Last week was one I won’t forget. We kicked off the 2012 Fall Selling Season with several client sales teams, and reached the long-awaited publication date of my first book, New Sales. Simplified. The book had been available for several weeks at amazon.com, and even with pre-orders trickling out in a frustrating fashion instead of with a bang on launch date, we managed to peak as the #2 Bestseller in Amazon’s Sales & Selling category on Tuesday (and still sit atop the Hot New Release list of sales books, as of this post). Honestly, I am blown away by the results, response and reviews. And incredibly thankful.
It’s been fun getting interviewed by various media outlets and interested sales gurus. I met Andy Paul earlier this year and immediately liked and respected him. He’s got a great, award winning book and valuable website with the same name: Zero-Time Selling. If you don’t follow and read Andy, you should. He was gracious to interview me about the book last week. And he crafted such an articulate summary of the interview and explanation of why the book is “very much needed” that I wanted to share it with you. Below is Andy’s introduction to his article and the first two interview questions and answers. You can link over to his site to see the rest.
What’s Old is New. And Very Much Needed.
Andy Paul of Zero-Time Selling: “As Weinberg explains during our discussion, he wrote this book as a form of basic survival guide for salespeople. Like many astute observers of the sales profession, Mike observed that an entire generation of salespeople that began their careers during buoyant economies of the late ’90s and middle years of the last decade are now struggling to perform at the levels that they previously experienced. He contends that salespeople during the go-go years benefited from such a great degree of inbound, customer-initiated, interest in their products that proactive new business development, and the skills required to do it, withered. As a consequence, when the economy turned sour these same sales professionals found themselves without the necessary skills and intellectual framework they needed to proactively build their pipelines. Weinberg intends New Sales. Simplified. to be an easily-digested corrective that teaches time-tested fundamental sales disciplines to the necessary business of developing new customers.”
ZTS: Why did you write the book? What issue were you looking to tackle?
MW: I wrote the book because I am increasingly concerned by what I see when coaching sales teams and consulting companies. It seems that fewer and fewer salespeople have a working knowledge of how to prospect for new business and create new opportunities through their own proactive sales effort. That wasn’t as apparent in easier times and better economies when enough business came the way of reactive salespeople. But today, many in sales roles who survived, or even thrived, when carried along by strong demand and hot industries, are struggling to make their numbers, and they’re lost and confused.
ZTS: What does the New in New Sales Simplified signify?
MW: Great question, Andy. You’re the first to ask that. New refers to net new business. It’s the new in new business development. There are a whole lot of solid account managers out there who do a great job managing existing business. But there is a dire shortage of true sales hunters who can be counted on to acquire new clients consistently.
For the complete interview, click here to link over to Zero-Time Selling and continue reading…
