The myth says that the ability to sell is something you either have or you don’t. I don’t believe this. In my opinion, the ability to sell is innate, but some of us have chosen not to use it, or to repress it, and fear is usually the reason why. We've known how to sell things since the dawn of creation. Eve had to sell Adam the apple, didn’t she? Does that sound simple? Let’s see you try to convince my children to eat a salad that has onions in it, for example. We're selling all the time. From infancy onwards, we never stop. As children, we were great at making deals with our parents—if you buy me this candy, I promise to be a good boy; if I straighten up my room, then give me…etc. ( in professional jargon the "if…then" technique is called “the half-nelson hold.”) We sell things to our partners, to our parents, our children, friends, teachers, students, to our employees and even to our boss, who in turn sells to the shareholders, and probably also to his wife. In my opinion, the ability to sell is one of the life skills necessary for creating a full and good life. If we look closely, we see that all successful people and all outstanding leaders know how to sell and market their ideas, their vision, their products, and most importantly—themselves, with great success. In brief, each one of them is a superb salesperson. We can sell our ideas fantastically well to our friends—a book we’ve read, a restaurant we liked or the great movie we saw yesterday. We know how to be aggressive, shameless, uninhibited, and we're not afraid to badger. So why are people intimidated by sales when it comes to their professional lives? Why is it that when a person needs to market himself, to proffer his capabilities and ask for money in return, he suddenly finds himself in a bind, and claims that he doesn’t know how to do it? I've met so many salespeople in my life, who sell a variety of products and still, as strange as it may sound, some of them fear selling. Over time I've come to understand this absurd situation: as part of the process of growing up, people bury their natural ability to sell, exactly when they need to sell in order to earn money. You decide whether this is funny, or sad. I have interviewed many people for positions as sales personnel and I've heard the following response, which never ceases to amaze me, over and over again: “Sales are not for me;” “Marketing is not for me;” “I’m not suited to persuading people.” These statements are often accompanied by body language embodying fear. This always surprised me, because when a person says something like that, it’s as if he'd said, “Look, breathing isn’t for me. Oxygen is not for me.” That's how weird it sounds to me. I mean, if you decide not to breathe, one may safely assume that you will die. Similarly, if you believe those nonsensical statements, like “sales are not for me” or “I'm not cut out for marketing,”—you’ll die, if not physically, at least financially or emotionally.

A person who wants to convince me that he's never taken part in a single sales interaction, or has never sold anything in his life, will have to prove that he's spent every moment of his life in a closed, isolated, windowless room, with no outside communication, and that since the day of his birth he's never met a soul, not even his own parents, and that, in fact, I am the first person he has met since leaving that room. Clearly, in telling me this, he is trying to sell me one fantastic story. There is no such thing. We are communicative creatures by virtue of being human, and having met more than one person in our lifetimes, it is more than likely that we have engaged in a marketing interaction. If we’re married, we had to sell ourselves in order for that to come about. Personally speaking, when I proposed marriage to my partner, I gave the best sales pitch of my life. I told her tales of happiness and prosperity and all kinds of good things and fortunately, she bought it. One of the things that has to be done in order to overcome our self-inflicted limitations and enhance our marketing skills, is to make peace with the very activity that we so love to disparage—selling. To make peace with the word—sales! It's what we do naturally with our family and friends, without any problems or pangs of conscience. Often, the moment we take up sales as a profession, the curtain comes down on this natural ability and our sales pitches sound forced, halting and even somewhat apologetic.

That being the case, my role as a sales coach is to raise that curtain once and for all. Transforming someone into a salesperson requires dealing with the numerous and varied fears and inhibitions blocking his innate sales skills, such as fear of rejection, fear for one’s image, fear of failure, fear of assuming responsibility for an outcome, fear of financial insecurity, and the most basic fear of all, that which gives rise to all the others and creates all the problems: the fear of hearing “No!” Eliminating this fear is 99% of the job. Obviously, no one would have a problem suggesting a product, service or idea, or trying to sell it, if he was assured that his sales pitch would always result in the client saying “Yes.” Based on my experience in training sales personnel, once we’ve dealt with these performance obstacles, the trainee is free of fear and motivated towards personal and financial development and empowerment, unveiling his innate sales talents. From this point on, all we have to do is polish up his sales pitch, teach several basic techniques, increase awareness of what’s said in a conversation, both by the client and the salesperson, teach the language of questions, foster the ability to listen, mainly by emphasizing why listening is important, and there you have it—an exemplary sales rep. And yes, I do believe that anyone can and should learn to sell.

The first time I was faced with the challenge of teaching people who hate sales how to sell, people who'd finally realized that this was something they'd have to learn in order to succeed in their network marketing business, was in 2001.

I was a sales rep trainer at Kirby at that time, I worked closely with the sales personnel and I had developed a unique approach to teaching the art of sales. But those were people who wanted to learn how to sell, who considered themselves salespeople and were involved in the trade. Training people who didn't want to sell, were afraid of sales, or were afraid that other people might think that they were trying to sell them something, was a whole different story.

I agreed to take up the challenge, and in order to make it easier for these people to accept the fact that they were going to be participating in a sales workshop, we decided to give it a lightweight, non-threatening title, Seal the Deal with a Smile.

It was a resounding success. The first workshop was followed by many, many more, all over the country. People flocked to these workshops to learn the art of sales in style, with a smile, in a light-hearted atmosphere, free of inhibitions and without feeling guilty.

It was a great year for my new business, and even then, people started telling me that I should write a book, that I had to write this all down, that that was the obvious thing to do. I'd say yeah, yeah, you're right, I'll get to it, I made up excuses about how I hadn't finished my research yet and I needed more data, and finally I just started lying and telling them that I was writing but it wasn't finished yet. The truth of the matter was that I didn't believe I could write, I didn't consider myself worthy of writing a book and I didn't really think I had anything worth writing about. Who was I, somebody without a degree, who hadn't even really graduated from high school, who'd never really taken anything all the way to the end, to write a book? All I really was a good salesperson, who also happened to know how to teach others how to be good salespeople. Writing a book seemed like something for people who were seriously involved in academic research, and anyway I really didn't have enough information, and what I did have had probably been written about already, I didn't have anything new, there were so many books about sales out there, who needs another one? And that's only a partial list of all the things I told myself and all the reasons I thought I shouldn't write this book.

Meanwhile, years passed, I led more and more workshops and more and more people encouraged me to write a book, and people whom I'd told that I was writing one asked me when it was going to be available.