On Those Who Say You Can No Longer Succeed in Sales

You don’t want to take advice about how to be fit from someone who is not fit. If what they believed was working, they’d be fit. There are a lot of people who can tell you what to do to be fit and healthy—even though they are not these things themselves.

There are even more people who will tell you about money without having any themselves. They too will tell you what you need to do to increase your income and grow your wealth, having never done so themselves. The people who share this advice will share a certain incongruity, their actions will be in stark contrast to their words.

There is (still) a growing cottage industry of sales experts who can tell you how difficult sales is. They’ll tell you that there is no way you can create enough value as a salesperson to be relevant, how buyers have all the power, how outside sales is dead, and how social selling is the only way to create opportunities. They’ll go on about how you can’t win anymore, and how only their product or service can help you.

What you are hearing from these voices is their own experience. They believe sales is too difficult because they found it difficult. They found it difficult to create value, and therefore, difficult to create a preference. In their experience, buyers have more power than sellers, and because they lack the deep chops to sell as a peer, you must also lack that ability.

You will always hear that cold calling is dead from those who cannot successfully use the telephone to schedule an appointment with their dream client. You will hear from those who can’t win that you also can’t win, and that because they aren’t a peer, neither are you. Their truth is not a universal truth. They only perceive it as a universal truth because it is easier for some to believe that external events are responsible for their poor results than to own up those results.

You should not take advice from people who preach the death of sales unless you are also willing to follow their example. To follow their example would be to leave sales and start a business to support other people who are failing in sales with an offering that promises them better results without having to do the work necessary to sell effectively today.