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    How to sell without selling out - Andy Paul’s latest book shows how

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    They told him he would never make it in sales. Now Andy Paul is a well-known expert in the sales industry, author of two books and creator of the award-winning podcast “Accelerate Your Sales” which he sold to Revenue.io in 2020.

    Andy’s latest book, How to Sell without Selling Out, shows how the very traits that made people think he’d never succeed, were exactly the things that helped him succeed.

    The book represents a perspective shift, a new way of looking at the role of sellers in the buying process, empowering them to embrace who they are as humans and to use their innate and individual strengths to win more deals.

    When Andy asked me to read a review copy of his new book, I knew immediately I wanted to talk about it on the blog. Everything Andy says echoes the themes of my book, Stop Killing Deals, from another angle.

    Be human, be yourself, don’t follow a BS methodology someone else wrote 40 years ago just because that’s what you’re told. Don’t use sleazy tactics and manipulation, don’t follow a process that goes against your core instincts or betrays your values.

    In short, don’t sell out.

    My team caught up with him recently to ask him about his book, why he wrote it, why now, and what’s new in it. Here’s what he had to say.
    Despite advances in technology, we aren’t getting better at sales
    Every year, there are new technologies on the market. Every year, companies spend more than they did the year before to purchase and maintain more and more technology.

    Let's stop endless searching for the next great thing and take it back to the basics.
    Andy Paul

    Yet every year, our effectiveness remains level. We aren’t getting better at it.

    Seeing this, Andy saw that the world didn’t need another book with techniques, tactics, processes, or technology insights. What it needed was a perspective shift.

    In the book, he tells the story of getting his start in sales. Trainers taught him to manipulate, to trick, to be sleazy. He couldn’t do it. It felt wrong and gross, and he decided it wasn’t going to work for him.

    Instead, he decided to understand himself better and his own strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of his buyers. He started having human conversations with the people he wanted to sell to.

    And it worked. He started to see his job not as one of selling as much stuff as he could, but of helping as many people as he could.

    People go against their own knowing

    Andy says that the reason the industry as a whole hasn’t gotten better is because “people go against their own knowing.”

    We keep trying old tactics because we were taught they would work. If they don’t work, we just try harder.

    We buy more and more tech because we think it should work, and if it’s not working, we just need more of it.

    He refers to the sunk cost fallacy, which I’ve talked about on this blog before. We just keep pouring more and more investment into things that never worked and still won’t work, just hoping that if we keep trying eventually we’ll get the results we want. And because it sometimes works a little bit, we keep trying.

    Instead, he says, it’s time for a change of direction. To achieve better success, we need to stop what we’re doing, the endless searching for the next great thing, and take it back to the basics.

    Listen to our inner knowing, and choose to be human in the sales process.

    Individual salespeople have more power than they realize

    I asked Andy what’s different about this book versus the thousands of other sales books on the shelves. He said the difference is his emphasis on empowering salespeople - on showing people that they have control over their own way of selling.

    “You may not feel like it, because your boss is encouraging you to act a certain way,” he says. “But you can push back and ask to be held accountable to your success rather than an approach. Or you can find a better manager who will let you do that.”

    He says the key take-away is that salespeople’s job is not to make more sales, but to align with the buyer and help them achieve what they want to achieve. The book is a guidebook to understanding that role and acting on it.

    This book may be the answer to salesperson anxiety

    Andy says that a lot of sales professionals are experiencing anxiety about their role right now, because of shifts in technology. As we move into more and more automation and AI, salespeople may wonder where they fit in.

    This book provides a framework for understanding why sales professionals are more important than ever in a world that seems to forget that it’s populated by humans. It shows how salespeople can be more effective by becoming more human and less salesy, and how technology will never be able to improve on that.

    I appreciate Andy’s perspective, and enjoyed every word of his book.

    I believe in process and in technology for sales, but unless it supports both the humans on the sales team and the humans who are making buying decisions, it will never make us better.

    You can purchase the book here and get the first chapter here. I’d love to hear what you think of it. And please remember to write a review on Amazon to help Andy promote his great work.

    PS: Take Andy's quiz: How Salesy Are You?

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    George Brontén
    Published April 27, 2022
    By George Brontén

    George is the founder & CEO of Membrain, the Sales Enablement CRM that makes it easy to execute your sales strategy. A life-long entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the software space and a passion for sales and marketing. With the life motto "Don't settle for mainstream", he is always looking for new ways to achieve improved business results using innovative software, skills, and processes. George is also the author of the book Stop Killing Deals and the host of the Stop Killing Deals webinar and podcast series.

    Find out more about George Brontén on LinkedIn