Educate Yourself-PI Sales Academy Blog/Quiz #16
Nobody who plays an instrument can argue that lessons, whether informal or professional, were important in learning how to play. Architects learn proper drafting techniques in trade school. Athletes not only have coaches but personal instructors. Post graduate degrees help professionals achieve a higher level and better pay grade. Learning a craft allows a person to be the best version of themselves professionally. Agreed? Question: Where do startup piano sales people get their education? Answer: Usually from older piano sales professionals who have been selling life long. Is this a good source of sales advice in this new selling landscape and environment? Rarely.
The problem the piano industry has to solve playing on today’s field is that the volume of possible selling relationships don’t start in the gallery. They start online where today’s traffic resides. Talking people with piano interest out of cyberspace and onto the showroom floor is a new skill as of this writing which has no history from which to learn. We are essentially neophytes trying to figure out how to live in this new normal, and I hate to say it but the old piano sales pros who were good at selling in yesteryear are struggling to sell at the same level of efficiency in our new normal. How does this tie into the title of this writing, “Educate Yourself”? More than most would imagine. You may think, if all the old sales books are written in the “days gone by” (which are irrelevant), that today their value is almost nil. What value can the available education possibly have in today’s world? A lot… follow my thought process in the next paragraph.
My advice to all sales professionals is simply this: although the world has changed, thus the tools in our toolbox, sales fundamentals are NEVER obsolete. Whether you are calling, texting, engaging on a social platform, or mailing, the progression of things you must execute to successfully accomplish the sale of a luxury item stand true. You sell your company, you sell yourself as the best possible concierge, you sell the opportunity, and then you perform the discovery or fact finding after which you sell your recommendation and subsequently the brand. What sales professionals struggle with mightily is the temptation to get out of sequence which then sabotages the execution of instilling confidence before you sell the product. What happens? The sales pro starts selling out of sequence and shoots themselves in the foot by being impatient. Don’t get me wrong, it can all be done in one engagement if it is on the floor, but talking people onto the floor most often must happen in increments.
And how does this tie into education? Education is all about building a repeatable and refinable process. Music education has fundamentals like the circle of 5ths that you build on, post graduate studies build on the back of the traditional previously taken studies, athletic development is all about regiment and the best businesses ever built had protocol at the top of their list of priorities. This leads me to my next question: If you haven’t studied sales techniques and psychology, how can you possibly know that your personal process is one fundamentally sound enough to build on to become a top performer? Answer: You don’t.
Most sales people absorb, tweak to fit their personal comfort level and wing it. Some industries are further ahead in sales training and sales education relative to their industry and needs; the piano industry isn’t one of them. It’s not the industry’s fault that the landscape in which we sell pianos today is so different from the days of the mall stores and floor traffic. “Back in the day” all it took to make good money selling pianos was a likable personality and some good demo skills.
Those days are gone and we are now learning how to sell to people we meet online instead of on the gallery floor. Talking people onto the showroom is a skill that is now so much more important, it’s one that we are figuring out as the new world we live in becomes more and more social and spends increasing amounts of its time in cyberspace. Because of this new landscape, not only do the modern day sales associates need to increase their tech skills but they also need to inject old school people skills into the mix, using a whole new set of tools in their toolbox. Self-educating becomes a must, a survival need and no longer a luxury.
There is no reputable school for piano sales people to attend and graduate from that will prepare them properly for a profitable existence in an “eat what you kill” environment vs. the retail/demo environment from the days of yore. The courses espoused and provided by the manufacturers are product-knowledge heavy and light as hell on actual sales fundamentals, prospecting and reeling in the fish. Steinway used to have a vibrant “in the trenches” program for the introduction and support of new sales associates but the two stellar sales specialists who conducted it have retired and the new thrust, per usual these days, is about product knowledge, not sales methods. This is a void we hope to fill with real substance for our clients of all manufacturer affiliations with this course.
There are several writers who have contributed impressively to the sales profession and allow me to share this: Selling fundamentals cross pollinate. Regardless of what you sell, reading, listening to podcasts and in general learning about sales, is valuable for all sales professionals.
Inarguably, Zig Ziglar and Dale Carnegie are on the Mount Rushmore of sales fundamental framers. Past them, an argument can be made for a plethora of sales thinkers, which is a great reason to read and study aggressively to find those that speak best to you personally. Some writers such as Charles Drucker are/were great business thinkers whose writings bled over into sales and marketing in a powerful way. Seth Godin is a great advertisement thinker whose writings can expand a person’s sales understanding. Even though Malcom Gladwell is more of a social writer, his content is very helpful in helping sales individuals put the world, peoples’ activities and proclivities into context; he is entertaining and brilliant. One of my personal favorite books is “The Secrets of Question Based Selling” by Thomas Freese.
On our website https://prospectsint.com there is a drop down menu that has two categories – “Sales Support” and “PI Sales Academy.” We are committed to sales support and the psychology of the sale. These can be very helpful blogs and chapters to spend your time on if you wish to be exposed to some in-depth sales oriented thoughts. We are the “thought leader” of piano sales in today’s industry.
The point of this article is not for me to recommend particular books, topics or writings. It is to promote the value of reading and studying your craft. The secret is to be honest with yourself and identify what you do and don’t know. The purpose of education is to expand your knowledge and hopefully your performance in the field of your choosing. The “best of the best” challenge themselves. Top performers don’t settle for mediocrity.
I’ll close with a story about challenging myself because I knew what I didn’t know: In 2014 after a year of a successful strategic partnership with our then soon-to-be partner’s company Rajoba Media, I started seriously considering going into lead generation as my main business focus. I would be leaving 3 decades of direct mail intact but no longer growing. Joey Bouza was the owner of Rajoba and we hired him to build the digital sales funnels for the events we were still performing a lot of targeted direct mail for. The success of the combination of the mail and digital marketing allowed me to see the future. My career path was to take a huge direction shift into an arena I knew only a little about… what I had absorbed from conversations with Joey. What did I do? I went to the largest local book store looking for reading material with which to educate myself about lead generation. I found that there was only one book in the entire business, sales and marketing areas with “lead generation” in the title! This told me two things: one, that it was a new and rarely written about subject, and that we were way ahead of the curve. I did find a very thorough explanation of where the development of the medium was at and bought the only book in the entire store on the subject… wait for it… “Lead Generation for Dummies.” If you are familiar with the series, it is actually well managed and written by some of the best specialists on each topic.
I started reading voraciously and entered my next meeting with Joey, throwing around some vernacular from his world and have not since ceased to learn about the advancements in lead gen and digital marketing daily. I continued to read new books as they finally started coming out and learned who the leaders in the lead gen world were. I read more and more about social media as it squeezed “pay power click” (ppc) into the background. I subscribe to a great blog entitled ADOTAT with Pesach Lattin. I get one every day. I am, at this writing, a sixty-six year old CEO of a digital marketing company and I gained my partner’s respect by not being afraid to get outside the box and learn new things. “Knowledge is Power”, you’ve heard it said. I have proof of it and in some areas I’m confident that so do you.
So doesn’t it make sense to read, listen to podcasts, and look for blogs that can help you expand your thinking and creativity about the craft you have chosen? I mean, if you’re going to make a commitment to do something everyday for a living, why not endeavor to do it to the best of your ability? Why not study and take a creative mindset toward that which you do? These are all rhetorical questions naturally, but questions that if you don’t ask yourself will hold you back from becoming the best version of your sales self. Come on, get your hands dirty and challenge your mind by exposing yourself to new thinking and methods. It really makes selling more fun in the long run!
Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune – Jim Rohn
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Jack is a thirty year marketing and sales veteran with an insatiable appetite for contributing to the sales success of others. After leaving Cox communications in the late eighties Jack has serviced clients such as: Goodyear, Allstate, Verizon Wireless, Steinway & Sons, and numerous independent businesses. His knack for creating targeted strategies has endeared him to clients who he has been privileged to service in many instances for over two decades.
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