The Inner Game of Selling

Book excerpt: Selling is 85% emotional and 15% logical. Forget everything you've been taught about selling -- forget the hardsell, forget negotiation strategies, forget those closing techniques. In The Inner Game of Selling, Ron Willingham debunks the familiar myths about "sales skills," showing that those tired methods are too shallow and manipulative to do anything but alienate potential customers and drain you of energy and dignity. Today's consumers are wise to the old-fashioned gimmicks, extremely informed about their options, and very particular about what they want. The old tricks simply do not work anymore. Willingham, author of Integrity Service and CEO of Integrity Systems, opens your eyes to a whole new truth about selling: Your ability to sell is more a question of who you are than of what you know. Accordingly, why you sell is far more important than how you sell. Salespeople perform according to their inner beliefs about themselves, about what it is possible for them to sell and earn, and about what they deserve to achieve. These beliefs set the boundaries of their self-image and ultimately determine their success or failure. Willingham has synthesized his decades of experience, field-tested research, and a career-long dedication to ethical and passionate salesmanship to arrive at the groundbreaking insight that you will sell at your highest level only when you achieve emotional and spiritual alignment. Your sense of your own self-worth combined with a belief in your product will inspire that crucial ingredient in potential customers: trust. The Inner Game of Selling shows you how to overcome self-limiting beliefs and move on to a new relationship with your customers and, more important, a new relationship with yourself. Your new inner strengths will truly benefit you and your customers in any sales situation. Willingham is at the leading edge of a values shift in sales culture, from product-focus to personal empowerment. The Inner Game of Selling establishes a groundbreaking new paradigm that will utterly transform the philosophy and practice of selling.