by Jacques Werth
I once owned a car agency which was not very profitable. Then I leased a horse stable near a park, so my kids and I could go riding together. It was a fairly big stable, so I took in other peoples’ horses for boarding to offset the expenses. Then, I bought some more horses, sold them and bought more. The profit in the horse business was much better than the profit in the car business, and a lot more fun. The interesting thing is that I was practicing High Probability Selling, using the same sales process in two different businesses, and getting very different results.
Then, I dug out the notebooks that I used to record my observations of the sales processes of top sales producers. This time, it was to make a list of the kinds of products and services they were selling. Before I was half way into making that list, I realized that there were too many categories to make sense of them all. However, I noticed that there were no car salespeople on the list. Then, I went back to the beginning and began to list other things that salespeople sold that were not being sold by any of the high-income sales producers. Here are some stand-outs on that list.
- Network Marketing (MLM) of all types
- Most commodity products and services
- Small special trade contractors
- Simple products and services that do not produce substantial income
Why aren’t the most successful salespeople selling these things? Could it be that there just isn’t any money in it? Or, could it be that the methods that highly successful salespeople use are just not compatible with selling these kinds of products and services?
