happen.

In one case, a sale of $650,000 was won in under two months. In another case, a sale of the same size was lost after nearly a year. Despite gaining the recommendation of the technical evaluators, I failed to notice a change in top management that killed it. Time, more than competitors, was always the biggest threat. With every day, there’s a chance that something or someone will change.

More recently, books like Predictably Irrational by Daniel Ariely and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman have added to my outlook on sales, and particularly the importance of loss aversion and other unshakeable human biases. 

The kernel of the Enterprisium GPT is based on a detailed set of instructions derived from my experiences and learnings. I have created and fine-tuned these in Enterprisium GPT. GPT does the heavy lifting, but the kernel functions as a rutter in navigating salespeople to where they need to go.

What took six hours just two years ago can now be done in twenty minutes using Enterprisium GPT. Better yet, this dynamic tool allows you to update your sales strategy in seconds as information develops and insights expand.

I look forward to receiving your feedback, learning, and partnering with you, to make this model better.

Respectfully,

Fred Eberlein

fred@enterprisium.org

Enterprisium.org©2024

Oracle Federal Division Kickoff June 18, 1990