Bring more to the table than your product: if you don't, you will be spouting statistics and testimonials like most other poor salespeople.

• Author: Wiesner, Pat
• Position: MANAGEMENT - Viewpoint essay

You walk into a room full of people you have never met before to have a meeting about something you are all concerned about. It could be anything from business to a homeowners meeting.

Suppose it lasts an hour or so. By the time everyone has had their say, you will have made some judgments about each other. You will have established some sort of pecking order about each of the participants in the discussion, measured your regard for them and determined a value for what each had to say.

So will everyone else in the room. Each person will make a ranking of everyone else. Who is the strongest? The weakest? Who would I like to have on my side? Who would I work for? A lot of this may not be conscious, but it still happens just below the surface.

I have been a salesman just about my whole life. I figure that my average customer has at least 25 salespeople, like me, calling on him or her. And I know that my customer has a ranking in his head for each of us. It might not be something he thinks about every day, but he could easily tell you which salespeople he hopes never call him again and which ones he is happy to hear from anytime.

So if I'm an average salesman, I'll be in the middle of the pack of that bunch of 25, and I'll probably have a hard time getting to see Mr. Big. I'll be average in my sales performance, and I'll make an average income and probably have an average life. I have probably learned to do things like most other salespeople do them.

If on the other hand, I am not like the other 25, if I act differently, perform better, provide more information to the customer, if I really understand his problems and try to help solve them, if I sound less like I'm only interested in talking about me and my product, etc.--then things will be different for me.

I will move up in the rankings that my customer keeps in his head for his list of 25 salespeople. I will find it easier to get appointments because I will always bring value, not just my product. I will make more...