How A Renewed Discovery Made An Average Salesman A Superhero

Tell me if you’ve heard any of these “anti-selling skills” phrases before:

• “Selling is a game of numbers.”

• “Throw enough crap against the wall and something is bound to stick.”

• “You’re problem is you’re not making enough presentations.”

• “Smiling and dialing. That’s how I did it when I was your age.”

• “Everyone’s a prospect. They all need what we have to offer.”

• “Always be closing.”

• “The sale begins at ‘NO!'”

• “You have to overcome at least five objections on average to close a sale.”

• “Overcoming objections is the name of the game in sales.”

• “Receptionists are just hourly employees there to make you jump through hoops. Plow right through them. They have no power.”

• “You have the gift of gab. You should be in sales.”

• “Go to networking events and bring a lot of cards. It’s a great and fun way to meet people and develop leads.”

• “Get your Twitter and Facebook Fan Page up and running and your information will go viral and you’ll get endless leads.”

• “List all of your features and benefits and they’ll buy.”

• “You need to learn ‘Consultative Selling.'”

• “Get your Miller Heiman Blue Sheet, Green Sheet, Pink Sheet, Yellow Sheet and Purple Sheet and try not to sheet your pants filling them all out to sell more.”

• “Develop a ‘Can-Do-Attitude’ to make more sales.”

• “Work on your Belief System to sell more.”

• “Set some Big Hairy Audacious Goals to sell more.”

• “Get Motivated to make more sales.”

• “Be positive and your sales will grow.”

Have you heard enough?

To be a Superhero Salespro, you, like Superman, need well-developed skills. Superman could:

• Fly.

• Leap tall buildings.

• Run faster than a speeding bullet.

• Bend steel.

• See through walls with X-ray vision.

• Shoot laser beams out of his eyes.

• Blow cold air to freeze his opponents.

• Blow forceful air to push them over.

• Hear Lois Lane call for help from the other side of the planet!

(Hint: Without his hearing, he wouldn’t know where the trouble was. How good is your hearing? Where do you go to hear yourself think?)

Superman’s adoptive parents encouraged him to develop his skills but not to flaunt his abilities.

Where Superman retreated to hone his skills. (How do you improve your sales skills?)

To accelerate his learning and get REALLY GOOD at developing and optimizing his skills, he built the “Fortress of Solitude,” where he not only got away from it all but it was where he could see and listen and interact with his parents, Jor-El and Lara, to get his questions answered and to clear his head.

What are your strongest skills?

How do you develop them?

Do you have one good skill and rely on that all the time for every situation with every prospect and client? (Superman didn’t burn everything with his laser-beam eyes, you know?

And it was only in a moment of crisis that he discovered he could fly so fast around the Earth that he could turn back time to save Lois Lane. But I digress.)

Where is your Fortress of Solitude, and how often do you retreat to it to get away from the Blackberry and the iPods and the Fan Pages and YouTube and FourSquare and LinkedIn Updates, Downdates, Posts, Polls, Pushes, and Pulls?

Who is your Jor-El and Lara that encourage you to continue on your journey? Or are you “figuring it all out on your own? (That’s a hard, lonely row to hoe.)

Despite Superman’s innate abilities, he surrounded himself with experts so he could focus and accelerate the development of his skills (click here for your own Fortress of Sales Solitude & Skills Development.)

Why would you want to go it alone, in isolation, against unlimited opponents when you could benefit from the experience and mistakes, and wisdom of others in your same shoes? Find someone that has “been there and done that” to help you identify and develop the skills you need to survive and prosper.

I recommend my ongoing sales training program as your Fortress of Sales Fortitude. 

Market like you mean it.Now go sell something.