Cambridge Business Association
Selling Sucks
Book

Selling Sucks

How to Stop Selling and Start Getting Prospects to Buy!

Frank J. Rumbauskas Jr.
Wiley, 2007
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Editorial Rating

6

Recommendation

Cold calling is a wretched way to earn a living. You spend valuable time wading through cold prospects in the hope that one will buy what you’re selling. These busy people have more to worry about than your products. On a cold call, your status with them goes from nothing (they didn’t know you before you called) to less than nothing (now they dislike you). They want you out of their offices. You try desperately to maintain a shaky toehold long enough to make your pitch. What did the sales manual say you should do in this situation? Maybe you’ll turn things around and make the sale; most of the time you won’t. Thankfully, there is a better way to sell: self-marketing. Frank J. Rumbauskas Jr. spells out how to showcase yourself as an expert in your field, so that prospects call you and you just take their orders. Even though some of the book’s suggestions seem impractical or costly (and the title seems unnecessarily uncouth), the author’s ideas sure beat cold calling, elevator pitches and other pushy rigmarole. getAbstract gladly recommends this upbeat sales manual.

Summary

Great salespeople know that selling is a terrible way to rack up a sale. It wastes time, converts prospects to skeptics and diminishes your reputation. This may sound crazy, but consider this example: To eat a nice shrimp dinner, do you go to New Orleans, charter a shrimp boat, sail the Gulf of Mexico, catch a load of shrimp, return to port, then de-vein and prepare the shrimp for dinner? Isn’t it easier to go to your nearest seafood restaurant and order a shrimp dinner? Salespeople mistakenly use cold calling – the sales equivalent of the shrimp boat approach – to get business. This antique method creates an us-versus-them mentality, putting you in opposition to your prospects and turning them off. You can’t sell to anyone if they are “us” and you are “them.”

Get with the times and turn the tables; create an environment where prospects contact you because they want to buy what you are selling. Such prospects are both qualified (they called you) and motivated to buy (they called you). Your overachieving sales colleagues surely use this simple sales method to close business, so why haven’t they told you their little sales secret? Because sharing their trade secrets with you...

About the Author

Frank J. Rumbauskas Jr. is an author, sales coach and marketing consultant.

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