12 Sales Myths: Selling to Smart People With Integrity
“Anyone who works in sales, or has been sold to, needs to read this book. Cameron Embers merges effectiveness with integrity, delivering high-power sales performance tactics that will be a breath of fresh air for both salespeople and their customers.”
– Kevin Harrington, Original shark from ABC’s Shark Tank, Inventor of the Infomercial, Over $6 Billion in Sales
“Cameron Embers turns conventional sales wisdom on its head and helps you reframe the entire process. The result is better clients, more profits, less burnout, and greater satisfaction for everyone.”
– J.J. Hebert, USA Today bestselling author
Better clients = a better life. Better clients understand the value of your work, pay faster, and are enjoyable to work with. But how do you get them?
It’s easy to sell to bad clients. All you have to do is lower your standards enough to match what they want. The best clients in the world are skilled, smart, and decisive. They’re looking for confident A-players who can bring them actual value. And they’re looking for people who don’t behave how most business owners and salespeople think they should.
Twelve myths stand between you and better clients.
Purchase 12 Sales Myths
Book Excerpts
- From Prologue
Many low-ticket, low-quality clients select their vendors for the wrong reasons. They may select you because they believe that they’ve gotten the lowest price possible, or because they believe that they can bully and control you. They may have unrealistically high expectations and fanciful ideas of how business works, and expect you to dance to their unrealistic whims. When you get better clients, you get a better life. Most high-ticket clients are healthy, pleasant to work with, and realistic.
This book will show you strategies that can help you attract those high-ticket, healthy clients. Throughout the book, we’ll refer to these as “smart people”. Intelligence, of course, is not all we’re looking for. Smart people are people who make smart decisions—they may not necessarily be born with a high IQ, but they know how to make smart decisions. They are committed to smart behavior. They have learned patterns of health and happiness that guide them throughout their lives. As a result, they are responsible and get results.
These patterns of behavior mean that “smart” people are often handed a great deal of influence, power, money, and connections. If you’re looking for influence, power, money, and connections—hook up with as many smart people as you can! If you’re ready for flip-the-script, outside-of-the-box sales tactics that are nuanced enough to work with the people who REALLY make things happen, this book is for you. If you apply the principles within, you’ll be able to gain a far more fulfilling, healthier life. And you’ll make a hell of a lot more sales! Let’s get started.
- From Myth #1: People Don’t Want to Buy
One of the most pervasive myths about sales is that people don’t want to buy. They do. They want to buy products that they believe will help them solve their problems or achieve their goals. We desperately want to solve our problems and reach our dreams. But, we all have deep, dark fears that get in the way. So, why wouldn’t we desperately want someone to help us overcome those fears? We want to be sold.
When you sell things that help people achieve their goals, all you have to do is help them get out of their own way. At my company, we now call it “giving customers the lightsaber”. In the famous first Star Wars movie, Luke Skywalker is tasked with a critical mission—to destroy the Death Star. Luke trains as a Jedi and learns to use the Force. His mission is important, difficult, risky, and daunting. Along the way, Luke meets the wise old sage, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Obi-Wan brings Luke wisdom and confidence, and helps Luke chart a path to reach his goal. He also gives Luke a valuable tool: his lightsaber. Ultimately, the lightsaber becomes one of the key components that helps Luke reach victory. It is certainly not the only tool he uses, but it is important—and it is especially important because it is given with strategy, wisdom, and guidance.
Smart clients, in my experience, feel a lot like Luke Skywalker. They understand their mission and its gravity. They understand the risk, they understand their limitations, and they understand that they need help. This is the most powerful hook you have to connect with your client—their mission. However, many salespeople still believe that the best way to make a sale is to talk up all the positive benefits of their product or their company.
How many times have you heard some version of this sales pitch? “Our company is an award-winning company that features a multifaceted team with a cumulative three thousand years of experience. Our headquarters is in one of the most prestigious parts of the world, we have cars on the Autobahn, and offices all around the globe. We have endless access to important resources, our clients include important big companies like Apple and Google, and our product has been triple-certified and featured in Super Prestigious Magazine. As for our features list…”
This pitch can drone on and on. This is ultimately just white noise. This kind of blathering is akin to a peacock showing his feathers, or the “Me Monster” that comedian Brian Regan talks about in his comedy specials. In Brian’s famous special, “I Walked on the Moon”, he talks about how annoying a “Me Monster” is at a dinner party. The Me Monster is a person who spends all their time talking about themselves. Every time someone else at the party talks, the Me Monster has to trump them. It’s as if he believes that the dialogue itself is a contest, and he is determined to win the contest at all costs.
Many salespeople treat their sales pitches exactly like this. They are convinced that if they can just show their prospect how impressive their company is, the prospect will buy. When they believe it’s the best, they will buy it! The reality is that sales do not often go to the “best” product. They usually go to the salesperson that gains the most trust. When the prospect believes that the salesperson is here to solve their problem—and is competent to do so—they will buy.
I’ve been in many sales situations where my company was clearly the right choice. In these situations, you would have to be quite dense to think that another company was a better fit—yet that other ill-fitted company still got the gig. This usually happens because the other company had a personal connection with a key decision maker. Ultimately, we just want to know and be known. One of the best ways to help other people get to know us is by showing that we genuinely care about their problems, their goals, and their vision.
Many companies think that they are the Luke Skywalker of the story. They believe that if they can just show how equipped they are to defeat the Death Star, they will be chosen for the important mission. But our prospects should be the Luke Skywalker of the story. The vision that we focus on during sales should be our prospect’s goals. When we show our prospects that we truly understand their vision and we are excited with them about where they are trying to go, we begin to form a bond of trust. Then, we become Obi-Wan Kenobi, the guide that can help the hero on their journey. Then, our product becomes the lightsaber. It’s powerful, cool, exciting, and central to the story. However, it is ultimately just a tool to help the prospect to reach their goal.
Really, we are not selling the lightsaber at all. We are selling the destruction of the Death Star. It is a mistake to sell the product, because the product is relatively useless by itself. A lightsaber without a mission is good for turning on, waving around, and marveling at for a few moments, but it is not useful. It becomes useful when it has a purpose. Once we connect product to purpose, selling the lightsaber becomes natural.
It’s a myth that people don’t want to be sold. We all want to be sold very badly. We want someone to convince us that we can destroy the Death Star, and we want someone to give us the lightsaber, along with the wisdom and plan that we need.
- From: Myth #4: Sales is Unethical
Sales is ethical when we are solution-oriented. Being solution-oriented means only selling products that actually solve the prospect’s problem. Sales immediately becomes unethical when you sell a product that does not meet the person’s expressed need. I say “expressed” need because we can only help them based on their understanding of the world, and ours. It is possible that they are accidentally buying (and you are selling) the wrong solution. But it is important to know your product, get to know your prospect, and ask diligent questions to ensure the best match possible.
A salesperson with great conviction about their product is the ultimate secret weapon for a company looking to make massive customer acquisitions. Ultimately, most salespeople aren’t sleazy deep down in their heart. Because their hearts are usually in the right place, if they act sleazy, it starts to weigh on their soul. When you know that you’re selling the wrong product to the wrong person, your heart will tell you. And you won’t be able to last long without losing your soul or quitting your job.
- From: Myth #7: You Have to Sell at a Fair Price
A logo’s value isn’t just based on how good it is and how fast it can go to market. It’s also based on risk.
I met with a business owner who was looking for a new logo. She was convinced that she just needed something simple and it wasn’t a big deal (AKA—she wanted it cheap). I asked her where the logo would be shown. She began to describe many different locations—the website, mailers, letterhead, business cards, TV screens, sales pitches, and more. I then asked how much revenue her business generated, and the figures were average for a small business—in the millions of dollars annually. As we went through the list of different places that the logo would touch, and how it would drive and express the brand, she began to see the value. She also began to get worried. If they were to deploy a logo that was unmemorable, offensive, or disliked by the public, it could spell disaster for the company.
In fact, many companies have rebranded with catastrophic results. The clothing store Gap experienced a dramatic and expensive rebranding failure. The original Gap logo had been in place for two decades, and during the busy Christmas season in 2010, Gap suddenly unveiled its new logo. Believing they suffered from “brand fatigue”, Gap decided it was time for a change. The old logo consisted of the G, A, and P letters in a classy white serif font on a navy blue square. It was a timeless logo. Unfortunately, the new logo looked like something that had been designed in WordArt. It was made up of the word “Gap” in front of a blue gradient square, fading diagonally from light to dark blue. The design community exploded, mocking the new logo. Customers and designers alike hated the new direction. Just six days after releasing the new logo, Gap reverted to its old one and responded positively to the online criticism. However, the entire affair was estimated to have cost the company $100 million dollars.
When there’s a possibility of losing $100 million dollars, suddenly a $500,000 logo designed by an expert who has launched other large-scale brands seems like a bargain. For this reason, Chris explained, a company’s purchase of a logo is proportionate to their amount of risk. What he means is that both the value and risk are considered when assessing how much to spend. A startup cupcake company with $0 profit has no risk in getting their logo wrong. A bad logo may have a small effect on their launch, but they don’t have a reputation yet. Proportionate to the level of actual profit that is in their ecosystem, it may only make sense for them to spend a few hundred dollars on a logo.
On the other hand, a multimillion, billion or trillion dollar company with many shareholders has an enormous amount of risk in changing its logo. So, it makes sense for them to give the job to the most established, safest expert possible, with the best track record. Even if this person only does the minimum to refresh their look and feel, at least they made this decision from an educated place.
Take the example of the Xiaomi logo, which cost $300 million to redesign. Xiaomi was a Chinese smartphone company that wanted a fresh aesthetic. Their old logo was an orange square with two Chinese letters in it. Their new logo was exactly the same–with a more rounded bubble shape. All the designer really did was round off the edges. Still, the CEO, Lei Jun, was happy.
“Finally, a design moved us,” said Lei, referring to the new slightly modified version of the logo.
“I think Boss Lei got scammed”, one Weibo user commented, receiving more than 4,000 likes.
But, this border radius change may have been the absolute most logical decision to make. And certainly the company felt that it was a good deal, and they did not lose revenue. So, it may have had value.
- From: Myth #7: You Have to Sell at a Fair Price
Abundance gives us the space to think about what kind of world we want to create Rabbi Manis Friedman explains that it is in abundance that we can truly begin to learn about stewardship. Until we have more than we need we are only worried about what we do not have. But once we have abundance, we have to look up and answer the question, what kind of world do I want to create?
So, it is actually our responsibility to charge for a premium product! Especially if we are working with smart people, we want to sell the premium model. We want to do this so that we can take care of the people who work for us. We want to do this so that we can be ethical in the way we manufacture the product. We want to do this so that we can take care of our families. We want to do this so that we can be ready for an economic recession. And we want to do this so that we can protect other people and create a good world with the resources that we have.
So, drop the guilt and charge a premium amount based on the client’s value perception. Of course, make sure that the product is a great fit and a genuine need. This will mean that the value will by necessity be very high, because the prospect needs the product! The idea that profit is greedy and that we should only charge fair market prices has no basis in reality. Again, pricing structures are purely a function of agreed value between the buyer and seller. I’d like to replace the general concept of charging fair prices – there is no such thing – with the concept of making sure that your prospect is making a responsible financial decision.
