The Golden Rule of Selling Like a Brilliant Sales Professional

By Brian Tracy

 June 13th, 2012

To improve your sales performance and become a better sales professional, adopt the Golden Rule mentality. The Golden Rule says to, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It also says, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The Golden Rule mentality in sales, says simply, “Sell unto others as you would have them sell unto you.”

The Golden Rule

What does this mean? Aren’t there all kinds of different personalities that require different sales performance techniques? Well, yes and no. Practicing the golden rule in selling simply means that you sell to other people the way you would like to be sold to. The successful sales professional uses the golden rule to sell with the same honesty, integrity, understanding, empathy and thoughtfulness that they would like someone else to use in selling to them.

Become a Brilliant Sales Professional by Seeking to Understand

In order to improve your sales performance, you must first seek to understand the customer. If you would like a sales professional to take the time to thoroughly understand you and your situation before making a recommendation, you practice the same thing with your customers. If you would like a sales professional to give you honest information and to help you make an intelligent buying decision, you practice the same with your customer. If you would like a sales professional to be thoroughly knowledgeable about the strengths or weaknesses of his or her product or service, and that of his or her competitors, then you do the same with your product or service and your competitors.

Improve Your Sales Performance by “Caring”

Perhaps the most important part of golden rule selling is the emotional component embraced in the word, “caring.” A top sales professional will care about their customers. They care about themselves, their companies, their products and services, and they really care about helping their customers to make good buying decisions. If you think about the very best sales professional you know, you will recognize that they are caring individuals who maintain a high level of sales performance simply because they “care”.

They Don’t care How Much You Know

If you think about your very best customers, you will recall that these are invariably people you care about, and who care about you. When you think about the people you buy from, you will recall that they seem to care about you more than the average. In every part of your business life, you will find that the significant people all have the denominator of caring as part of their character and their personalities.

Differentiate Yourself from Your Competitors

A top sales professional, positions themselves as consultants, sees themselves as a resource for their clients. They see themselves and carry themselves as advisors, mentors and friends. They become emotionally involved in their transactions and they are generally concerned that their product or service be the ideal solution to the real needs of the prospects they are dealing with. They differentiate themselves from their competitors by being more concerned with helping their prospects than with selling their products or services. Their customers often feel that the sales professional cares more about them than they care about making a sale. And it’s true.

I hope you enjoyed this article on improving your sales performance using the golden rule of selling. If you are a sales professional, please feel free to share your thoughts and comment below!

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The Key To Long-Term Success

By: Brian Tracy

Successful people have been studied in depth for more than 100 years. They have been interviewed extensively to determine what it is they do and how they think that enables them to accomplish so much more than the average person.

In this Newsletter, you learn the most important single factor of long-term success and how you can build it into your personality and your attitude. You learn how to virtually guarantee yourself a great future.

The Harvard Discovery on Success 
In 1970, sociologist Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University wrote a book entitled The Unheavenly City. He described one of the most profound studies on success and priority setting ever conducted.

Banfield's goal was to find out how and why some people became financially independent during the course of their working lifetimes. He started off convinced that the answer to this question would be found in factors such as family background, education, intelligence, influential contacts, or some other concrete factor. What he finally discovered was that the major reason for success in life was a particular attitude of mind.

Develop Long Time Perspective
Banfield called this attitude "long time perspective." He said that men and women who were the most successful in life and the most likely to move up economically were those who took the future into consideration with every decision they made in the present. He found that the longer the period of time a person took into consideration while planning and acting, the more likely it was that he would achieve greatly during his career.

For example, one of the reasons your family doctor is among the most respected people in America is because he or she has invested many years of hard work and study to finally earn the right to practice medicine. After university courses, internship, residency and practical training, a doctor may be more than 30 years old before he or she is capable of earning a good living. But from that point onward, these men and women are some of the most respected and most successful professional people in any society. They had long time perspectives.

Measure the Potential Future Impact
The key to success in setting priorities is having a long time perspective. You can tell how important something is today by measuring its potential future impact on your life.

For example, if you come home from work at night and choose to play with your children or spend time with your spouse, rather than watch TV or read the paper, you have a long time perspective. You know that investing time in the health and happiness of your children and your spouse is a very valuable, high-priority use of time. The potential future impact of quality time with your family is very high.

If you take additional courses in the evening to upgrade your skills and make yourself more valuable to your employer, you're acting with a long time perspective. Learning something practical and useful can have a long-term effect on your career.

Practice Delayed Gratification
Economists say that the inability to delay gratification-that is, the natural tendency of individuals to spend everything they earn plus a little bit more, and the mind-set of doing what is fun, easy and enjoyable-is the primary cause of economic and personal failure in life. On the other hand, disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem and personal satisfaction.

The long term comes soon enough, and every sacrifice that you make today will be rewarded with compound interest in the great future that lies ahead for you.

Action Exercises
Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, think long-term. Sit down today and write out a description of your ideal life ten and twenty years into the future. This automatically develops longer-time perspective.

Second, look at everything you do in terms of its long-term potential impact on your life. Do more things that have greater long-term value to you.

Third, develop the habit of delaying gratification in small things, small expenditures, small pleasures, so that you can enjoy greater rewards and greater satisfaction in the future.

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