T he Ph il oso ph y of Se ll ing

T i me T e st e d Sa l es Pr in c ip l es T h at Wo rk For
E v er yo n e

B y J os ep h Y ur ki n

1
 T he Ph il oso ph y of Se ll ing

T i me T e st e d Sa l es Pr in c ip l es T h at Wo rk For
E v er yo n e.

B y J os ep h Y ur ki n

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C opy ri gh t 2 00 9 by Jo se ph Yu rk in
P ub lis hed by N ew Hor izo n Pub lis hin g Inc .
I n Boc a R ato n, Fl ori da

A l l r i g ht s r e s e r ve d . N o p o r t io n o f t h i s p ubl i c a t io n
m a y b e r e pr o d u c ed , st o r e d in a r e t r i ev a l s y s t e m o r
t r a n s mi t t ed , e l ec t r on i c a l ly f or t h e p u r po s e o f
r e d i s tr i b ut i o n w it h ou t w r i tt e n p e r m i ss i o n f r o m t he
p u b l i sh e r .

I S B N 97 8 - 0- 5 7 8 - 01 3 9 8- 5

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 T abl e of Co nt en ts

Part I M y O wn B e g i n ni n g s Pa g e 7

Part II T he T ele p h o n e Pa g e 2 3

P a r t I II C ul t i v at i n g W i l l Po w e r P a ge 33

Part IV T he M ech a n i c s o f a G o od Da y Pa g e 4 5

Part V T he E l em e n t s of Pe r s u a si o n Pa g e 54

P a r t VI O n B e i ng P e r si s t en t Pa g e 63

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 I ntr od uc tio n

This book is designed to convey to you, the aspiring

salesman and seasoned professional alike, that there is a
specific psychology involved in all selling transactions.
Whether you are selling widgets, complex
telecommunication systems or magazine subscriptions, all
sales transactions contain certain selling moves that are not
necessarily industry specific. This means that you can take
the following principles, from this book, and then customize
them to your own particular field.

When it comes right down to it, selling is hard work. The

highest paid people in this life are all, in fact, salespeople. It
has always been this way and it will continue to be this way
as long as businesses continue to exist, Plain and simple,
successful selling takes “guts”, the guts to wake up every
morning knowing that you are unemployed until you
transact your first sale. Knowing that every day, you wake
up and must start all over again, from ground zero, in order
to make the kind of money that you desire. Yes, it is tough.
Yes, at times, it may seem that there should be an easier way
to make a living and that starting all over again, everyday,
feels like an endless, cyclical, “grind” that never lets up.

The good news, though, is that you will also ascend to

heights of economic status that few people will ever realize
if you can learn to endure this process. You will also learn
that unless you are selling, and that you don’t just happen to
be moonlighting as a lawyer or surgeon, then you should
never really expect to make more than $8.00 to $10.00 an
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hour anyway. So, if you are the ambitious type and you just
happen to desire the finer things in life then pursuing a
career in sales, armed with the proper skill sets, just might be
your only salvation from plodding through an average
existence.

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 Chapter One

My Beginnings

I was born of a lower middle class family in Union City,

New Jersey in 1960. My parents were very strict, hard
working people whom had little tolerance for excuses as to
why something did not get done. I remember, as a little boy,
responding to my mother’s demands to perform my daily
chores by replying to her, “I’ll try, Mom.” She would
immediately respond to my protest by declaring, “You don’t
try anything in life. You just do it.” There was no middle
point to anything with her. Maybe it was her Italian back
round. She was right, though, when you think about it. When
was the last time that anyone ever actually did what they said
they would “try” to do? The answer is . . . they usually
didn’t.

Hence, it became engrained into my thinking from a very

early age that “trying” to do something had an extremely
limited value. I simply learned to execute my job and
whatever I had to go through (as long as it was fair & honest)
to get the job done was not as important as the end result
itself. This indoctrination to life may seem harsh, yet it
would serve me well in years to come.

I began working, commercially, at the age of thirteen by

pumping gas (during the 1973 gas shortage) for $2.50 cents
an hour for 10 hours a day. I lied about my age and told them
that I was sixteen just so I could get the job. The job was
tough as I was the only person working my shifts and, add to
that the fact that there were no self pump lanes in those days
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which meant that I had to manually pump thousands of
gallons of gasoline, a day, without ever being a penny short
at the register by day’s end. I worked jobs on and
off like that for years - dead end jobs that would barely give
me enough money to buy my own food for a week much less
afford me the opportunity to save and get ahead in life. I had
a couple of things going for me though. One, I was a hard
worker. And, two, I was ambitious which translated to my
always doing more on the job than I was paid for. This mind
set, alone, is what always kept doors open for me.

Eventually, I concluded that in order to get to the real money

that I would have to transcend the hourly wage concept and
start leveraging my time in a profession that paid more. I
didn’t particularly want to invest the time (nor did I feel that
I had the skill) to become a Doctor or a lawyer. Commercial
trades or specialized placement careers appealed to me even
that much less. What jobs, in general, represented to me was
a finite existence that I could never transcend. The mere
thought of this repulsed me. I finally concluded that getting a
job in sales would, at least, have no ceiling attached to it.

My first sales job consisted of selling memberships at a local

health club when I was around the age of twenty-three.
Although I don’t remember having possessed any special
skill or training, I somehow managed to do fairly well at it. I
can vaguely remember taking the new prospects on guided
tours of the club, then sitting them in a closing room and
then persuade them to the point of signing the membership
contract on the dotted line. I stayed at the job for a year and a
half but, it too, had a dead end to it as the new management
would eventually flood the floor with too many sales reps in
order to get more company sales volume at the expense of
the individual.

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So, a year and a half later there I was again, unemployed,
looking for a way to make ends meet. What saved me, more
than anything else, was that I was never afraid to read and
learn how I could improve my own skills. This fundamental
discipline (reading) seems to be lacking not just with the
general public but, more specifically, with sales
professionals whose entire existence depends upon their
ability to sell day in and day out. This sad situation would be
analogous to a professional football team not wanting to
practice anymore because they felt that they were beyond
the need to do so. Such a scenario would be disastrous to any
team, yet there are salesmen whom consider themselves
professionals who have not read a single book on selling or
self development since they have graduated high school.

At any rate, the more I read and learned about selling the
more I began to realize that the profession of sales, when
properly understood, is actually an advanced study in
psychology and self development. Moreover, the pursuit of a
successful sales career requires that the aspirant to take an
intrinsic look at him or herself and make the proper changes
in attitude and personality in order to effectively transact
with other people in the environment. In short, the
profession of sales forces a person to grow as an individual -
both in character and people skills.

One thing that I learned about successful sales people is that

they are very low key yet highly alert and sensitive to the
person whom they are talking to. There seems to be a
general fallacy that sales people are supposed to have this
tremendous “gift for gab” or
that sales people are simply born with a more outgoing
personality than other people. Such assertions, in my
opinion, are utterly false. Top sales professionals, like any
other professional, are cultivated and developed over time.
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Moreover, they are excellent listeners whom exercise
tremendous self restraint in order to let the other person
voice their own opinions within the crucibles of intense
selling situations. You can probably attest to this statement,
yourself, as I’m sure that you have been annoyed, in the past,
by some incessant telemarketer who cold called you on the
phone and then wouldn’t let you get a word in on the
conversation. Not a very appealing offer, is it?

One thing, though, that I learned very quickly was that the
top sales professionals seemed to align themselves with
careers that allowed them to exercise the inborn talents that
they were born with. As for myself, I seemed to have a
predisposition for metaphysical concepts with a secondary
strong point in the area of proper language diction. In other
words, I came to realize that I was better suited to sell a
product or service that was intangible verses trying to
present something that was more “concrete.” This is a very
important point. There are sales reps out there whom are
trying to sell vacuum cleaners when they might very well be
better off trying to push educational programs or a product
or service that is a little more abstract.

Mental stamina is an absolutely vital component to the sales

professional since sales has a lot more to do with tolerating
rejection than it does with actually confirming deals. This
capacity, alone, is what separates the average working class
of people, from the select few whom actually “make it”.
Mental stamina implies that one continues to press on, with
vitality, after having gone through the entire no’s”. This is
real faith. It seems to me, though, that there are a number of
people, whom profess to have faith, who are still not willing
to get out there, where the bullets are flying, and forge sales.
I believe that real faith requires us to keep pressing on, even
when there are no immediate signs of anything positive
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happening, and to maintaining a positive expected outcome.

By my mid thirties, I decided that I would be well suited to

motivate people to become more successful with their own
lives. Hence, I started to deploy my energies to becoming a
motivational speaker and trainer. The initial process of
becoming a professional speaker was not as easy as I thought
it would be for a number of reasons. For one thing, just
because I believed that I was a great motivator didn’t mean
that the rest of the world was supposed to automatically
agree with me. Hence, my first step (on the rung of a
seemingly endless ladder) of selling myself to corporate
America would begin.

I soon learned that trying to sell sales training programs to

the decision makers of major corporations was about as
much fun as trying to sell American flags in downtown
Bagdad. These guys (and sometimes gals) were seasoned
sales reps whom had little tolerance for any sales fluff or
“puffery” when being presented to. They were tough people
namely because they, themselves, were top sales
professionals whom had endured years of hard selling in
order to reach the top levels within their own organizations.
For one thing, the vice president of a major selling
organization had to have, at one time, been the top
salesperson to get to second in position within their
company. These people could look right through you and tell
whether you knew what you were talking about or if you
were simply making things up as you went along. If the
latter suspicion were true, you would be stopped dead in
your tracks and the interview would be politely, but sternly,
terminated into an abrupt exit.

I learned, the hard way, on more than one occasion that you
don’t get a second chance with these people so you had
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better go in with all you had, the first time, or else the
doorway back into that organization would be permanently
barred shut. It would suffice to say that my first two and a
half years in selling seminars to major business corporations
in South Florida were brutally tough yet successful all the
same. The first year was especially tough because I did not
yet possess the credibility that major corporations were
looking for in a sales trainer. So, what is a person to do? You
have the talent yet you don’t have the experience that people
seem to want from you. The answer is that you keep on
trying until a door opens for you. There is an old saying that
says “Work hard and unseen forces will come to your aid.”
Well, I did just that and one day, a door finally opened for
me.

It was a late Friday afternoon sometime during the summer

in 1998. It was hot, humid, and nothing seemed to be going
right that day. I was having no luck getting through to key
decision makers, on the phone, and every office that I
walked in on politely informed
me that they did not welcome solicitors. What was I to do?
Thoughts began to flood my mind. Ideas that maybe I had
chosen the wrong profession. The tendency to look back
began to tighten its vice like grip around my neck precisely
at this moment. The urge to run and retreat into a salaried
labor position began working its way into my head. That
afternoon, years ago, could have been my breaking point.
Actually, I felt like a boxer who was “out on his feet’ yet still
managed to remain standing.

I decided to throw one more punch. Perhaps it was my

mother’s voice, in my head again, reiterating to me that
merely “trying” was not enough. I remember walking into
the regional sales office of Orkin Pest Control Corporation
on West Sunrise Boulevard in Broward County. I felt too
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close to being at the end of my own rope to be afraid, that
day, and I think that the district sales manager whom I met
sensed that in me. Pleading for an opportunity with a man of
this caliber, in a situation like this, would only be futile.
Somehow, I conveyed to this man that I would instill in his
own sales people the value of never giving up in the face of
rejection. This guy was able to see something in me and pick
up that I was “walking the walk” and not simply “talking the
talk.” After twenty minutes or so he concluded that it might
not be a bad idea to let an outsider do some of his training for
him as his own staff might just be getting tired of seeing the
same old face at his weekly sales meetings. We went over a
talking points outline and agreed upon a time and date for
me to speak at his next sales training meeting. I walked out
of his office that day on cloud nine, suddenly oblivious to all
of the mental hardships that I had to endure leading up to this
point. Here is the important message - There is a thin line
that distinguishes each day from being a winner or a failure.
Had I not taken that extra step, during my moment of
anguish, my opportunity with Orkin would not have
happened and I might have cashed it in right there.

The following eighteen months in the seminar business was

hallmarked by significant progress in spite of a lot of
difficulties. For one thing, I quickly learned that in order to
render a successful sales training session in corporate
America, you need a receptive audience. To get a receptive
audience, you had to have gone through tougher experiences
than the audience, whom you are speaking to, did. This
seemed to be the only way that you could command their
respect. Otherwise, these seasoned pros would consume
you, alive, right on their own company site. I also learned
that more than half the battle of rendering sales training was
just being able to get an appointment with the decision
maker. This was typically done on the phone during a
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process of what is known as a “cold call.”

Important decision makers, of any corporation, are very

busy people with attention spans that range anywhere from
seven to maybe twenty seconds when dealing with new
solicitors. If you, the caller, cannot arrest the decision
maker’s attention, within the first 3-5 seconds of the call,
they will shut you down without mercy and you will have
absolutely zero chance of booking an appointment with
them This critical part of the sales cycle that was a skill that I
was ultimately able to perfect to the point where I could call
an any major executive of a Fortune 2500 company and
book an appointment with them or at least grab their
attention long enough to get my point across. The process
was not easy by any means. The learning curve in corporate
sales is imbued with so many dead bodies that if they were
piled on top of one another they would block out the sun’s
rays from ever reaching the earth.

Since I had already made up my mind that I was not going to

be another “statistic” in the world of corporate selling, I
simply decided to analyze every proponent of the sales
process, break those proponents down to their key
constituents, and then refine each proponent to perfection.
And, that’s exactly what I did. Studying the techniques of
proper cold calling became as mandatory for me as
Lombardo’s players, in his day, were required to perfect
every move of the famous Packer Sweep. Everything had to
be executed with precise timing or the entire play would fail.
Likewise, on the phone, one misplaced word or a pause not
held long enough, would be as disastrous as a lineman
missing his blocking assignment on an NFL offensive
maneuver.

One thing that I always knew was that nobody was any
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better than I was once I made up my mind to do something.
There were certain people, of course, whom held higher
positions in life than I did. This never bothered me, though,
because I knew that my time would come if I worked hard
and would never quit.

After about a year of calling and presenting to major

businesses in South Florida, I started
to get in front of some important people. I ended up
performing seminars for Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi Cola and
Toshiba Corporations by my second year. And the funny
thing is that all of these opportunities, at one point, hung by
threads during the initial selling process. The difference that
separated me (often by a hairline fracture) from my
competition was that I wanted it more and I knew that I was
better than anybody else at my profession. Whether this was
actually true or not does not really matter. What did matter
though, and ultimately tipped the scales in my direction, was
that I believed in myself and that conviction went right
through people.

I would say that over the course of my ten year career as a

professional sales trainer that I have put on about 2,500
seminars to different companies. At the high point of my
career, I was putting on ‘10” two hour training sessions a
week or, “2” training classes a day, to two different
businesses in South Florida. The intensity level needed to
address this many people in a single week was staggering.
There were many days when I began to doubt whether or not
I was actually enjoying the entire process anymore.

By my third year in corporate sales I had perfected a cold

calling script that enabled me to completely corner the
market, in seminar training, within the South Florida area.
The call involved a seven point sequence of a phone script
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that was designed to rivet the decision maker’s attention,
during the first five seconds of the call, and then
immediately posture them into a serious consideration
mode. The following two years involved me teaching the
dynamics of this script to outbound sales reps, of major
companies, who’s living also depended on them positioning
themselves in front of decision makers to present their own
products and services. Some people were willing to learn
this skill while others sat and listened, impassively, waiting
for the corporate whistle to blow so they could bolt home.

The remaining seven years of my rendering corporate

training were hallmarked by periodic moments of sincere
appreciation by audience participants although most of these
participants attended my seminars only because it was
mandated by their bosses. Another words, they were there
because they had to be and not because they chose to be.
This was very frustrating for me because I really wanted to
help people become better. Eventually, though, I realized
that I could never want something for somebody more than
they wanted it for themselves. By the end of my seminar
career, training corporate executives became more of a
battle of wills, with the audience, instead of it being an
educational process designed to better the individual. Quite
often I would find myself debating with “know it alls” in the
audience, whom were at the peak of their mighty careers
making a whopping $400.00 a week. I started to dread the
entire process altogether.

The superior salesman is the aggregate sum of ambition and

empathy. That’s really about it. These are elements that you
are either born with or without. That’s just the way it goes.
Character is another thing. This is something that can be
developed through time. When we talk about ambition,
though, what we really mean is the burning desire to become
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greater than you already are. This is innate of the individual.
Empathy, too, is the same way. When we talk about empathy
we refer to the capacity to care about other people to the
same degree which you value yourself. This cannot be
learned. So now you have two primal elements - ambition
and empathy. They are essentially diametrically opposite yet
necessary to each other’s existence. If, for example, you
have an ambitious person who is non empathetic you will
essentially have a person who wants to “make it” at the
expense of others. Contrarily, an empathetic person, without
ambition, becomes another shoulder for a prospect to cry on.
The combination of these two elements, however, creates a
dynamic individual that want take no for an answer without
rubbing someone the wrong way!

Top sales professionals, whom are ambitious and

empathetic, are indeed a rare breed. You could even go as far
to say that they are not normal people. They, of course,
would take the latter sentence as a compliment. I agree.
Normal people will simply not endure the suffering that is
required to get to the top in any field. The thing about selling
is that you get killed a little bit, everyday. You wake up with
your ego intact and then you venture out to where the bullets
are flying and you take enough insults to put a dent in your
armor. Then, you wake up the next day and go through the
same thing all over again. One thing that I learned, though, is
that iron sharpens iron. What this means is that a tough
environment will make you even tougher – if it doesn’t kill
you first.

I have always believed that the path of least resistance leads

directly to failure. Dealing with difficult people forces you
to sharpen your own skills and, it increases your own
tolerance levels that are necessary if you are to survive the
“long haul” sales. It seems that too many people wish that
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their own circumstances were easier. This is a mistake.
Nothing worthwhile, in life, is ever easy for if this were so
then everyone would either be rich or successful. Going
through difficult experiences and/or surviving setbacks are
the very building blocks that prepare us for even greater
challenges in life. It’s like what General Norman
Schwarzkopf said to the reporter whom asked him what
gave him the strength to rise to the occasion during the Gulf
War. He responded, very matter of factly, by simply saying,
“Vietnam did.”

Character, therefore, can be built. It is not assigned to

anyone at birth. It’s the same way with fear. No person is
born fearless. One eventually learns to act in spite of fear
until the assignment is completed. This is not to be
misconstrued as saying that a person learns to become
fearless for this would be impossible. What I’m saying is
that when you perform a dreaded task enough times (like
cold calling, for example) you can eventually perfect it and
then the fear associated to the task will be less traumatic.
You still have to live with this emotion, though, because it
can not completely go away. It does, however, become more
manageable. If you think about it, every person is afraid of
something until they actually confront that one thing that
they fear the most and, then, the fear goes away - after the
fact.

To take it a step further, you could eventually conclude that

the single thing that you are most afraid of, in this life, is also
the very same thing that is holding your life back. This
concept can be applied to that one account that you are afraid
to call on or it could be a certain person whom you would
like to meet. Actually, when you break the process of getting
what you want down to the essential steps, you come up with
a two step solution to your dilemma. The first thing is to
18
know is exactly what it is that you want and, what you are
willing to give in order to attain it. Secondly, you have to
talk to the person who is capable of saying “yes” and whom
has his/her hand on the checkbook. Short of that, you are
simply wasting your time.

During the initial part of my career as a corporate trainer, I

quickly discovered that I could possess all the talent in the
world yet if people did not know that I existed then my
career would still amount to a zero sum game. So, I was
forced to get myself on the phone, in short order, so that I
could position myself in front of someone who would listen
to my story. When one starts out on this process, however,
the necessary phone skill requisites are not yet developed so
what happens is that the caller either gets shut down by the
gatekeeper of a corporation or you end up talking to
someone who is “nice” but has no authority, within a
company, to hire your services either. I spent a year of my
life talking to such people and I can only tell you that it was a
complete waste of time.

Subordinates, for example, are easier to talk to and they

usually have longer attention spans while on the phone.
Decision makers, on the other hand, are not as pleasant to
converse with and their attention spans range from 0-20
seconds. They do, however, have the power to say yes or no,
and, they have the capacity to pay you if they do decide to
use your services. A boss’s underling does not have the
power to say “yes” but he/she can still say “no” to you. This
is a very important point that every journeyman sales
professional should quickly come to terms with. The good
news about dealing with decision makers is that they are
easy to sell to and it does not take them long to deliberate on
the merits of your own argument. In fact, decision makers
can sometimes accept a proposal so quickly and, with so
19
little resistance that the salesman can’t believe it himself.

This type of scenario can be very threatening to the actual

sale because the sales professional typically expects a lot of
resistance before closing any deal. What often happens,
when a prospect agrees to purchase so quickly, is that the
sales person doesn’t really believe that the purchase is
“going down” so quickly and effortlessly. What happens
next is that the salesman keeps talking past the point of the
sale and may actually start annoying the prospect so that he
actually talks himself out of the sale. It is absolutely
imperative for sales people to understand that solid deals can
be closed in as little as 2-3 minutes. A good sale does not
have to be a protracted war of wills between the buyer and
the seller. In fact, most purchasers prefer to make the buying
process short and sweet so that they can get on with their
own lives.

I have sold securities over the phone and I can remember one
time I was talking to an accredited investor and after a few
quick pleasantries and a sentence or two of logic he calmly
replied, “I’ll take $10,000.00 dollars worth.” Just like that!
At first, I thought that he was taking me lightly or maybe he
was a clown. I ignored what he said and continued to launch
into my sales presentation when he politely, but in a stern
tone said, “I’ll take the shares.” Thank God I caught myself
and recognized what was happening before I uttered another
word of my pitch to him. At that point, I angled right into a
closing mode and then got him off the phone forty-five
seconds later. Sure enough, a cashier’s check for ten
thousand dollars came in 3 days later.

What helped me succeed in business, more than anything

else, was my mental approach to each project that I
undertook. One thing that I never did was to leave a back
20