Discover Your Sales Strengths: How the World's Greatest Salespeople Develop Winning Careers

FROM THE PUBLISHER

For four decades, The Gallup Organization has been gathering information and offering data-driven advice -- conducting millions of interviews, compiling thousands of statistics, and building a wealth of facts about what really makes people successful (and happy) in their fields. Now Gallup uses its expertise to offer a unique, interactive StrengthsFinder.com Profile that will identify your top five talents -- and help you start getting the most from them in your sales career. Each copy of this book has a special, individualized code that lets you access the StrengthsFinder Profile on the Internet. The product of a twenty-five-year, multimillion-dollar effort, the StrengthsFinder program interviews you and offers an in-depth, individualized analysis of your predominant strengths and personality traits. Using this book, you can then find out how to put your strengths to work in the real world, how others with similar talents have succeeded or failed, and why you may need to make essential changes in your career. Debunking the most-repeated myths about sales -- from the myth that anyone can sell to the myth that a good salesperson can sell anything. A book that only The Gallup Organization could create, Discover Your Sales Strengths offers you a powerful new knowledge of who you are, what you're good at, and how you work best. And in today's world of sales, that is the most powerful tool of all.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Unlike many how-to-sell books written by motivational gurus and successful salespeople, Smith and Rutigliano s work is backed up by facts and figures gleaned from 40 years of Gallup research. The authors, both Gallup consultants, dissect stereotypes and debunk popular myths about selling to determine that there is no one formula for success, and that training, knowledge and experience cannot make a great salesperson. Instead, they find, great salesmanship stems from exploiting individual talents. Top salespeople succeed by figuring out what they do best and then finding a way and a place to do it. With that argument established, Smith and Rutigliano take an interactive approach to help readers find their own Signature Themes, directing readers to www.strengthsfinder.com (for which they ll need an ID code from a Gallup publication) to gauge whether they fit their current situation by taking a quiz based on a 12-step hierarchy of employee engagement. Since the authors contend that good managers help sales stars shine, they analyze what makes a good sales manager and relay advice from those they deem the world s best. This inventive book should help people with a knack for sales achieve better results. (Feb. 26) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Soundview Executive Book Summaries

A Winter Sales Career
For 40 years, The Gallup Organization has conducted millions of interviews and compiled thousands of statistics and facts that reveal what makes people successful in the field of sales and selling. The authors of Discover Your Sales Strengths, two effectiveness experts from The Gallup Organization, use the latest statistics and analysis to debunk the most pervasive myths about sales, and help salespeople understand themselves and their top sales talents while showing them which talents they should focus on. Benson Smith and Tony Rutigliano also show salespeople how they can use their personal strengths to impact other people and find the right field, company and boss for their talents. In addition, the authors discuss the benefits of a variety of approaches to selling and explain that there is no one right way to sell.

While studying thousands of salespeople and the factors that hinder them from reaching their full potential, the authors discovered many prevalent myths that were debunked by Gallup's extensive research. For example, while exploring the myth that a better-educated sales force is a better sales force, they point out a study that indicates the best performers had not achieved high grade-point averages in college. Dispelling the myth that experience matters a great deal, they write that their research indicates that sales is not the experience-sensitive profession that it has been made out to be. Instead, they write that they rarely find a strong correlation between experience and results.

Assessing Personal Strengths
While discussing the importance of assessing personal strengths, the authors delve into redefining many terms that help them describe world-class performers. When they write about talent, they explain, "It is a pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied." To describe the talents of salespeople, the authors have compiled a list of 34 theme names that describe different traits salespeople can embody, and discuss the benefits of each as a dominant theme in various sales disciplines. These themes include Achiever, Command, Empathy, Fairness, Self-Assurance, and Strategic. By defining a clear vocabulary of sales strengths, leaders, managers and salespeople can talk knowingly about their strengths.

The authors call a salesperson's top five dominant themes his or her Signature Themes, and they write that knowing one's Signature Themes is a key to understanding the areas in which one's talents will allow him or her to outperform others. When a salesperson understands his or her Signature Themes, he or she can focus time and energy on those areas in which he or she naturally excels. To help readers find their own Signature Themes, Gallup researchers have developed a computer-based StrengthsFinder assessment tool that can be accessed on the Internet with an identification number from the book.

Signature Themes
The authors also address ways salespeople can find a job that fits with his or her talents. By aligning a person's daily activities with his or her Signature Themes, a salesperson has a greater chance of finding a good fit. They write that the five critical dimensions of fit for a sales role stem from the patterns of thought, feeling and behavior that explain: our motivation the way we build relationships the way we gain commitmentsthe structure we need to get work done our ability to understand customer needs The authors write that the most important dimension is motivation, and research indicates that the best salespeople are much more motivated than most of the population. When key motivation requirements are fed, motivation and fit are maintained.

Discover Your Sales Strengths discusses the importance of good managers, self-reliance, expectations, building customer engagement, and even becoming a sales manager. To help salespeople and managers better understand their roles, the authors have created 12 questions that make up a hierarchy of employee engagement that addresses their needs.