A very good flight
January 19, 2010 By: Kirk Shelley
You probably don’t know Jeffery Gitomer from Adam’s house cat unless you are in sales. He is one of the best sales trainers in the country. I’ve been a fan of his for many years – hey what is politics and fundraising except sales and marketing. He has a great weekly ezine (free at www.buygitomer.com).
I was on my way to Kansas City on South West and I look up and here comes Jeffery walking down the aisle looking for a seat. So I make space and invite him to grab the middle seat on the exit row.
I had been talking to the other guy in the row (Kelly) who is in the beverage industry. Kelly was on his way to Kansas to see his son who was getting deployed in a few days to Afghanistan. He didn’t know Gitomer. So when I made the introductions I lavished the praise on Gitomer as one of the premier sales guys. Immediately Kelly’s “sales defense shields” went up. Sure enough he was in charge of training his sales force and he didn’t want to spend his hour of flight time being “sold” by Jeffery.
Personally I wanted to ask Jeffery a ton of questions and possibly get some free consulting, but I quickly realized that Kelly could use Jeffery’s services, and I suspect Jeffery knew it too. So I took the opportunity to watch Jeffery “sell.”
One of Jeffery’s maxims is “People love to buy, but they hate being sold.” I was looking forward to seeing Jeffery do his “pitch.” You would expect a sales trainer would try to start giving a long list of features and benefits of his company – let the prospect (Kelly) know how long he’s been in business, sales volume etc. >>>>>> for the rest of the article.
[Special thanks to Kirk Shelley for his political insight and friendship through the years! These are wise words indeed and Kirk always makes the trip entertaining too./sc]
