A Tell-It-Like-It-Is Guide to Picking Lucrative and Satisfying Sales Jobs, June 22, 2007
By Donald Mitchell "Co-author of The 2,000 Percent Solution. (a Boston professor and management consultant)

The title of this book is terribly misleading: A more appropriate title would be "How to Pick a Lucrative and Satisfying Sales Job." I begin by mentioning this point because I found the title to be such a turnoff that I almost didn't read and review the book. That would have been a shame because I found The Coldest Call to be one of the best books I've ever read for evaluating sales jobs.

I'm constantly meeting people who decide they want to get into sales because they enjoy meeting people, like the excitement of having a chance to make a lot of money, and want to operate in a freer environment. When I bump into those same people a few years later, they usually aren't so positive about sales. Why? They ended up working for companies where it was all but impossible to make sales.

In the future, I'll recommend The Coldest Call as the perfect advice for avoiding such losing situations.

Mr. Cullen's basic point is that many companies make it difficult for sales people to succeed. How?

He points to four main faults:

1. The company's marketing confuses potential customers so they cannot understand how the offering resolves their pressing concerns (eases or eliminates sources of pain).

2. The company has no efficient way to generate lots of qualified sales leads.

3. The company's pricing philosophy discourages buying by either making it all but impossible to get a price quotation or by making the price appear to be higher than it really needs to be.

4. The company sees sales people as undesirable servants to the company with few useful skills rather than organizing the company to encourage and support sales efforts.

Mr. Cullen comes from a background in technical sales, and his points and examples nicely reflect those environments . . . whether for hardware or software. Those who are in more mundane products will find that the first point may not be as relevant to them, but it's still worth checking. Product positionings often reflect muddy thinking that's disconnected from the customer's perspective.

The first 110 pages of the book detail those points and are briefly illustrated with examples drawn from his experiences. Each of the parts in section one dealing with one of these sales barriers concludes with a checklist you can use to rate your potential employer. If you don't like to read books, you can simply skip to the last page or two of the barrier discussions and focus on the checklist. Those lists are pure gold. They could make you millions of dollars over a career.

From there, Mr. Cullen goes back in time to share the pivotal experiences he had that taught him the lessons that he's sharing with you. If you just wanted to read a humorous book about frustrating sales experiences, these stories would be well worth the price of the book. From a learning perspective, the stories help reinforce the lessons.

To further make the book accessible, Mr. Cullen makes effective use of CartoonBank.com cartoons from The New Yorker.

Mr. Cullen is a professional speaker and I can imagine the great humor that he brings to this subject. I hope I get a chance to hear him.

After finishing the book, I realized that the book has another potential use: As a resource for investors, venture capitalists, boards of directors, lenders, suppliers, and partners to check out a company's sales effectiveness.

Naturally, CEOs and CFOs who want to succeed but are clueless about sales can also use this book to improve matters before sales stall . . . rather than simply relying on golden parachutes to feather their nests.

There has been a long debate among sales professionals about whether you sell to alleviate pain . . . or to sell to encourage gain. Few would disagree that the easier sale is alleviating pain. Sometimes, however, the amount people will pay is no more than what an aspirin costs. Huge sales are more often associated with delivering gain.

Mr. Cullen comes down on the side of pain-relief selling. If the pain people have is bad enough, that can be lucrative. Just be sure you've checked that point out before applying this book. As an example, if an IT center is destroyed, the amount someone will spend on disaster recovery is limited only by whether the expenditure will help or not. Someone who has never experienced such destruction, by comparison, may not want to pay very much to avoid the experience (as Mr. Cullen found out in selling his device for monitoring heat in data centers).

If you want to learn more about how to end up in a company that succeeds in gain-based selling, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Happy sales!

Don't Let Your Boss See You Reading This.

By Lamont Wood (Business Writer, San Antonio, TX)

You might do well to add this entertaining, wittily written and illustrated book to your "professional growth" reading list, but don't tell the boss about it, or let him see you reading it. Basically, it tells you how to gauge whether your boss is worth working for, and not a jammed cog in a self-defeating organization that will be neither fun nor lucrative to work for.

The book tells you how to determine if an organization has figured out why anyone would want to buy its product; figured out how to market to those people; figured out how to be open rather than Byzantine about its prices; and figured out how to treat the sales organization as a source of income, rather than a bureaucratic leper colony.

If you find that you're stuck in a dysfunctional organization, Cullen does not advise trying to cleanse the temple. You were hired to sell, not reform. Your proper response is to vote with your feet, revise your resume, and look for another job. While being interviewed for the next one, size up the prospective employer according to Cullen's criteria, and act accordingly. You might be in for a happier career.