Most people are always striving to better themselves. It’s the “American Way”. For proof, check the sales figures on the number of self-improvement books sold each year. This is not a pitch for you to jump in and start selling these kinds of books, but it is an indication of people’s awareness that in order to better themselves, they have to continue improving their personal selling abilities.

To excel in any selling situation, you must have confidence, and confidence comes, first and foremost, from knowledge. You have to know and understand yourself and your goals. You have to recognize and accept your weaknesses as well as your special talents. This requires a kind of personal honesty that not everyone is capable of exercising.

In addition to knowing yourself, you must continue learning about people. Just as with yourself, you must be caring, forgiving, and complimentary with others. In any sales effort, you must accept other people as they are, not as you would like for them to be. One of the most common faults of salespeople is impatience when the prospective customer is slow to understand or make a decision. The successful salesperson handles these situations the same as he would if he were asking a girl for a date, or even applying for a new job.

Learning your product or service, making a clear presentation to qualified prospects, and closing more sales will take a lot less time once you know your own capabilities and failings, and understand and care about the prospects you are calling upon.

Our society is predicated upon selling, and all of us are selling something all the time. We move up or stand still in direct relation to our sales efforts. Everyone is included, whether we’re attempting to be a friend to a co-worker, a neighbor, or selling multi-million dollar real estate projects. Accepting these facts will enable you to understand that there is no such thing as a born salesman. Indeed, in selling, we all begin at the same starting line, and we all have the same finish line as the goal – a successful sale.

Most assuredly, anyone can sell anything to anybody. As a qualification to this statement, let me just say that some things are easier to sell than others, and some people work harder at selling than others. But regardless of what you’re selling, or even how you’re attempting to sell it, the odds are in your favor. If you make your presentation to enough people, you’ll find a buyer. The problem with most people seems to be in making contact – getting their sales presentation seen by, read by, or heard by enough people. But this really shouldn’t be a problem, as we’ll explain later. There is a problem of impatience, but this too can be harnessed to work in the salesperson’s favor.

We have established that we’re all salespeople in one way or another. So whether we’re attempting to move up from forklift driver to warehouse manager, waitress to hostess, salesman to sales manager or from mail order dealer to the president of the largest sales organization in the world, it’s vitally important that we continue learning.

Getting up out of bed in the morning; doing what has to be done in order to sell more units of your product or service; keeping records, updating your materials; planning the direction of further sales efforts; and all the while increasing your own knowledge—all this very definitely requires a great deal of personal motivation, discipline, and energy. But then the rewards can be beyond your wildest dreams, for make no mistake about it, the selling profession is the highest-paid occupation in the world!

Selling is challenging. It demands the utmost of your creativity and innovative thinking. The more success you want, and the more dedicated you are to achieving your goals, the more you’ll sell. Hundreds of people in the world become millionaires each month through selling. Many of them were flat broke and unable to find a “regular” job when they began their selling careers. Yet they’ve done it, and you can do it too!

Remember, it’s the surest way to all the wealth you could ever want. You get paid according to your own efforts, skill, and knowledge of people. If you’re ready to become rich, then think seriously about selling a product or service (preferably something exclusively yours) – something that you “pull out of your brain”; something that you write, manufacture or produce for the benefit of other people. But failing this, the want ads are full of opportunities for ambitious salespeople. You can start there, study, learn from experience, and watch for the chance that will allow you to move ahead by leaps and bounds.

Here are six guidelines that will definitely improve your gross sales, and quite naturally, your gross income. Look them over; give some thought to each of them; and adapt those that you can to your own selling efforts.

1. Be Confident. You need to know that you know that you know that you can help them. And your product or service is something that will serve them.
2. Be Authentic. People can spot a fake a mile away. If you don’t believe in what you are selling, they won’t either.
3. Know your strengths. Your product’s strengths. This all matters.
4. Create relationships. People buy from who they know, like and trust.
5. Sharing: telling how you can help them. Be specific. They need to visualize how they will feel once they purchase your product or service.
6. Answer their questions. Be honest. Be open. 

If you accept our statement that there are no born salesmen, you can readily absorb these ideas. When you realize your first successes, you will truly know that “salesmen are MADE – not born”.