After his death some years ago, someone finally realized that John D. Rockefeller was as great a salesman as he was a financier.
In truth, he might have been one of the greatest salesmen of all time.
His sales career started at age 16.
Some time in the past, I remember reading that Mr. Rockefeller had 3 sales philosophies, which he had started even at that young age.
Just a boy, he had recognized that there’s a tremendous amount of waste in selling, so he found three key rules to guide him.
Sales Philosophy #1 was that he would only call on large companies.
Sales Philosophy #2 was that go after big orders.
Sales Philosophy #3 was to always see the right man, the one at the top.
Using those three rules for his selling guidelines, he went out and produced one of the top sales careers of all time.
I personally think that #3 is the one that stalls most salespeople today.
Either they’re scared to go after the top person in the company who makes buying decisions, they don’t know who it really is because they’re lazy or stupid or their company won’t let them go hard after the account.
Any one of those is a career killing mistake.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
#3 is very true. I used to work in an IT dept at a bank, and the only salesmen who made any sales were the ones who got in direct contact with the IT manager. I received countless sales calls on the help desk line, and they got no where. Because frankly, I just didn’t care.
Only the guy with the company credit card would even bother listening to them.
Hey Aaron,
Thanks for the confirmation.
People who don’t do their homework waste a lot of time and effort.
In the old days, we used to call that person the “checksigner.”
Now (s)he’s called the “corporate card carrier”:-)
Was that back when someone was actually responsible ?
Today it seems like everything’s decided by committee.